Nearly everyone who reads my blog has a goal. That goal, in its simplest form, is to make money online. It’s why I’m here and it’s why you’re here. Without that goal there’s no point in SEO or anthing else for that matter. Trouble is many of us go from year to year not even achieving a fraction of what we’re capable of.

There are lots of reasons for this failure, but the depressing statistics are that out of all online startups a massive 95 percent will fail at some point.

We’re all aware that the #1 reason for this statistic is simply failure to plan a strategy. Many of us go on wasting time online day after day. I fall into this category myself. For months now life’s interruptions have prevented me from taking simple steps towards making my dream come true: I plan to sell information products online.

Ages ago I realized that if I wanted to change all this I needed to get myself organized. A coach won’t work for me because I’m hugely independent, and I am also highly visual. I respond to visual cues far more readily than to verbal cues. I suspect that many of us who work online fall into this category.

So what I’m saying in my roundabout way is that for some time now I’ve been looking for project management software or really any kind of software to get me organized and get my business started. I wanted to be able to list my goals, dreams, to-dos and plain have-tos without a huge hassle and without someone else poking their oar in. I’ve tried several programs which I won’t be naming hear and they left me totally uninspired.

Then today, when I was least expecting it, I saw a Tweet from Scott Allen. Of course you know he co-wrote the book The Virtual Handshake. That book by itself is a superb business/networking tool–but I’ll be talking more about it in a subsequent post.

Back to the Tweet. Scott was tweeting about new project management software from Nozbe.com. I thought it’d probably be another uninspiring flop, but my curiosity got the better of me so I wandered over for a look. Ten minutes later I was signing up.

No word of a lie folks, it took me less than an hour to enter my present projects, add some tasks (a total of about forty urgent ones), and list my dreams too. Now it’s several hours later, and the great, wonderful, superb news is that I actually got down to it and tackled three tasks that I’ve been putting off for around six months. To me that is an outstanding success. To say I’m thrilled is a piddling understatement. Getting myself motivated in this way is simply huge. I am around 50 percent closer to realizing my dream of launching my first information product and it’s all thanks to Nozbe.

If you need to get organized and systematically work through your tasks, you need to give this a try right away.

One of the tasks I was putting off was downloading Magento. Magento is a full-featured, open source ecommerce platform. Yes, this is what you need if you want to add a shopping cart and sell products on your website. The most amazing thing about it is that not only is it better than some very expensive ecommerce applications out there, it’s absolutely free. Word is catching on fast because it really is a great application, and I researched it months ago. If you need any more encouragement, you might find it impressive that a whopping 10,000 people downloaded it in the first two weeks after release. All that was left was for me to upload it to my server. I’ll admit I haven’t got it configured yet, but I’m a lot further on than I was this morning.

Finally, I took the bull by the horns and decided to sign up for an email marketing and list-creation service. You really can’t run any kind of  online business without this. I let my last email service subscription lapse because I didn’t like the program. Again I made my choice a while back. I’ve noticed that a lot of marketing professionals are using Constant Contact so I’d better see what that’s about. I haven’t had time to evaluate it yet, but I love the interface. It’s cheerful, easy-to-use, and what’s more you can get a 60-day trial without giving your credit card information. What more could you possibly ask?

So if like me you’ve been wasting a lot of time recently, and if you desperately need to see yourself making progress, check these three programs out. You can get started for free in all three so there’s really no excuse for procrastination.

If you’d like more motivation, great tips and information, and the occasional bawling out from me, be sure to sign up for my tips in the box you can see at the top of the sidebar.