The 30 Minute Success System

by 5buckguy

I was going to wait to release this tomorrow, but I figured that many of you wouldn’t be checking the ‘net on New Year’s Eve, and I think this is a perfect topic for those setting goals for 2011.

It’s actually a little report I wrote a while ago, but I’m real proud of it, and the information is evergreen.

A couple posts ago, I wrote on the topic “A Sure Fire Way To Success”, you can find it if you look in the recent archives.

This post is similar, but now I’m going to tell you how to be successful in just 30 minutes a day.

If I could teach you that, would you love me? :-)

It actually is included in the bundle of 34 reports that Rachel and I give away to anyone who wants them, if you don’t have them already, you can sign up for the download over to the right…

Here’s how you can be successful in just 30 minutes a day…

Today I’d like to talk about a subject that was started a while ago over at Earn1KaDay.com. One of our members announced that he had decided his primary business model for 2009 was going to be to build membership sites.

Another member chimed in that she wanted to do the same, but had a hard time making time because she was doing something else on a daily basis already to bring in income, and giving up that income would mean the bills wouldn’t get paid, so she had to pass up the idea of building the membership sites.

Have you ever had a thought like that? “I don’t have time to yada yada yada, because I’m doing yada yada yada”. Fill in the yada’s, and don’t feel bad because 99.999% of the population, or more, thinks the same thing, except the yada’s are different.

I’m not saying you’re wrong, but … oh heck, yeah, I’m saying you’re wrong. And here’s why.

And this next thought could be life changing, so get ready for it.

Don’t miss it. Open your eyes wide, stop skimming, and soak this next thought in…

Are you ready?

OK, here it is…

Making progress towards your dream isn’t an either-or proposition.

In other words, you don’t have to stop doing something in order to start doing something else.

Well, maybe you do, as I’ll explain in a bit.

What I advised in the Earn1KaDay forum was this, and I’ll quote part of my post:

Jane Doe (not her real name) was thinking she’d like to start a
membership site, but was overwhelmed at the thought mainly because
she has other things she needs to do to bring in money to pay her
bills. Here’s some of my thoughts …

Just put aside a half hour a day to do something to make progress
to completing your membership site.

First off spend those half hours deciding what niche it will be.

Then decide how you’re going to run it, for example by
autoresponder, with a forum, with a blog, what you’ll use to secure
it, etc.

Then determine how much content you need to start, and work towards acquiring the content.
If outsourcing is financially feasible, cool. Will the content be articles? Reports? Videos? Interviews?

Public domain content? Rewritten PLR content? User created content?
All original done by you? All of the above?

Then write a sales letter and figure out how to market it. PPC?
Your list? Joint ventures? WSO? With affiliates?

The site doesn’t need to be full of stuff from day one, in fact you
shouldn’t strive for that. What if you announce it and nobody
joins? It doesn’t mean you’re a failure, it means that particular
niche isn’t a match for you at this time. So you learn from the
exercise, maybe bundle up the content and run a WSO to sell PLR
packs with it, or whatever. No big loss. Maybe a little
disappointment, but just a bunch of half hour blocks of time over a
few weeks or a couple months that you might have wasted by watching
Seinfeld or Friends reruns anyway. :-)

And you go back to square one, to find another niche.

Remember, failure is your friend if you fail fast and learn from
the experience.

Eventually, sooner or later, you’ll happen upon a niche perfect for
you and you can make a small fortune, or a large fortune, depending
on a lot of factors. But one factor is for sure … if you don’t do
anything, you won’t make any fortune at all.

Just a half hour a day.

That was my advice, and I’ll stick with it. Whether your personal yada yada yada is making a membership site, or writing an eBook, or producing a software product, or writing the next great American novel, you just need to make, and here’s the other key to this report …

Are you ready? This is important…

You just need to make incremental progress towards your dream every day.

You don’t need to spend 8 or 12 hours a day on it, to the exclusion of your income producing endeavors, or to the exclusion of your family and friends.

I said above a half an hour a day, every day, even 5 days a week, even 3 hours a day on the weekend, but better to do a half an hour a day every day.

If you spend a half an hour a day on something, that’s around 180 hours in a year, about 5 normal work weeks. Just think how much you can get done in 5 full weeks. Will you miss those half hours?

I don’t think so.

And on top of the 5 full weeks of work you’ll get done, it will be tremendously focused because you’re only spending a half an hour a day, so you aren’t spending that time checking emails, surfing, reading forum posts, etc. You’re totally 100% working for that total of 5 full weeks during the year.

Just think how much you’ll accomplish. And even more if you can identify tasks that you can outsource. Since that half hour a day is so valuable and precious to you, and you want to be only doing what is absolutely necessary, you’ll naturally come up with tasks that can be done cheaply by others, so that your personal half hour involvement will be incredibly productive.

Incremental progress.

So OK, the 5 Bucks a Day strategy includes a primary point being focus. Maybe I’m diverting a bit here from the strategy. But maybe not. The strategy says that you should pick a project every week (assuming you have all week to work on one), and focus on that until complete, and hopefully it will increase your income by $5/day going forward.

That’s all well and good, and I still live by that strategy, but two things can get in the way.

One is if you’re doing nothing else but your income producing 5 bucks a day project, you don’t do your dream project because you can’t get it done in a week, so either it’s not on your project list, or else you do something else that you know you can get done in the alloted week.

The other thing is if you have a J.O.B. of some type that completely fills your normal day with tasks that pay the bills, and you can’t give up that J.O.B. yet, so you aren’t even doing your 5 Bucks a Day project.

But you still continue to say to yourself, when your dream project is done, you can and will have all your bills paid, you can quit your J.O.B., you can put your kids in private school, you can take the summer off and travel Europe or the U.S., yada, yada, yada.

How long is your dream project going to take to complete if you wait until you have time to work on it full time? It would be a shame if it took a lifetime, and then the kids were grown and moved away, and you were too tired to travel.

Or worse yet, if someone else took your idea, did it, and made a fortune.

Carve out for yourself a half an hour a day to work on your dream project. Just a half hour. Give up something else. Like I said before, give up watching just one Seinfeld rerun a day.

Or get up a half hour earlier. Or go to bed a half hour later.

Or outsource some other time consuming task. Hire someone to clean the gutters, mow the lawn, paint the barn, whatever it is that’s standing in your way.

Or don’t read the whole newspaper, it’s never good news anyway, and if there’s an emergency you’ll hear about it somewhere else.

Just 30 minutes a day.

Making progress towards your dream isn’t an either-or proposition.

Incremental progress.

It can change your life.

Even if it temporarily, for a half an hour a day, interrupts your focus from your normal 5 Bucks a Day project. I give you permission to do that.

Just 30 minutes a day is all it will take.

BTW, if you liked this post, why not post your own feelings as a comment. Or press the “like” button below… Or both?

I’d sure appreciate it. And the more comments we get, the more incentive I feel to keep posting more often.

Print Friendly Version of this pagePrint Get a PDF version of this webpagePDF

Facebook comments:

  • http://x-raytechniciansalary.org/ Mark

    Thanks for this post! I for one, can (and do) overwhelm myself with all the steps involved in a project. But breaking it down to just 30 minutes of focus attention – just 30 MINUTES! – makes the whole progress doable. Simply focus on this day’s 30 minute effort. Because THIS DAY, plus the next, is all it takes!

    Thanks for the reminder!

    Mark

    [Reply]

  • http://www.5bucksaday.com 5buckguy

    Yep, just 30 minutes of focused attention will move you a step ahead, and your competition will never know what hit them!

    [Reply]

  • http://www.edakehurst.com Ed Akehurst

    This is a great post, as usual, Dennis.

    I think I’d like to add one small point, which I was recently reminded of by Jason Fladlien. Spending a dedicated 30 minutes a day is a great strategy, but only if it is 30 minutes of WORK. Reading reports and watching how-to videos is not work, even though it is needed to succeed. We should make sure that if we are taking 30 minutes to read that newest e-book or going through that latest thread on the Earn1kaDay site, that we are also taking 30 minutes to implement what we’ve learned. I meet marketers all the time that say they are struggling, yet when I ask what they are doing, I hear that they read two ebooks, ordered a WSO and watched a set of training videos on (insert latest fad here). Yet, they never wrote an article that week, or posted on their blog or did any keyword research.

    Thanks again for your post! I agree that getting into a regular schedule of even 30 minutes a day can change someone’s life. (love ALL your reports, by the way).

    Happy New Year!

    Ed Akehurst

    [Reply]

  • http://www.5bucksaday.com 5buckguy

    I agree, Ed, and I thought that it went without saying maybe. I’m talking about 30 minutes of making progress on a goal. While learning is important, it isn’t working toward a goal, unless it’s something like installing a script that’s necessary on your site, and you have to read the user guide to install it. That kind of thing.

    But thanks for clearing that up, as others might have misunderstood my intent also.

    Spending time studying is often a way of procrastinating about doing what’s really important.

    [Reply]

  • http://newbreedmarketer.com/blog Andre

    That is a very good way to think about your task, that half hour of progress. I like the concept and feel it is something I can easily incorporate into my supposedly busy schedule. Will let you know how it works. Thanks.

    [Reply]

  • http://getoffyourassinternetmarketing.com/ John

    Thanks for the advice! Sometimes I need the reminder that it all doesn’t have to happen at once.

    Keep up the good work!

    [Reply]

  • http://www.5bucksaday.com 5buckguy

    Yes, please let me know, Andre. The best systems are simple systems, after all.

    [Reply]

  • http://www.5bucksaday.com 5buckguy

    Thanks, John. Nope, Rome wasn’t built in a day, and neither is an Internet marketing business (though the gurus like us to think you can if you buy their high priced courses).

    [Reply]

  • http://www.edakehurst.com Ed Akehurst

    “Spending time studying is often a way of procrastinating about doing what’s really important.”

    Wow! Have I done a lot of THAT in my life! LOL! It is primarily thanks to you and your Earn1kaDay Insiders Club that has recently helped me from falling back into that bad habit.

    [Reply]

  • http://www.5bucksaday.com 5buckguy

    Well, learning isn’t a bad habit, in moderation. Learning without taking action on what you’ve learned is indeed a horrible habit, because the learned behavior, if not acted upon, is forgotten quickly.

    [Reply]

  • Rita

    A very good email. Many of us want to do many things and often times do a little here, a little there and never get a whole lot done.
    I, sadly to say am one of these. Will start to do as you suggest. Certinally not hard. Think I will write down the things I want to do, decide which should be first and get started.

    [Reply]

  • http://www.5bucksaday.com 5buckguy

    Way to go, Rita, let us know how it works out, I think you’ll be surprised!

    [Reply]

  • http://getoffyourassinternetmarketing.com/ John

    Yep…the gurus…I’ve been unsubscribing alot the last few days because it takes too much time to go through the emails and read the sales letters of the next thing I have to have to make my instant automated fortune.

    BTW: You made the cut ; )

    [Reply]

  • http://www.norenebroyton.com Norene

    Dennis,
    This is such an important post! It is so easy to find other things to keep you from creating a sustainable business — in short, because it is easier to do nothing than to do something! But when it comes to Internet Marketing, or anything of value really, doing *something* is *everything*!
    -Norene

    [Reply]

  • http://www.claimdomainnames.com Jeannie Crabtree

    Good post Dennis. It is amazing how those half hours add up.

    I had a project I did for a while, which could be ongoing. I spent the first half an hour to an hour on this project before I did anything else for the day. It got done and then I moved on to the “regular stuff” for the day.

    Jeannie

    [Reply]

  • http://TrishOleary.com Trish Oleary

    Another wonderful post Dennis. Daily I see so many people just continue to study and/or say they are working but they are really just reading emails and etc. They never take any real tangible daily actions and then they wonder why they never accomplish their goals. If they would just do like you mention here and just seriously focus and turn everything else off for just a mere 30 minutes a day AND take action they would be shocked how it all snowballs after a while. Daily Consistent actions are truly the “SECRET INGREDIENT” :-)

    [Reply]

  • http://www.5bucksaday.com 5buckguy

    Thanks for the comment, Norene. What I like about this plan is that in 30 minutes a day, you’ve done something, and it’s accomplished before you even realize that it’s work.

    [Reply]

  • http://www.5bucksaday.com 5buckguy

    Perfect, Jeannie, perfect!

    [Reply]

  • http://www.5bucksaday.com 5buckguy

    You got that right, Trish! Turn off the phone, don’t check emails, ignore the instant messaging, all that. For just a half hour. And you’ll be amazed at what you can accomplish.

    By the way, the half hour doesn’t start ticking until you’re actually working, not just sharpening your pencil of logging in somewhere, etc.

    [Reply]

  • tomr

    I don’t know why Dennis, but all of a sudden I’ve become highly sensitized to how much time I don’t use wisely. Your post just jumped off the page in my noggin. I’m going to build on that half hour of action, nothing else, just well thought out action going forward using the Earn 1K a Day way. Thanks man and have a safe and happy new year in 2011!

    [Reply]

  • http://conniegreen.com Connie Ragen Green

    This is how I got started in 2005/2006. I was still teaching school then, so I would park in the parking lot of the post office and write for 30 minutes each morning before going on to my school. On Saturday I would turn the writing into articles and blog posts. Soon I began earning some money from affiliate products, and the rest, as they say, is history.

    [Reply]

  • http://www.5bucksaday.com 5buckguy

    I’m glad I raised that awareness in you, it’s a healthy thing.

    Couple what I’m saying in the post with using Action Enforcer, and you’ll never look back!

    [Reply]

  • http://www.5bucksaday.com 5buckguy

    Connie, that’s awesome!

    Readers, if you don’t know Connie, she’s a great affiliate for us and others, and very successful in her own right.

    She’s definitely someone that I’m privileged to have met, and the fact that she’s agreeing with my recommendation here really means that maybe I’m on to something. :-)

    [Reply]

  • http://www.smartmoneyproject.com Lawra

    Great post Dennis, this is a timely reminder to greet the new year with a plan of action.

    Thanks for the inspiration and great products, wish you and Rachel all the best for 2011.

    Cheers,

    [Reply]

  • http://www.autographedprosportsmemorabilia.com Steve

    It will be implemented TONIGHT! Thanks for the direction.

    [Reply]

  • http://www.5bucksaday.com 5buckguy

    That’s what I like to hear, Steve!

    [Reply]

  • http://www.5bucksaday.com 5buckguy

    Thanks, Lawry, same to you.

    [Reply]

  • http://www.greenteaconnection.com Louise

    Hi Dennis,

    Thanks so much for this post. I need a reminder every so often to take more action and spend less time on “preparation” for action!

    All the best to you and Rachel for 2011!

    [Reply]

  • Vic Sciarrino Amicizia Vic

    Well not all email is bad. ): Now I know who you are! ” The five buck guy ”
    I’ve even bought some of your products,however I did not know your the creator of all these products.
    I was so impressed with your approach to Internet marketing, I laughed out loud, “just five bucks a day” ….SIMPLE!
    Most marketers want the big bucks and talk about the big bucks that can be made over night. ( don’t laugh! I thought, well maybe? )
    Give me the 5bucks a day! I’ll be as excited as you were when I see that 1st sale!
    And in conclusion, The bad habit of reading email is hard to break, but some times ya find sumthin’ good!
    Thank you! Now I got to do my 1/2hr. thing
    Vic Sciarrino AmiciziaVic

    [Reply]

  • Vic Sciarrino Amicizia Vic

    @ Trish Oleary:
    Wow! That’s me! Yep! Junk efforts :(
    I study and study and read till my eye’s water but don’t get much done. Bad habit>look for the right thang and forget the hard stuff.
    I hope I’ve learned a great lesson. “THE SECRET INGREDIENT”
    AmiciziaVic Vic Sciarrino

    [Reply]

  • http://www.5bucksaday.com 5buckguy

    No, not all email is bad, Vic. But it’s bad when you do it when you’re trying to get something important done, because you lose your train of thought for from 15 to 30 minutes every time you shift your focus from one task to the next.

    Equally bad for that is allowing the phone to interrupt you. Or Skype or other instant messengers.

    [Reply]

  • Ron

    Great post Dennis,

    I’ve started doing “time blocks”, thats where you set aside 30 min. of doing nothing but 100% focus on WORKING on your business with absolutely no distractions unless of course an emergency arises.

    You would be surprised how much progress you can make, especially when you get in that “FOCUSED ZONE”. Then next when I’m ready I’m gonna move into 60 min. time blocks.

    I think it makes for a good strategy of doing small tasks, which, hope and pray will lead up to some big accomplishments.

    [Reply]

Previous post:

Next post: