Organize Your Online Business

People often talk about the importance of setting goals for your business. But they rarely go beyond that to the action steps required to make those goals a reality.

One of the most important action steps is to get organized. This is never more true than in an Online Business. What starts as a simple website with a few articles can quickly mushroom to 15 websites with 500 articles, 7 products, multiple audios - and you've lost control of all of it!

That's why organization is so important to an Online Business. It provides the systems that allow the business to grow, quickly and painlessly. Here are five ways you can start to organize your Online Business.

1. Keep a Web Owner's Manual. This physical notebook should have a page dedicated to each website with the passwords, registrar and other pertinent information. Plus you'll want a master list of all the URLs you own.

It's amazing how quickly you can accumulate a long list of domains. Early in my business I lost an important URL because I had forgotten I owned it and failed to renew it on time. This was a costly error and one that could have been corrected with a Web Owner's Manual.

2. Inventory Your Assets. Not just your physical items like your computers and printers, but also your intellectual assets. I found that I was spending too much time looking for "that video" that I knew I had created - but forgotten which domain I put it on. With more than 75 active domains it sometimes took hours to find the one I needed. Now with a single list of all of my videos (and another for audios) I can find anything with a simple electronic search.

3. Set Up A Dashboard. You have a choice of how you start your browser. Why go to MSN or Yahoo or AOL and immediately get distracted by the latest news? Instead, set up your own web page with links to all of the sites that you use regularly. Then set this page as your Home page.

It's much faster to click on the Home button, then on the name of the site than it is to type it in. And even faster than using favorites or bookmarks, if your list is as long as most peoples'!

4. Create a Productivity Folder. Even though my most frequently used documents are organized in various folders inside My Documents, I find it very helpful to have links to them in a single folder on my desktop. That way I can open that folder and immediately click to open the documents I'm likely to use daily. That saves having to navigate through multiple layers to find them.

Why not put them into the same folder to start? Because it makes more sense to have them spread out. For example, my profitability analyses are with the web documents for each site. The daily activity report is with Business Planning Reports, etc. Having the productivity folder provides quick access to the things I am most likely to update frequently.

5. Track Your Success. Once you've determined your revenue generating activities, then you need to find a way to measure your revenue as well as those activities. I use a Success Factors report which is updated daily. It includes all the sources of revenue for the day, as well as the revenue producing activities completed such as articles written, newsletters sent, teleseminars delivered, and sites built. It's a one-page summary of daily revenue so you can see exactly where you are every day of the month. No surprises here!

With just a few tools and some consistent attention, you can get - and keep - your Online Business organized.