This seems to be a common complaint from aspiring internet marketers and those looking to start an online business. There’s too much information out there and they can’t keep up with it all. As a result, they’re completely overwhelmed and get nothing done.
Are you one of these poor souls?
If you are, don’t fret.
There are ways to deal with information overload. Even as an established and successful marketing specialist for many years now, I have to deal with this problem all the time. So, in this post, I am going to share my personal tips for dealing with information overload. I have no doubt that you will find these to be very helpful.
At the top of my list is doing just that… making a list. What kind of list? Let’s say that you’ve decided that you want to learn pay per click advertising, search engine optimization, list building, article writing and copywriting. Now, obviously, you can’t learn all of those all at one time, or even in less than several years. Your head will explode! So what I do is make a list of each item I want to learn and order them according to importance. In other words, which one do I need the most right away? I then concentrate on that one and ONLY that one until I have mastered it. I then cross if off my list and move on to the next thing. Trust me, this is a very effective method to dealing with information overload.
Another great method for dealing with information overload is developing what I call tunnel vision. This is a little harder to do, but if you can pull this off, you’ll be way ahead of the game. Let me try to explain how this works. Let’s say that I am working on a project that requires me to do certain things and have certain skills. I will look at my list of things I want to learn and see if any of those skills for that certain project are on it. If so, I will tackle ONLY that skill and master it. I will pretend that the other skills don’t even exist, no matter how tempting it might be to include them in the project. If they’re not needed, pretend they don’t exist.
Basically, what this all comes down to is discipline. And quite honestly, I don’t know how to teach that. Yes, it’s very easy to see the new shiny ebook, course, or video training on “whatever” and convince yourself that you need to have it. But if you really look at it rationally, you’ll discover that there are very few things that you really need.
And THAT is how you successfully handle information overload.