Make Money Online with 80% of the Work

I don't know how many of you have worked in a Fortune 50 company before. But, if you have you know how much large companies focus on squeezing the greatest benefit from every dollar spent.

This type of value can come in many ways - reduced expenses, more sales, faster delivery, etc. Any way you look at it, large corporations understand the need to keep the financial statement friendly to their stock owners.

A common theme running in many companies is the idea that the first 80% of any work is easier than the last 20%, and, it is that last 20% that usually doubles the total cost of the effort. Plus, it is usually the first 80% that provides a majority of the need. When you apply this to a large effort or a combination of efforts the savings is staggering! Companies will work on 10, 50 or 100 million dollar projects and can realize 32 million in savings plus get the benefit sooner just using those three examples

How can you apply this to your own online marketing endeavors? You have probably invested quite a bit of time and effort to make money online, and, if you're like me, want to perfect all of your work. This includes articles, websites, blogs, ebooks, graphics, lists, etc. Are you burning the midnight oil on fine details?

If you took a step back and analyzed your own work would you be able to strip away some of the most difficult and time consuming steps but still get most of the benefit? In my own work I have found that trying to complete a site down to the finest details probably did nothing for any additional revenue. If I had worked on only the core 80% I could have spent the rest of the time on traffic building.

Take a look at it a different way. Perhaps you are writing your first ebook and have 12 chapters on your specific topic. Do you really need all 12 chapters? Will some of those chapters make the difference in the overall quality or sales? What if you cut it down to 9 or 10 chapters - maybe the other chapters can wait for the next ebook.

By no means am I trying to suggest that you not complete anything to the point of it being non-functional, poor quality or simply useless. You still have to do the majority of the work that gets you to that threshold. The balance is benefit vs. effort and cost with your goal to still have quality products, services and information.

The bottom line is every hour you spend working on fine tuning your own online marketing process could be taking away potential profits from other endeavors. The more revenue generating projects you have, the higher the potential is to make money online.

You can always use your first earned dollars to hire talent later to tune, modify and perfect your past work. This gives you even more productivity with business acceleration!


Don James is an internet strategist and online marketer. Discover ways to make money online with your sites or blogs at The Agile Marketer