How To Keep Your Online Home Business Organized

Do you sometimes feel overwhelmed by the wealth of information that you find on the Internet? Do you feel that all the information that you need to keep your online home business running effectively is getting out of hand? Well you are definitely in good company. Each and every person that tries to make a living online will experience some kind of information overload.

The good news is that I am about to reveal to you a powerful way to keep things organized. Basically you need to things: (1) you need a powerful organizing and filing system and (2) you need the discipline to keep the system going. I would like to address both issues in this article. I am going to give you a very practical and simple way of organizing your information and a way to keep the system going.

Let us start with the organizing system. My answer to an organizing system for your online home business is a very simple one. You need to create a mini-website for your business. This site need not be fancy. It only needs to be functional. I used Microsoft FrontPage to setup my own organizing website. If you cannot use a program like FrontPage use Microsoft Word or a similar program and save your pages as web pages. I cannot give you a blueprint of how you should organize your information. You will need to find a way to categorize and sort the information you have about your business yourself. It is not difficult though. Take a piece of paper and make a list of all the categories that you can think of that will help you organize your information. Just brainstorm that for a moment. After you have brainstormed the main categories take a new piece of paper and write homepage at the top. Now write the main categories of your organizing website below the word “homepage”. If there are any sub-categories that you would like to add beneath the main categories fill them in also. Now you have a template from which to build your organizing website. Use the main categories as the menu of your website. You will also create a webpage for each of the main categories. Now create links between your organizing homepage and the web pages of the main categories. Create links on the main category web pages to the sub-categories that you identified.

Now you need to sift through all the info that you have about your business and put them in the appropriate categories. Here is how. You need to create a folder on your computer to organize the system. Create a folder with the name of your online home business. Place your homepage and the web pages of the main categories in this folder. Now create sub-folders in your online home business folder for each of the main categories. After you have done this start to transfer all your info about your business to one of these folders. Create hyperlinks on the appropriate web pages to these pieces of information. I know that this will take some time in the beginning, but in the long run it will save you lots of frustration and time.

Here are some additional tips. Include the following pieces of information somewhere in your organizing system. Your business and life goals. Your weekly schedule. I also have an action steps webpage where I type in the action steps I need to take the next day. Include an accounting system for your business. I use Microsoft Excel. If I get a web address that contains useful info I make a link to that site somewhere in my organizing website. I also make links to the pages that I have to visit frequently on my homepage. When I want to surf the net I open my organizing webpage first of all and click on the links to access them quickly. If you build a organizing webpage make sure that the link open in a new window so that your organizing website stay open in the background. Here is an example of what the HTML code should look like: target="_blank" href="http://international-home-business.com/" The target=”_blank” is the piece of HTML that cause the link to open in a new page. Be creative as you could be and play around with the system. It is great fun!

Now you need to keep the system going. Let me give a few suggestions. Set aside some time each day for admin and use it to keep your system updated. I use a flash disk to store the new info that I retrieved from the internet. Each day I sort through this info on my flash disk and transfer them to the appropriate folders in my organizing website and create the necessary links. I do not link all the info though, but if a particular piece of info is of great importance I always link it to one of the web pages in the organizing website. Usually I download web pages that have useable information and link them to my organizing web pages. In that way I am building a wealth of information that I can access easily to refresh my memory about a particular subject in my business. I hope these few ideas will be useful to you.

About The Author: My name in Roux Malan. Visit my website to download a free e-book of 325 pages on internet marketing. Go to the freebie section. http://www.international-home-business.com

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