Jim Kukral – Small Business Consultant

Guest Post by BenSpark.

It seems that many of my posts lately have been inspired by Dave Ramsey and Financial Peace University. This one is no exception. My wife Allison and I have been working very hard at reducing our debts and we are currently working through Financial Peace University. The biggest thing that I’ve taken away from this process is the importance of writing down your plan. Putting your plan on paper gives you a solid goal to shoot for. We went from buying practically everything on credit cards to full on cash. I’m amazed that we actually have money left in our envelopes. We’re also not worried about what we are going to eat for the month because my wife wrote out a whole month menu plan. I feel much better about our finances because I can see things on paper. I am not overwhelmed by what we need to accomplish because we have a written plan.

Now that I have a financial plan and monthly meal plan written down I started to think of different areas where I need to set up a written plans. A major place where I am feeling overwhelmed is in my blogging and blog related activities. Right now I run one blog but I own 9 domain names but really blog on 1 blog while 8 blogs pretty much lay dormant. I write guest posts for this blog (JimKukral.com), Dad-o-Matic and The Coach Shoppe. I am a compensated writer for BloggingTips.com and Shuttercal.com. I’ve also started a blog consulting business and have 4 clients. One client has moved me up to running their Membergate site which means I now have to learn Membergate and get up to speed with that. I’ve created one course on Prfessor and need to create a few more. Oh yeah, I have two or three product reviews to complete as well and some contests to start. On top of that I have a full time job and a family.

Do you see how these priorities are a bit out of whack?

A written plan for my online life is in order. Trying to balance all of these responsibilities at once in my head and on a couple of docs is going to rive me right to failure. So, much like my Cash Flow Plan I am creating my Online Success Plan.

Steps in the Online Success Plan

1. Family First – The whole point of this is to create a better life for my family
2. My Job that actually pays or bills Second – Losing a major income source will hurt
3. List out all of my online commitments – Get it all out there, what to cut, what to keep
4. Set Goals for each commitment – What do I really want to accomplish?
5. Document how much time I spend on each commitment in an average week and determine where I am spending the bulk of my time
6. Are my priorities straight. – i.e. Am I spending so much time on things that don’t generate revenue at the expense of those that do?
7. Set up a plan for:
• writing – blog posts, guest posts, newsletters and sponsored posts
• creating – new Prfessor courses
• consulting – giving clients value
• reviewing – giving each product sufficient evaluation time
• networking – Being Social, replying to comments, tweets and Facebook messages

Am I missing anything? If so what do you think I should add?

About the author: Andrew Bennett aka BenSpark is a husband, father, blogger, photographer, Blog Consultant wired kayaker and an old school Transformers fan. He takes a photo every day and blogs about it on BenSpark.com. You can follow BenSpark on Twitter.