Five Ways to Stop Information Overload
Like many people, I am interested in many topics and always wanting to have access to the latest information, but, like me, if you are following the giant topic that is Internet Marketing, there is so much flying around that you could soon drown under the vast ocean of e-mails and reports that are available to you.
So to stop you being totally overwhelmed, here are five tips I use to manage the information coming my way and I hope they will help you.
- Manage Your Subscriber Groups
Remember that much of the information being offered by many e-mail lists is the same, or very similar, so by joining 6-8 “good” groups, the likelihood of missing the very latest information is minimised. Now it might come a little later if you have chosen the top marketers to follow as they will do more research before writing about and recommending new things as they tend to test more than the excitable newbies.
The choice of groups is a very personal thing, but doing your research is paramount and you might find that some you start to follow are not in your particular area and drop them, but take on new, more relevant groups as you learn and progress.
- Filter Your Messages
I tend to use a Google Mail account for my list e-mails as separate from my personal e-mails as the volume would soon choke the Inbox and I might miss the next funny video about puppies from a friend who thinks the Internet is only for sharing stupid movies!
Using the Filter settings on the Inbox page, I can set up individual folders and the mail, as it arrives, is dropped directly into this folder and bypasses the Inbox. This then allows me to see the full sequence of e-mails and read them easily in one sitting.
By the way, I’m not that inhuman as some of those stupid videos are fun and can tend to give you a lift if the day is not going well!
- You Don’t Need To Read Everything
Not every e-mail, even from one of your chosen lists, has to be read in totality as some might be purely sales messages, but even then if the content is not important, the actual style of the e-mail might be of interest when you are coming to sell your own, or affiliate, products so well worth hanging onto for the future.
You can save these types of e-mails in a swipe file so that you have a source of reference of successful e-mails when you are ready to produce your own.
- Concentrate Your Reading
As mentioned above, by collecting a series of e-mails together, you can read them in one session and gain more insight into how they have been crafted and thus you can improve your own skill at writing good quality e-mails moving forward.
And by reading the series in one short burst, you will get a better understanding of the whole topic rather than reading, say, seven different e-mails on different topics one day and then reading the next e-mails the following day. I, personally, find I get them all mixed up in my head doing that, but blame a lot of that on my age!
- Focus Your Interests
When you start in Internet Marketing, or any large similar topic, you will find plenty of places from which to request information, but gradually you will find the specific niche (or niches) in which you have more interest so you might decide to drop some of the less relevant sites and delve more into your specific niche.
Mind you, by using the Filter option as mentioned above, you could still stay on that list and leave the e-mails in their relevant mail box until you do think that topic would be relevant to your interest.
Anyway, this is how I cope with the vast amount of information out there and I hope that this is of assistance to you with dealing with possible information overload. Please let me know in the Comments section how you deal with this problem, as I do see it as a problem until you get control, as your tips might help me and my other readers to make a better fist of solving this problem.
