As we observe Marin Luther King’s birthday, it’s natural to look at why he deserves a national holiday. Three traits come to mind:

Pioneer
Leadership
Vision

On the cusp of the civil rights movement, he stood out because he was a pioneer. Had he emerged at any other time in history, he might not have gotten the same notice. But because he was one of the recognized early leaders he received more attention.

There is no doubt that he was a leader. His personal charisma and his speaking ability made him a natural leader. And his ability to encourage people to rally around him pointed to his natural leadership.

No one can doubt his vision. He spoke of it often and painted a vision that others could see and follow.

But would Martin Luther King have made a good online business owner in today’s world? I doubt it and here’s why.

As a pioneer he had to find new ways of doing things – expressing thoughts, getting a message out, inspiring people. As an early online business owner, you had to figure out new paths.

Nowadays, the path is clear. We are no longer in the pioneer stage of online business. There is no need to invent new paths. It’s a matter of buckling down and doing the work. For a pioneer like MLK, the work would not have as exciting.

His leadership style also does not fit the online business mode that most people use to start their business. Unless he were to aspire to be one of the startups with venture capital and a team, his personal charisma would have been wasted sitting in his home office.

After all for most online business owners, there is a lot of work behind the scenes. Your ability to inspire others is expressed through webinars and video sales letters and in that regard his strong voice and inspirational tone would have been helpful. But for most of us, just being ourselves is more than sufficient.

Finally, any business can benefit from vision. Your vision may be as big as MLK’s. But in your own online business you are the one who not only creates the vision – but you also make it happen. The civil rights movement benefited from his vision, but it took a lot of people who were willing to work unnoticed to make it happen.

So what do YOU think – would Martin Luther King have been a good online business owner? Add your comments below.

One of the things they never talk about in school is choosing a career, based on the type of lifestyle you want to have. Yet, that is probably the most important aspect of your career decision – particularly if you are building a business of your own.

Here are five questions you need to sit down and answer for yourself, as you are choosing the type of business you want to build.1. Where do you want to live?

This is not only a choice of location, but also the type of dwelling you want. Do you want a condo downtown or a 3-bedroom ranch in the suburbs? Do you crave your own ranch or would you rather live out of an RV as you travel the country? Each of these choices helps narrow the type of business you want to create.

2. Where do you want to work?

Have you dreamed of a 10-second commute to your home office where you can work in peace or do you need other people around to keep you excited about the work? You may want your own office building or you may be content to work out of one of the new virtual offices. These questions will help you recognize your work style and what you need to support it.

3. How much do you want to travel and where do you want to go?

If the thought of flying and staying in hotel rooms isn’t attractive to you, then there are automatically some activities you don’t want to include in your business. Speaking at seminars for a living, for example. On the other hand, if you love to travel and can’t stay in enough hotels, that dictates a totally different business.

It could be that you love to camp and visit national parks, here and abroad. Then think how you can weave that into your business by writing books, travel logs, or designing trips for people.

4. How many hours per week do you want to work?

This includes the time per day, number of days per week, for how many weeks out of the year. The Four Hour Work Week triggered a lot of people to rethink their work time and figure out other ways to do it so that they could be on the road for long periods without working.

On the other hand, many people enjoy working at home and feel more comfortable working set hours, leaving specific times free. You have to know what works for you and your family at this stage in your life.

5. How much money will it take to support the lifestyle you have designed above?

This is where a realistic perspective and a calculator come in. Be honest with yourself. If you want a large house, fancy car, multiple vacations each year, flying first class, then it may be unrealistic to plan to work 2 hours a day, 3 days a week.

This is the mistake many people make when planning their business to support their lifestyle. They don’t sit down and “do the numbers” based on reality.

These five questions will give you a great start to planning your business to support your lifestyle. Now to make that specific to your online business, you’ll want to look at Plan Your Online Business.

As an online business owners, one of the major issues you face is using your time effectively. After all, there are a lot of tasks to do every day – and if you’re a new business owner you are the only one to do them all. That’s why it’s critical that you create a schedule for your work.

Here are three easy steps to building your work schedule.1. Decide what you need to do on a weekly basis. Make a list of those tasks. And remember to include maintenance items, such as backups, as well as your marketing tasks.

Now don’t panic when you see the list! There are a lot of tasks involved in running a successful online business. That’s why you’re taking the time to schedule them – to be sure that nothing is left to chance.

2. Move all of these tasks to your time tracker as a list. For each, you’ll want to add the day of the week you work on it. It may be something you do daily or only on Mondays.

One of the best approaches is to set aside one day a week for each work category – one for content creation; another for recruiting affiliates; another for product development, etc. For each of your major task categories choose a day that you’ll do that each week.

Finally, add a time estimate to each task so that you have a benchmark against which you’re working.

As you’re setting up your schedule, be sure to consider your work style. If you are most productive on Mondays, then schedule that day heavily. If you have used up all of your fresh ideas by Friday, schedule mechanical and maintenance tasks for that day.

3. Adjust your plan. No plan is perfect. It’s only through reviewing it regularly that you can make it more effective and more efficient.

As your business continues to evolve, you’ll need to update your work schedule with new tasks – and take off those that are no longer relevant or that you have outsourced. This gives you the starting point for your schedule for success.

To see how to set up your own time tracker, visit Organize Your Online Business

I recently took the 10-day JimBoat cruise with 100 other Internet marketers and their spouses and a few of their kids. This is my fourth JimBoat cruise, so I already knew about the quality of the information and networking. But I also learned some new things this year that I wanted to share.

It kind of reminds me of coming back to the office with all of those pink “While you were gone” messages on your desk (for those of you old enough to remember when we got phone messages instead of email!) And I have three “While I was gone” messages for you…

Message 1: Pare down your technology.

I left town with NO computer! That’s right – for the first time in 20 years, I did not roll a computer behind me through the airport, onto the ship, all over the ship, then home again.

Instead, I took my iPad. And it worked beautifully! I added a wireless keyboard – but didn’t even use it. The built-in keyboard worked fine. There was only one time I’d wished I’d had a “full” computer, but we worked around it. (see Message 2)

My advice: If you’re going on vacation/work or even work/vacation ask yourself – do I *really* need my computer or would my smart phone or iPad do? I know my family was thrilled to see I could do “without” a computer for several days. They were of the opinion that we were one and the same before the cruise!

By the way – in day 8 you get a special report about the iPad – you HAVE signed up for this haven’t you?

12 Days Free Gifts

There are exactly 12 days until Christmas at this point, so it’s the ideal time for you to sign up – and to share it with your list as well!

Message 2: Get a team.

While I was gone I was able to cruise with a clear conscious because I left my team in charge of my business. And while I only have five part-time contractors, it gave me the confidence to only check my emergency email four times during the cruise.

I was particularly pleased when a technical glitch appeared with two of my sites – and they were fixed in less than 24 hours with the team working together. One person spotted the problem, another isolated the error message, and my webmaster did the “fix.”

As I was reading the resolution of the last issue I happily said an emphatic “YES!” The man next to me asked about it and after I explained what had happened and how my team had taken care of it, he said “Wow, you have a REAL business!” (you’ll read an article about that shortly)

If you want to be the CEO of your own business instead of being all of the worker-bees in your business, you need to check out

Outsource Your Membership Site

I’ve just added the full report of who is on my team, how I found each of them, and what they do. It’s a growing source of information for all types of outsourcing – not just membership sites.

Message 3: Attend live events.

If you’ve been on my list for more than six months, then you know this is a recurring theme – you must attend live events. As home-based business owners we live in our own isolated world. Our way of doing things becomes our reality – and that’s dangerous!

You must get out and talk to other people in business. While you can do that through Rotary, a local business networking group and other meetings in your area, I think it is critical that you meet people at events in your industry.

Even though I’ve been in business online for 14 years, I picked up a TON of great ideas this past week that I will be implementing over the next several weeks. These ideas are things that will increase my sales and my profits – and thereby increase my business and my lifestyle.

Could I have learned these same things through online courses, webinars, teleseminars, ebooks, etc? No, I could not.

I could not have picked up that idea that I got sitting in the casino casually visiting with the person next to me as we mindlessly pushed the slot machine button.

Or the tip that someone gave over lunch last Wednesday, without even realizing I needed that specific piece of information.

And I certainly could not replace the new friends I made as we played the slots or had lunch together – or got caught in the rain in Barbados or talked as we snorkeled in the ocean off the Dominican Republic.

These are things that are not planned. They are not part of the “curriculum” of an event – but they are critical to your success. These are the people who become your joint venture partners. These are the people who become your FRIENDS in what is otherwise an isolating business.

I share the events I know about and attend each month in the Calendar section of

OnlineSuccessNews.com

If you’re not already a subscriber, you need to be! It’s chock-full of great ideas and information – and it’s totally FREE! Sign up today.

So that’s it – some of the unplanned learning I wanted to share with you. So let me know in your comments below whether these are helpful tips – what would you add?

While you may have gotten the impression from many online sales letters that people “just happen” into success online, the truth is ANY small business requires planning.

Of course, as with any other aspect of your business, there are multiple ways to go about it. For example, Jeanne and Sue, business partners, meet every other month for business planning. Just click that link to get ideas of how and what they plan.

In my business, I do comprehensive planning every quarter, then I keep a running plan with me at all times. Before I commit to promoting an affiliate offer, I check my planning calendar. When I come up with a new product idea, I check my planning calendar to see when I can release it. It’s all a matter of planning!

Since I’ve had a successful online business for the past 14 years, I documented my planning process in my Plan Your Online Business product. While it only takes an afternoon, I don’t do that each time – but at least once a year. And each year, I take members of my Online Success Incubator through that planning process so that they can apply it to their online business.

So if you’re not planning for your success online – set aside an appointment with yourself and start planning!

When you work for yourself you recognize that there is a lot to do. You also know that it’s a challenge getting it all done, whether you’re full-time or part-time in your business.

That’s why doing things in the most efficient manner possible so important. Here are three tools to help you work faster.

Procedures - You probably thought immediately of a big Procedures Manual. But a procedure can be as simple as 3 steps jotted on a yellow sticky.

Of course, I don’t recommend the yellow sticky approach! Instead take the extra five minutes it will take to type those steps.

Then either file it in a Procedures folder on your hard drive or print it and put it in a notebook on your shelf. It will be ready to use the next time you want to repeat that task.

Checklists - While a procedure is the step-by-step instructions, a checklist gives you a way to track that you completed that task. So where a procedure may have 10 steps, that entire task will be one check box on your checklist.

Checklists are helpful for daily tasks as well as large projects. It’s easiest if you start with an out-of-the-box checklist and adapt it for your use. But you can also build a checklist from scratch, based on the tasks you do.

Templates - When you do the same task over and over, you end up with the same outcome. So why not just start with the end result? That’s exactly what you do with a template.

Just as with a checklist, it’s much easier to modify an existing format than to start from scratch. So use your existing optin pages, sales letters, special reports and articles to create templates that you can modify and reuse.

The important thing with each of these tools is to test it and update it each time you use it. This process of continuous refinement is what makes all the difference in how long it take you to get it all done!

Jeanette shares more tips and a full organization system in her Online Business Organization System.

Whether you’re setting a value on your time for a sales letter – or trying to figure out how much a personal project is “costing you” it’s important to know what your time is worth.

Now we’d all like to just plug our name into a magic calculator, along with our related experience and education, and have the machine tell us “Your Time is worth this amount.” But since that’s not going to happen, let’s consider alternatives.

Method 1: What You’re Paid

If you’re still working a job, it’s a fairly easy calculation to see what you’re paid per hour. Just take your annual salary and divide by 2000. That’s the average work hours per year.

Sure, that’s not really what you’re worth, because you’re being underpaid. But it will give you something to work with.

Method 2: Annual Income

If you’re self-employed, take your gross income for the year and divide by 2000. That’s your hourly earnings.

You can also rely on your “billing rate” for consulting. But for every hour you are paid a consulting fee, you also have preparation, marketing, and background hours. So it sounds good, but isn’t realistic, unless you’re paid that rate for 2000 hours per year.

Method 3: Market Comparison

If you’re new to your business and don’t have a track record, look around at your competition. What do they charge for an hour of consulting? What do their sales letters refer to when talking about their time value?

But you have to be careful with this approach. Just because your competitor or your mentor is charging a particular amount does not mean that your time is worth that amount. There’s the experience and education factor you have to consider before you can match their value.

A word of caution: You never want to put a value on your time that is more than you have actually gotten paid. Unless you’ve been paid that amount, you can’t say you charge that amount. This is particularly true in sales letters where you are subject to governmental regulations. It is better to understate, than to over-inflate your rates.

Method 4: Internal Rate

Finally, there is the internal number. This is the amount you pay yourself – in your head. Twenty years ago when I started consulting, I read that if you got paid $50 per hour you would make a hundred thousand per year. That sounded good to me at the time, so I decided to consider my time worth $50 per hour.

So if it took me 30 hours to create a product, it “cost” me $1500. If it took me 5 hours to write a sales letter it cost me $250. And so on.

As my actual worth has increased I’ve also increased my internal number. At the same time I’ve gained expertise and speed. So a product that used to take 30 hours to create can now be finished and ready for sale in 15. It still “costs” me more because my rate has more than doubled – but I can create more of them in the same amount of time.

Start applying your new “time value” to the things you’re doing in your business. For example, if you spend an hour surfing the net, how much did that cost? If you spend an hour playing a game in Facebook – what was that worth to you?

And a final word of caution, from personal experience. I have tried using my real billing rate, currently set at $450 per hour, for personal costs. It doesn’t work. “I’ll fix dinner but it will cost you $450″ doesn’t fly here at our house. Around here my rate is about $5 per hour. It just keeps you humble!