As signs of Spring start to rise all around us and that Spring Cleaning bug hits, I have to admit I have been caught up in the frenzie too. Unfortunately for the rest of my family though, it isn’t the house that’s commanding my attention. MY Spring Cleaning is of a different nature — I am on a mission to clean, organize, backup and weed out my computer and Internet Marketing material. Yes, that’s right, LET’S GET ORGANIZED!

In a typical day, I get ezines, affiliate marketing newsletters, reciprocal link requests, RSS feed notifications, and more; not to mention the vast amount of valuable information I run across through random searching - I find templates, .pdf files I can’t live without, ebooks and more and as we all can relate there’s never enough time in the day to properly review it all.

But I have found that the key is organization and I wanted to share some of my tips with you. Feel free to comment and share yours as well.

• Backup software that you have downloaded and installed already and burn it to a CD. Once it is installed, you don’t need the original sitting on your computer taking up space.
• I know it’s scary, but go to that wonderful directory called “My Pictures.” Yes, you can do it! Burn these to a CD too and get them off your computer — especially the ones from Aunt Millie who doesn’t know how to resize her files and sends you a picture of her pooch that is 12MB. We all love Aunt Millie, but her and her pooch don’t need to be taking up valuable hard drive space!! And if you label your CDs well, it is just as easy to pop in a CD to retrieve a photo as it is to have it sitting on your hard drive.
• Now that you are feeling empowered, go to your “My Favorites,” in your browser. Yes, just do it! Now take a look at all those links… if you spend about 5 minutes with a sheet of paper nearby, you will discover that most of what you save can be broken up into about 7-10 logical categories. Make master folders and slide the favorites into each of them. Along the way, try a few out and if they are no longer working — just get rid of them!
• Since you are on a roll, just burn a CD with everything in your My Documents folder; if your machine ever crashes & burns, you will be glad you did!
• Take a deep breath and go to your email. Now let’s think about this… do you REALLY need every document you have sent since the ’90’s in your Sent Items folder? Conversely, if you’ve deleted something, do you still need to keep it in your Deleted Items folder “just in case?” Empty it!
• Like your Favorites organization, take a look at your email and decide on some logical categories; chief among which should be a Links or Registrations folder. Put every membership, registration confirmation and password verification in this folder. The next time you go to a site that you don’t visit that often, you will thank me when you can simply go to this folder and find your login info.
• Now, let’s talk about these ezines and newsletters. If you haven’t read it in the past six months, chances are it is outdate, no longer an active link or the offer has long since passed. Get rid of it!
• And next decide on which newsletters you don’t even read any more. Instead of just deleting them every day when they arrive, take the time to go and unsubscribe. This one activity alone with cut your daily email in half.
• For the newsletters that you do value and read, create a newsletter folder with subfolders that are labeled for each newsletter. This way, when they arrive, you can simply group them accordingly for easy retrieval when you are ready to read them.
• And last but not least, ahem, can you describe your desktop as a sea of icons or a blank slate? If you’ve got the whole deal going that you have to remove an icon from your desktop just to add a new one without it falling off the edge of your screen, then it’s time for change! Even if you don’t view and review each of them right away, create some logical folders and sort them accordingly. Then as soon as time allows, you can go back and easily tackle the process of weeding them out.

OK, it’s time to Go Forth and Conquer! And if that spring “house cleaning” bug has hit you as well, be sure and check out this site - LET’S GET ORGANIZED!

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