Everyday we use search engines or other websites to find information, to locate places, food order in restaurants, search for local doctors, nearby law firm, clearance sales on clothes or electronics or furnitures, to check the climate, find news, download software codes, ebooks, write blog at the end of day, check office and personal mails, stock news, to go to woot.com, orkut.com, facebook.com, linkedin.com, flickr.com, youtube.com, adult related websites and many many others based on the individual needs, work, time, geograhic location etc.,
Given a hair, scientists will find out the complete DNA of the person whom it belongs to, same way the webhistory or the journal of what you do online – could define who you are, what you look for and where do you spend more time – one day if you note it down, you can learn a lot different things to do things appropriately and to utilize that time efficiently.
Below are few examples that I provide – which gives you an idea/glance at another person (that is myself) web activities on a particular day or you can compare yourself with (you searched for something and you ended up here or you are a regular visitor of my website). Some common routines we might share
1. What websites do I visit?
Everyday visits atleast couple of times:
Google mail, hotmail, yahoo (haven’t consolidated to one email provider yet and also have multiple email ids), Linkedin.com, Orkut.com, CNN.com, youtube.com, flickr.com, facebook.com (facebook – very rare nowadays), Couple of local websites (in my native language – Tamil), Wikipedia, google patents, internet marketing related news, technorati.com, Webhost4life.com, rapidshare (use google and then download free ebooks, tutorials, sample documents, graphics etc.,), godaddy.com, pcnames.com, all of the websites that I own and maintain (check blog roll and continue doing that) and all other websites which I don’t remember (as I visit them through google – work related)
And in other days:
I visit one new website each day, Visit my friends websites such as Muthu, Saravanan, and then for movie reviews visit Rotten Tomatoes, bank websites to see whether I have anything left at all to invest more in what I do, check weather.com when traveling, use maps in google, check competitors website (argh – now can I say that?!), Craigslist.org, meetup.com
If you see clearly, there are bunch of sites that you would visit frequently – it may or may not be in the list and I would have had not covered all the sites that I check. Now, what you may not know is that or what you know but cannot avoid is the internet addiction, if you check your email like half hour once as though every minute you expect something might pop up and finally to just see couple of junk mails and coupon saving promotion emails to be deleted waiting in the queue – that frustrates. At the end of this post – I will tell you how can you save some time.
2. What keywords do I search for?
Now, this vary from day to day, based on my needs, as how I started this post, it changes. But as of now, as of today and there are few search keywords, there are patterns in how people search for things, an internet savvy will not type “how do I find a dentist near my house?”, he/she will rather type dentist “location name” and thats it. There is a pattern how users search for, what they search for and how quickly they find relevant data/information. And this pattern is based on the individual skills of that person, geographic location, like how accent and usage varies from a Texas person to Newyork one.
Below are very few keywords that I provide that I use to search for some purpose, but for various different reasons, you can easily guess few and some you will definitely be wrong.
blog headers, “blog headers”, free blog headers, seo expert, seo consulting, adsense, site:www.themeheaders.com, seo new york city, adwords, business plan, successful entrepreneur, internet marketing agency, and a lots and lots of keywords
You might have your own bucket of keywords for everyday and the way you form the sentence to search them also maybe different.
Tips for saving time:
a) When you are not expecting mail, avoid checking mails frequently.
b) Learn type writing, old school way, asdf ;lkj, just learn it, in 3-4 months you can type 60 wpm (words per minute) – well I learnt it 15 years ago. (You can check this website for online typewriting resources here)
c) Do not type http:// everytime, and sometimes you do not need to type the www. as well, just type in the domain name and you do not have to type .com as well, use ALT + ENTER key after typing the domain name.
d) CTRL + N (pressing ctrl key and n in keyboard together will open another new browser)
e) You can find lots of tips online to save time by learning few computer tricks.
f) Do not read the same article again and again, do not watch the same video again and again just because it is the buzz.
g) If you are in Stock business, every tick is important – but you cannot be checking that by every second.
h) Bookmark sites, if it is your personal computer tick “remember me” checkbox – so you do not have to login each and everytime.
Let your colleagues and friends know these simple tips and get to know what websites do they check frequently and what keywords they use to search for. (only things which does not compromise their privacy). If you have time, you can comment it here on how you visited this post and for what (even if it means you are here to market your business website) and the sites and keywords that you use.
Cheers,
Shiva