Do you ever have a nagging feeling that there's something you're supposed to be doing but you don't remember what it is? Do you sometimes remember these things at the worst possible time, like in the middle of the night, when you're standing in line for a movie or somewhere else that you can't act on it?

I used to do these kinds of things all the time, until I created a system for managing all my outstanding tasks, projects and other information.

That system is based on the "Getting Things Done" method designed by David Allen (also known as GTD). He wrote a book several years ago called (surprisingly enough) Getting Things Done.

Since then, a bit of a cult following has grown up around his method. You'll find a ton of websites with tips for following the system, as well as "hacks" for making it work better. One of the better websites in this area is Merlin Mann's 43folders.com. It's not the official website of GTD, but it's one of the most complete.

The basic idea behind GTD is you empty your brain of absolutely everything that needs to get done and put it into "containers" where you can easily review it when necessary. You do the same with physical information, such as information you need to read or review, letters you need to respond to, etc.

Some people use software to track their information (there are even dedicated programs designed around the GTD system), others use web-based tools and some even use good old-fashioned paper and pen.

The exact method you use isn't really the point. The point is how you organize it, and that's what David Allen explains in detail in his book.

Part of the method is tracking future projects, which works really well for me. I constantly have ideas for new projects, but I don't want to lose focus on the ones I'm actively working on. Now I just add the new idea into my followup system and I don't have to worry about forgetting what it was 6 months or a year from now.

If your internet business suffers because you sometimes forget to do things when you're supposed to (ever forgotten to renew a domain registration, for example?) the GTD system may be just what you need. It has certainly helped me to get on top of my business.

I'm not normally a big forum person, but somebody pointed me to this post on the Warrior Forum and it's well worth reading:

Difference Between Making $5K and $500 K a Month

There are some responses from some heavy-hitters in the Internet Marketing world (Mike Filsaime, John Reese) so some of the advice is from people who have been there and done that.

Whether you're making $5 a day or $5K a day now, the advice in that thread will help you get to the next level.

If you think massive product launches are a bunch of hype, hate long sales letters trying to sell you something, and just generally don't like someone trying to "sell you" on something - but are still trying to market your own stuff you should go and read this post:

Dead Puppies For Sale

It's a pretty good argument for why most people fail at selling their own products if they hate being marketed to.

Personally, I love to get the big launch sequences, the 5 "one time" offers after the initial order click, the long sales letters. Heck, I even love to get junk mail and try to get myself on as many mailing lists as possible.

There's no better way to learn how to market than by watching how the masters do it. And it won't cost you a dime if you understand that what you learn by watching the marketing method is probably exactly what the product they're marketing to you is going to teach you how to do anyway!

Andy Beard wrote an interesting post about some of the risks associated with viral optin scripts that's well worth reading if you've ever considered using one of these tools:

Opt-In Accelerator Warning - Security Risk - Read This First!

If you're not familiar with these scripts, they're a little bit like the old tell-a-friend scripts, where your site visitors can enter the names and email addresses for their friends, and those people will receive some sort of promotional message trying to get them to visit your site.

The difference with these viral optin scripts is they scrape the information about your friends and contacts from your web-based email accounts, such as Gmail or Yahoo Mail.

Your visitor enters their login information, the script goes out to the email service and scrapes all their contacts, then sends all those people an email.

There are all kinds of security issues with this, which is what Andy discusses in his post.

Frankly, I'm amazed that anyone would ever enter this information on any "small time" website. I mean, if you're a Facebook or LinkedIn it's one thing, but I can't imagine anyone trusting this data to a website that they're not extremely familiar with.

But in my opinion, there's a more fundamental issue than the security risks.

Why would anyone want to bulk mail everyone in their contact list about some website? Maybe I'm not the normal user, but I've got a combination of personal and business contacts in my Gmail account, many of whom I don't know personally - just through a loose "internet based" relationship.

I don't care what the topic of the website is and how wide its appeal, I just wouldn't want to send some kind of bulk email to everyone in my address book.

I don't care how many extra optins I could get by using one of these scripts, I just don't think it's a legitimate way to drive traffic. Whether or not it's technically spam is debatable, but it's close enough that I would avoid them like the plague.

Anyway, if you don't feel as strongly about the ethical issues with these scripts, make sure you read Andy's post so you understand the security risks that go along with them.

If you follow John Reese on Twitter or subscribe to his blog updates, you've probably seen the big hubbub over his recent email advising people to use Twitter.

I almost hate to link to these posts because they can be such a time sink when you start getting involved, but in case you haven't seen them, read these posts to get the story.

** Warning - DON'T let yourself get sucked into the discussion, no matter which side you agree with, unless you want to get yourself all worked up about something that really shouldn't have a direct bearing on you!

1. Pending Sign Of The Twitter Apocalypse: It's Being Talked About By Internet Marketers
2. Is Twitter Vulnerable To Marketer Attack?
3. Don't Spam Twitter Or You Will Die A Horrible Death

That last link goes to John Reese's follow up post to the original one he did yesterday. He seems to have realized his first response was based on emotion more than anything, so I figured I'd link to the newer one. If you really want to read his initial response, it's linked from his follow up.

So it seems the "web 2.0 community" (for lack of a better term) doesn't like the fact that one of their babies is starting to get used by direct marketers like John Reese.

It's hardly the first time - I've written about this a few times before.

Whether or not you believe Twitter is going to become a spammer's haven is really not the point here. After all, Twitter is an opt-in type system - you have to sign up to read someone's posts, and you can easily block them if they're spamming you.

The issue is what happens to these tools when thousands of people sign up on the recommendation of someone like John Reese, who markets to marketers.

In Twitter's case, aside from an increase in bandwidth, there's probably not that much downside even if thousands of people sign up and start making posts with little or no value. (Although with Twitter's track record for going down, that extra bandwidth could cause problems!)

But taking a wider view, when one of these resources gets "outed" by an internet marketer to their huge list, it inevitably gets inundated with crap, no matter how well meaning the marketer is who announced it.

They can tell people not to spam until they're blue in the face, but people will. A certain percentage of most internet marketing email lists are going to be people looking for a quick buck, who are willing to take whatever shortcuts they think are going to help them get it.

The people marketing to these marketers should realize that.

It's a tough road to travel. People like John Reese also help a lot of people find success marketing on the internet, so I'm not suggesting they shouldn't do what they're doing.

They just need to be aware that what they're doing is a bit of a double-edged sword, and the people who are using these resources in what they believe is a more "pure" way are probably going to take issue with the marketers who promote the system.

I avoided getting involved in the discussion yesterday for exactly the reason that it seems John Reese should have - it's too easy to get emotionally attached to your opinion and get all tied up in these arguments.

So what's the bottom line?

Don't spam (and I'll say it until I'm blue in the face)

When you hear about one of these tools from someone who's marketing to marketers, do a little research before jumping in.

See how people use it, become part of the community and learn how to fit in without offending people. See if you can find a way to integrate it into your internet business without trying to force your target market to change the way they do things.

Twitter is a good example. If you're selling to marketers or a tech-savvy market, you'll have plenty of your customers already using it, and those that aren't will be open to it.

If you're selling to people who are over 65 and not very computer savvy, chances are there's little value in being on Twitter.

Don't just blindly follow the latest technique from your favorite marketing "guru." Take the time to analyze whether or not you can use it effectively and if so, how.

It's Wednesday, and I'm going to make that my "book of the week" day. Each Wednesday, I'm going to post about a book (a "real" book that is, not an ebook) that has taught me something or helped me improve some aspect of my business.

Today's book is Web Analytics - An Hour A Day.

If you're not tracking your website stats, you're almost guaranteed to be leaving money on the table. But those stats go way beyond unique visitor counts and search keywords that sent people to your site.

If you want to know things like the value of every visitor who lands on your site, the ROI on each type of advertising you run, and the paths your visitors take once they get to your site, this book will show you how to do that.

It's not specific to a particular stats tracking system, although it does use Google Analytics for a lot of its examples. Everything is explained in terms that can apply to any stats tracker, however.

The author of the book, Avinash Kaushik, also has a blog called Occam's Razor where he shares a lot of good information about web analytics, so if you want to get a feel for the kind of stuff you'll learn from his book, take a look at his blog first.

If you're writing content that people read online, whether articles, blog posts, forum posts or some other type of written information, you should go and read this article:

How We Read Online

It has some good information that you should put to use when you're writing.

Remember - the way people read on the web is different than in print. Your writing should be as well.

One of the biggest challenges most of us face is a lack of time (or at least a perceived lack of time).

I know I'm guilty of thinking if I only had some more time, I could get all these extra projects finished.

What if I told you that you could "create" an extra 9 full weeks per year to build your internet business?

Do you think that you would see some success if you had the next nine weeks to focus on nothing but your business for 40 hours each week?

Well, here's the secret to getting 9 extra weeks to reach your goals this year…

Work 1 extra hour a day.

If you work for an hour a day every day for the next year, you would wind up with 365 hours, which is just over nine weeks at 40 hours a week.

Does that sound too simplistic? Are you thinking "Sure, but I don't have an hour a day?"

Let me put it this way - what could you do to free up a single hour every day for the next year?

Could you get up an hour earlier? Watch one less hour of TV? Play an hour less of the Xbox every day?

Everybody has the same amount of time - the difference between people who have successful internet businesses and those who don't is how they choose to spend it.

If you're not seeing the success you'd like, it's not because of a lack of time. You're just choosing to spend your time on other things instead of building a business.

There's nothing wrong with that, if that's what you want to do. But if you want to make a full-time income on the internet and quit your day job, you're not going to get there if you're not willing to give something up to reach that goal.

Are the people on your list actually opening and reading your emails?

First, if you don't know the answer to that question, you're not tracking well enough. All the major autoresponder services have open rate tracking, although usually only on HTML messages, and most of them also have click tracking.

Or you can set up your own click tracking script if you don't want the weird looking URLs that the autoresponders use to track.

If you do know how many are opening and reading your emails, are you happy with the number?

I'm willing to bet that even if you're happy with it, you would still like to get more. A 100% open rate is practically impossible, so no matter how good it is, chances are it can be improved.

When you're writing your emails, you need to look at it from your readers' point of view.

Imagine that they get 100 emails on any given day. Yours is just one of those hundred.

What are you doing to make sure that your message stands out from the bunch, to grab your reader's attention and get them to open your message?

Think about what they want - why they signed up for your email in the first place. Chances are they have a problem they want solved, or else they wouldn't have given you their contact information.

Your subject line should be compelling, making a clear offer of what they're going to read if they open your message - and more importantly, how it's going to help them fix their problem.

The content is what's going to grab them, not when you send it, the name it's coming from, or any other trick.

If you schedule the email to go out at 12:01 am, it might be one of the first in their inbox that day. But lots of people work from newest to oldest when sorted through their email.

If yours is number 95 in the list, how much energy do you think the reader is going to have left for reading mediocre messages that are just trying to sell her something?

The most effective way to get your emails opened and read is to write them from the perspective of what your reader wants and needs.

If you can hit their hot button, it won't matter if you're number 999 out of 1000 emails for that day, they're going to open it and read it.

I'm going to give you a tip for how you can know what your readers' hot buttons are in my next post, so if you want to be notified when I post it, sign up for the blog announcement emails over on the right (or add my RSS feed to your newsreader).

One of the major statistics for most bloggers is the number of subscribers they have, whether via RSS or email.

In some ways, this is even more important than the number of unique visitors to the site. Getting a lot of visitors but not many subscribers means the people coming to your site aren't being grabbed by your writing.

Fewer visitors but a higher percentage of subscribers means that you've struck a chord with them and they want to read more of what you have to say.

If getting more subscribers is your goal, go and read this post on the Copyblogger website:

How To Increase Your Blog Subscription Rate by 254%

There are some excellent points in that post, and even if it doesn't give you the same 254% increase that they saw, I suspect it will improve your results nonetheless.

When was the last time you sat down and read an honest-to-goodness business book?

Not the ebook-of-the-week, promising to reveal the "real" secret behind Guru X's success, but a book about running a "real" business?

It's easy to get caught up in all the latest ebooks and other internet marketing products, but the fact is there are hundreds, probably thousands of books that will give you real information about how to run a business instead of tricks that may or may not work past next week.

I try to read at least 3 or 4 books every month so I'm going to start a semi-regular feature on the blog - the book of the week (or month, depending on how hectic my schedule gets!)

This week, the book I'm going to recommend is Influence by Robert Cialdini.

This book gets into the psychology behind why people do the things they do, with all kinds of interesting case studies from the real world.

If you've studied internet business to any degree, some of what's in Influence may sound familiar.

For example, the term "social proof" has been getting used a lot in internet marketing circles lately. This is one of the things that Cialdini covers in his book, in much greater detail than anything I've seen in the IM world.

Influence isn't written specifically for marketers, but there are a lot of great lessons that we can use to improve our marketing results.

Whether you sell your own products, promote affiliate offers or even just create Adsense sites, the information in this book can make a huge difference in the results you're getting.

And best of all? It's less than $13 on Amazon at the time I write this. When was the last time you bought an ebook for less than $15 that had some really valuable information in it?

If you're like the majority of people who are involved in internet marketing, you're signed up to a whole bunch of mailing lists where you get offers trying to sell you something daily.

Some of these offers can be pretty tempting, but the products don't always live up to the sales pitch.

If you find yourself constantly buying the "latest and greatest" product, only to find out it doesn't work as well as they said (or worse - to save it on your hard drive and never read the whole thing, let alone implement it) here's a simple way to overcome the impulse purchase habit, courtesy of the No Credit Needed blog:

The $100-A-Day-Rule Prevents Impulse Buying

That blog post is not specifically talking about products in the internet marketing niche, but it's just as relevant here as it is at your local electronics store (or whatever your vice happens to be).

Next time you're tempted to buy something, think about it for one day for each $100 it costs. If it's a $97 product, put it off until tomorrow and see if it still seems as important then. If it's one of the bigger launches, let's say $1497, give it a couple of weeks to think about it.

These high-ticket products are usually sold with a big launch and a limited number or deadline. But you can generally get a pretty good idea of the cost during the launch hype, so you'll have plenty of time to think about it.

Plus, most of them have a few spots open up several days after the launch sells out (assuming it does), so you can usually get in on it then if you decide it's right for you.

And the worst case may actually be the best - you miss the deadline and don't get to spend your $1500. Instead, you can continue to focus on the work you have already started and put that money towards something that will help you reach the goals you're already working on.

I had an experience this morning that serves as a good reminder why I backup my data, and thought I'd share it here in hopes that it will make at least someone start a regular backup system.

I work on a desktop and a laptop (both Macs) and I'm constantly looking for the most effective way to keep the files in sync between them. I want to always have the latest version of any files on both so it doesn't matter which one I'm working on.

Well, I installed a new piece of software a couple of days ago that does the syncing for me, set it up and scheduled the first sync for last night. I wanted it to copy all the latest files from the desktop over to the laptop so I would have a current version on both.

I must have set something up wrong because instead of syncing all the files from the desktop to the empty folder on the laptop, it went the other way - it synced the empty folder on the laptop over to the desktop, deleting all my websites in the process!

When I sat down to work on something today, everything was gone.

Fortunately, I'm running Time Machine, the automated backup built into the latest Mac operating system. It backs up my data automatically throughout the day so all I had to do was restore from yesterday's backup (before everything got wiped out) and I was back up and running.

I shudder to think of the work it would have taken if I didn't have a current backup. Even losing a week's worth of work would have caused me a lot of grief.

If you're not backing up your data on a regular basis - ideally every day - you need to start. It's not a matter of if you'll have some kind of data loss, it's a matter of when.

Do you have a goal in mind for how much you want to earn per year from your internet business?

$10,000?
$50,000?
$1,000,000?

The amount isn't the important thing here. What's important is whether you've ever actually worked out how much you need to make per hour to earn your goal.

Let's say you want to earn $100,000 per year from your internet business.

Now let's assume you're going to stick to a traditional work schedule - 2 weeks of holidays and five 8 hour work days each week.

That means you'll need to make $2,000 per week (50 weeks x $2,000 = $100,000).

$2,000 per week breaks down to $400 per day, which over an 8 hour day means you need to make $50 per hour.

With that $50/hour wage in mind, you can now look objectively at a whole bunch of things, both in your business and in your personal life.

How long does it take you to write an article for your website? If it takes you a half an hour, that article cost $25. An hour - $50.

Can you outsource that writing for less than what it costs for you to do it yourself?

What about answering customer service emails? How long do you spend doing that every day?

Let's say you spend 1 hour a day answering email - it's costing you $50. Can you outsource that for less money?

How about your personal life? How much time do you spend watching TV every day?

Two hours? You know it's costing you $100 to watch TV for those two hours, right?

Once you put a hard value on your time, it's a lot easier to decide whether or not you should be doing any activity.

Sure, when you're first starting out you might not have the money to outsource these things, but you should plan to do so as soon as you start seeing some profit.

And of course, your hourly value will increase according to what you want to make in a year.

$200,000 - $100/hour
$500,000 - $250/hour
$1,000,000 - $500/hour

And it also increases if you want to work fewer hours:

$100,000 @ 20 hours a week - $100/hour
$200,000 @ 20 hours a week - $200/hour
$500,000 @ 20 hours a week - $500/hour
$1,000,000 @ 20 hours a week - $1000/hour

Let's look at an extreme number, based on the 4 Hour Work Week book.

To earn $1,000,000 a year while working only 4 hours a week you would need to be earning $5,000 per hour.

At that point, the two hours of TV would be "costing" you $10,000. Is American Idol really that valuable?

I encourage you to do this exercise for yourself, using your income goal and the number of hours you can expect to work every week.

I have a feeling you'll start to look at all those time-wasting activities in a whole new light.

If you're working with outsourcers or a virtual assistant, go and read this post from the Productivity 501 blog:

The Ultimate Virtual Assistant Guide

There's a ton of good information in that post that will save you a great deal of time and/or money compared to having to figure it out through trial and error on your own.