26 Apr 2009

Are Your Eyes Open?

Developing an online empire takes a lot of work. You’ll have to learn a little bit of everything…at least until you have an income stream large enough to support outsourcing some of the more mundane or difficult tasks.

There are a lot of different Internet courses that can help you save time and money, but there is also a lot of information available for free. The problem is trying to get to the best information in as little time possible. This isn’t easy, especially if you’ve ever spent time sorting through a forum or website that is otherwise full of garbage.

Google doesn’t do you any favors either. If you search for something like “how to make money online” you’ll find pages and pages of junk. People abuse the search engines to the point that they are saturated with spammy sites that are either trying to sell you something you don’t need, or direct you to a site that does.

Sure, you can buy the latest 2,000 launch product, but there isn’t a single product that covers everything you need to know. If you were to buy a course on every single subject, you would probably spend upwards of 20k. Now, if you’ve got 20k to throw around don’t let me stop you, but there are other ways.

Swipe Files

The other day I was browsing through the comment section at CopyBlogger and I found several comments that were nuggets of pure gold. In the past, I probably would have simply read the comments and moved on, but now that I’m trying to build and develop an online empire I do things differently. Rather than just keep reading, I instantly pulled out my notebook (in this case I used Wordpad) and copied the entire comment to my swipe file. Oddly enough, as I kept reading I found several more great pieces of information that also landed in my swipe file.

Folks, it can be so difficult finding good content online that when you do find it, you need to keep it! Sure, you could stumble it or bookmark it, but how often do you really check your bookmarks or remember the tags you used? Wouldn’t it be easier if you had a digital copy of everything right on your computer’s desktop?

Having a swipe file is paramount to decreasing the time spent learning how to build an online empire. If you store all the good ideas, you’ll always have something to learn from. Here’s the system I use:

Keep a swipe file for great copy, such as landing page or sales page copy. This is great for learning how to use headlines and bullet points, as well as formatting a landing page.
Store hard copies of websites in your swipe file. This includes opt-in forms, landing pages, and anything else you find interesting or worth keeping. The great thing about storing the html is that you can later use it for your own websites. You can simply change the text or wording and you’ve got an instant web page that is proven to work. There is simply no reason at all to always create from scratch when you can find and use what others have found to work well.
Copy and paste any useful tip, hint, strategy, or tactic that you find while browsing the web. Keep entire posts if you must, but do yourself a favor and store every good nugget of information you find. You can always go in later and organize or upload to Google Notebook or Evernote.

If you make a habit of storing good information, you will not only save time finding it again, but you’ll also learn how to shift from a consumer’s mindset to a business owner’s mindset. When you keep your eyes open, you’ll seem to always find great information. As you learn to constantly reference this information, you will drastically reduce your learning curve. Information doesn’t do you any good if you can’t go back and reference later, which is what happens when you only store information online in the form of bookmarks.

Since you’ll always have your swipe files handy, you won’t forget about the tips you found last week but forgot to implement. You will always be thinking from the perspective of a business builder rather than a consumer, and you will constantly be refining your business tactics.

Learn to keep and use a swipe file and I guarantee you that you’ll be able to learn and store more information than ever before. Don’t let the good stuff go to waste…track and store everything. Your future self will thank you for it.