Every website owner/consultant has their own method for staying organized, staying productive to meet their goals, and fighting off Business ADD.

However, it’s far too easy to get wrapped up in staying up with the fast-paced and exciting release of breaking news and the next best business model, software program or cool service. This morning I started thinking about what percentage of my (”working”) time I spend on actually adding more value to the Internet and building something worth linking to, compared to the amount of time I spend going through the motions to “increase conversions” and “build links”.

So, after a little soul searching, I realized that SEO boils down to being 3 very simple things; none of which have anything to do with Search Engines:

1. Sensational
2. Efficient
3. Organized

While it’s awesome to try to be more efficient by automating certain processes with software or outsourcing mundane tasks, it’s all useless without the first step: making something Sensational. So, start by doing something better (even just a little bit) than the other guys. Whether it’s simply writing in a more interesting way, packaging your content in more convenient ways for your visitors to absorb it, doing more in-depth research, or finding related resources for them to continue learning more, the right people will remember you and come back for more (which means you can eventually stop relying on Search Engines completely).

Once you’ve built something great, you’ll acquire more demand for what you offer. Sounds cool at first, but demand can be, well, demanding. The key to scaling anything in business is to remain Efficient. In order to get top 5 positions for dozens, or even 100’s, of relevant keywords, you’re going to have a tough time doing everything manually yourself. Train some people, setup software to handle “non-human” tasks, etc.

Once you’ve built something fantastic, demand increases, and you’ve increased your efficiency to handle the demand in a reasonable fashion, you’re going to get confused. There will be problems, and the less Organized you are, the more difficult it will be to handle problems…not to mention there will naturally be more of them.

In order to keep track of all of your SEO efforts on a daily basis, handle all the techniques you’re implementing across multiple keywords, with software programs and other people taking care of some of the easier tasks, it’s crucial that you stay organized. The more methods, the more keywords, the more software programs, the more people involved, the more complex things will get. Stay organized, or lose the game. It’s that simple.

But how can we keep track of dozens of terms we’re working with, all the newest websites we can utilize to increase exposure and rankings, and continue to keep our employees on the right track?

I think I’ve finally found a solution, but more on that in a sec…

So, to recap, here’s what SEO really stands for:

1. Build something Sensational
2. Setup an Efficient system to handle demand
3. Stay Organized to keep focused and gradually improve results

After literally years of cranking out (and updating) detailed checklists for outsourcing and training employees to scale my SEO efforts, I found one simple, cheap solution: Lotus Jump.

It’s a web-based service that I ignored for quite some time, due to claims such as “SEO Made Easy” and “Boost rankings in 10 minutes a day!”. I thought it was BS, to be honest, but after being referred to it by one of my favorite SEM bloggers multiple times, I decided to give it a shot to train a friend quickly.

Here’s what it does:

• You pick your core keywords, and enter them into the system (along with your domain name)
• It scours the Internet daily for link building opportunities relevant to each keyword
• You gradually follow the recommendations you’re interested in to build backlinks

The service analyzes backlinks from the top 10 results in Google for each of your terms to find “Competitive Backlinks” they have in common, and shows you how to acquire them as well. It looks for article directories & Web 2.0 sites that have pages ranked for your terms, and recommends you make better pages on the same (and other) services to beat them. All this research is done steadily, but I was surprised to see 210 tasks that needed completed for the first site I entered (10 core keywords) by the end of the first day, and 330 by the end of day 2!

(And this was on a site that already ranks well for quite a few terms, and has 100’s of backlinks!)

The reason I decided to give this a shot was the sheer fact that I could delegate these mundane tasks to employees, without having to train them or constantly send them new work. It might sound lazy, but when you’re running a handful of large Affiliate websites, it gets extremely difficult to manage multiple people’s tasks on a daily basis.

But, with Lotus Jump, I can explain the link building process in general, and just about anybody can follow the simple instructions for each task to build high-quality, manual links to my websites, on a consistent and natural basis.

I’m going to pay a flat rate per month to have 2 people take care of all these tasks consistently, and with Lotus Jump I don’t even have to email them, let alone do the research to tell them what to do next. I can just login and see their progress on my websites’ link building.

If you want to stay organized with your SEO efforts, and be as efficient as possible along the way, Lotus Jump will save you a TON of time for less than the cost of 5 or 10 outsourced articles.