“You learn something new everyday.” How many times have you heard or uttered that sentence?

It’s true. I think we can’t help but learn something new every single day, but what about learning on purpose?

The Internet is full of so many resources to learn from. You can find teleseminars, ebooks, ecourses, articles, white papers and newsletters on any topic under the sun. It can be overwhelming for information junkies like myself when there’s new knowledge coming at you from every direction. I get emails daily announcing another course I should consider or a blog post I should read.

One of my favorite things about Twitter is that I can choose to “follow” the people I want to learn from. All of the experts I admire are right there, leading me to the articles they’re reading so I can learn right along with them. There’s always someone sharing a motivational quote, a great time-saving recipe or some hot industry news that helps keep me in the loop.

One of the most powerful things I’ve taken from Twitter over the past few weeks was a ‘Tweet’ from someone known in the Twitterverse as @unmarketing. It’s funny to think that in 140 characters (which is the maximum amount of space allowed in your mini blog post) someone could share something that would have an impact on my life, but it happened.

His tweet simply said something along the lines of: ‘Before you buy another ebook or course, implement something you already have.’ That’s not an exact quote, and I’m not really prepared to go through his 12,000-ish updates to find exactly what he said – it’s the overall point he made that’s important.

I can’t tell you how many ebooks I’ve bought over the years, but I can tell you how many I’ve read. Two. They were really good. I skimmed the others, but they’re all on a thumb drive waiting for me to find the time to go through them.

It’s ridiculous to keep buying and downloading these things without ever taking the advice inside and applying it to my business.

@unmarketing (Scott Stratten is his real name) inspired me to dust off a copywriting course I purchased a couple months ago and open it up. Until that day, I had consistently been marking off time in my calendar to get to the course, but it always got trumped by work or surfing for new information. I have stacks of books I’ve yet to read yet I continue to buy new ones while the others sit there waiting for their spines to be cracked.

What about you? Are you hording information and stockpiling ebooks without actually implementing anything? I challenge you to take a break from downloading anything new until you put something you already have into practice.

Oh, and if you’re not on Twitter already, you should be!

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Once upon a time in some village somewhere, an industrious cobbler could regularly be found hunching over his worktable, busily repairing shoes belonging to all of his fellow townspeople. He took great pride in his trade and worked long hours to support his family, often eating his lunch where he worked and fixing shoes well into the night (much to his wife’s dismay).

One day our cobbler noticed his own children’s shoes were a disgrace – holes in the soles and all. In fact, one of his children was only wearing one shoe because the other had been sitting on the cobbler’s work table for two weeks waiting for him to get around to them.

The poor cobbler was so busy eking out a living fixing other peoples shoes that he just didn’t have time to do the same for his family.

Now, this is a story fabricated by moi, but I figure that old saying, “The cobbler’s kids have no shoes” probably came from a scenario like this and I have to say, I’m feeling cobblerish. I don’t think I’m alone either. You could probably replace the words ‘cobbler’ with ‘mechanic’ and ’shoe’ with ‘car’. You see where I’m going with this.

I’m not a cobbler – I’m a VA, but I’ve been so busy with my clients’ work that my own admin has been kind of a mess. I just noticed that I haven’t updated my ‘About’ information on this blog, for example, since I first started blogging. My social networking sites reflect the same type of stuff.

My business now is so far removed from what it was when I started that I hardly recognize myself in many of these places anymore. In fact, I’ve been so busy “repairing other people’s shoes” that I haven’t even realized that my own shoes were broken (so to speak).

This weekend, I’m going to take an inventory of sorts and go through my ‘profiles’ and ‘bios’ and ‘about’ sections all over the Internet and update them.

I suggest you do the same. Things change! Unless you’ve managed to keep up with all this as you’ve grown busier. If that’s the case and you’re a cobbler who always manages to keep your kids in well-repaired shoes, please leave some comments on how you’re managing to do it!

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I started working with a client a few months ago who was using a wiki as a file storage area where team members could also collaborate.

When I realized how helpful a wiki could be (besides being fun to say), I decided I’d like my own wiki to keep my files organized so I opened my own free account at pbwiki (It’s easier than making a “peanut butter” sandwich, they say).

I have folders set up for each of my businesses as well as one each for my different personal creative writing projects (my novel, children’s books, random ideas). The great thing is, you can create a page, write your heart out, give it some tags and file it in a folder. The search function of a wiki is really powerful so if I want to find everything I ever wrote about the economy, I can do a quick search and kaboom – I have all pages that I’ve tagged ‘economy’ right in front of me. If I want to pull up all of my character sketches for my novel, I can pull up everything I’ve tagged as a ‘character sketch’ and I’m on my way.

You can customize even a free wiki, so mine is all pink and pretty which makes me want to use it even more. I recommended that my sister (a school teacher) set up a wiki to store all of the materials that she creates. She lives in fear of a hard drive crash, so this would be a good solution. I don’t know if she took my advice or not, probably not, but I put it out there for her anyway, just as I’m putting it out there for you today.

Check out pbwiki, I think you’ll like it!

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This might not have much to do with entrepreneurship, but it’s a technological time saver so that makes it worth blogging about!

Anyone who regularly reads my blog knows I’m a huge fan of the Food Network and I absolutely love cooking. Unfortunately, my days are pretty busy now with a young family and a thriving business so I’m all for shortcuts whenever I can find them.

Since I’m pretty sure that if my husband were responsible for the cooking we would all die, I make 100% of our meals. And, I still like to prepare nutritious meals for my husband and daughters so I don’t like to have to rely too much on packaged foods.

That’s why I got pretty excited about this…

I got a ‘tweet’ through Twitter on the weekend which turned me on to a totally cool new Google thing called Cookin’ With Google. You type into the search bar the stuff you have in your fridge and in return you get a bunch of recipes based on what you have on hand.

Bookmark this site if you love to cook!

There are lots of recipe sites out there that allow you to search by ingredient but for those of us who are really lazy busy, this saves the steps involved with logging into the recipe site, finding the ingredient search, searching by course, blah blah blah. It’s instant. One step.

“When there aren’t enough hours in the day…” try Cookin’ With Google! 

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I was doing some online research today and got lost in this really great website full of small business marketing information. You really can get lost in all the information. I purchased one of the products from his store on article marketing, and I can tell you, I learned a few great tips just by scanning it. This guy (Charlie Cook) really knows his stuff and has a lot of valuable information to share. If you have about an hour to wander around a website for some great marketing tips and ideas, it’s worth a visit!

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