Recharging Yourself

Surviving in the online world requires constant observation and maintenence of your Internet empire. Adding a new site or profile doesn’t just double your workload; it multiplies it exponentially until things can get very out of control. Suddenly you find yourself up at odd hours of the night maintaining, fixing things and networking. Before long, it can completely consume you and you are faced with what I call “virtual burnout.”

You suddenly find that maintaining everything isn’t as fun as it was in the beginning and you actually miss going outside… Remember that big shiny thing in the sky? I believe they still call it the sun.

It’s very important to get things running as smoothly as possible so that you can get off the computer and get back to living your real life. There are several things that can help you do that.

1. Schedule things head of time. Blog posts, Tweets and even Facebook status’ can be scheduled ahead of time.

2. Schedule your online time. Set time limits and use a timer if necessary to make yourself stick to them.

3. Make good use of your offline time. Use the tools you’ve learned online to research fun, new activities for your offline time.

4. Cross post. Have your blog updates auto post to Twitter, facebook and LinkedIn. This way you are updating several sites at one time.

5. Back up everything! There isn’t a bigger time drain around than having to recreate everything from scratch. Regular backups help you save time should your online data disappear unexpectedly.

BONUS: Create an email list. Better yet, create many… one for blog subscribers, Twitter followers, Facebook friends and fans, etc. Even if you don’t have anything to send them now, you will be able to find them all again should anything happen to your site and save time by redirecting them to your new site.

Getting offline without falling behind can be challenging, butimplementing these few simple ideas can help you get offline quicker and prevent virtual burnout. Now get offline for a while and go enjoy the real world a bit today… we miss you out here!!!

Tags: Lessons, Tips