time-management — Shoestring Marketing

In 1895 an Italian economist by the name of Vilfredo Pareto made an interesting discovery. He found that 80% of Italy’s land was owned by just 20% of the population. Although his research was based on land acquisition, the theory behind his work remains intact today and is referred to as Pareto’s Principle or the 80/20 Rule.

Interestingly enough, the Pareto Principle can be applied to your marketing efforts as well. Basically, 80% of your marketing results come from 20% of your marketing efforts. If you can correctly identify the 20% of your marketing that works, you will save an incredible amount of time in your business. And as any good shoestring marketer knows, time is money.

However, how do you separate the marketing that is producing good results as opposed to the marketing that is zapping your precious time?

Here are a few clues that you are spending time on tasks that are NOT producing results for you:

• You spend hours “getting ready to market” as opposed to “marketing”

• Your marketing efforts are taking much longer than you anticipated

• You’re working on marketing platforms that are outside of your area of expertise.

• You are using dozens of marketing platforms, but still achieve poor results

• You are frustrated, burned-out and often feel that your marketing hasn’t accomplished anything.

Here are a few clues that you are spending time on marketing tasks that ARE producing results for you:

• You’re concentrating ONLY on the marketing platforms that help to boost your business and achieve your goals.

• You complete your marketing quickly and efficiently each day

• You feel that you focus on your areas of marketing expertise and outsource the tasks that you are not good or prefer not to do.

• You clearly understand what marketing platforms produce the best results for you and your business.

• You have mastered a few marketing platforms and ignored the rest.

If you find that you tend to fall in the first category, then there are three simple ways to increase the effectiveness of your marketing efforts.

First of all, pick five marketing platforms and become an expert on these. Unfortunately, in today’s society, small business owners are overwhelmed by their marketing choices.
As a result, small business owners often dapple with dozens of different marketing platforms with poor results.

You will never succeed if you are a “Jack of All Trades, Master of None.” Instead, select just five platforms and become a dominating presence there. After you have mastered your five, then you can add additional platforms to your marketing portfolio.

The second way to increase the results of your marketing is to purchase a link-tracker that will track where your prospects are coming from. A link tracker will give you a clear idea which marketing efforts work and which don’t. One of my favorite link trackers is Linkcounter at http://www.linkcounter.com

Linkcounter allows you to set up an unlimited number of links which will keep track of who clicks on your URLs. This is information that every marketer must have.

Finally, focus on your marketing strengths. If you love to write, then market your business through blogs, ezines and articles. If you enjoy speaking, then host a radio show, teleseminar and podcast. And if you like online networking, then tap into the power of online business communities like LinkedIn, Ryze and eCademy.

If you use your own personal strengths to drive your marketing efforts, the results will be so much more effective.

Eventually, you want to increase time on the 20% of your platforms that are producing results for you and eliminate the 80% of your platforms that are not producing results.
If you follow this simple 3-step formula, your business and your time will skyrocket! You will find that you are spending less time on your business, yet making more profits.

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One of the most common problems for small business owners is managing their time when using free marketing strategies. Many individuals feel that free marketing, specifically social media marketing (Facebook, YouTube, MySpace, Twitter, etc), is too time-consuming and overwhelming.

Individuals aren’t sure what to focus on, where to spend their time and how to balance all of their varying marketing platforms. As a result, many individuals end up spending hours and hours every day marketing their business.

Believe me, it doesn’t need to be this way! Of course, free marketing is going to take some time and energy every day but, it should only take you between one and two hours if you work smart and strategically.

Here are 7 time management strategies to help you work smarter, as opposed to harder.

1) Narrow Your Focus

There are hundreds of free marketing platforms to choose from. You can’t possibly market on all of them. My rule of thumb is to pick five free platforms and focus your marketing efforts there.

You will never succeed if you try to conquer too much. Remember, you do not want to be a “Jack of all Trades, Master of None!” You want to master a few marketing strategies well.

2) Spend Time Each Day on “Creation” and “Maintenance”

Every day you should “create” new information. This can be accomplished by writing an article, shooting a video, creating a group (Facebook, LinkedIn), etc. The new information that you create doesn’t have to be long and time-consuming. For instance, you can shoot and 3-minute video and upload it into YouTube all under fifteen minutes time.

In addition to creating information, you should spend time each day maintaining your sites. This can be accomplished by making MySpace friend requests, writing on Facebook walls, adding LinkedIn connections, posting to Twitter, etc.

If you divide your time between creating information and maintenance, you will be working smarter.

3) Set an allotted amount of time for marketing each day.

You want to approach your marketing with a plan. And that includes a plan for how much time you will devote each day to marketing your business.

If you simply “start marketing” without any sense of how much time you will devote, you will be extremely non-productive.

I generally recommend spending 1-2 hours every day actively marketing your business.

However, you also do not want to spend more time than necessary on marketing. If you log into Facebook and begin “to market” without a plan of action, you might still be there six hours later. So, decide how much time you will spend on marketing and stick to it.

4) Use a Timer

Using a timer might sound silly, but it is certainly a trick that I have always relied on. When I am writing an article, I set my timer for 30 minutes. I give myself exactly 30 minutes to write my article. If I don’t finish, then I will have to finish tomorrow.

You’d be surprised how much more efficient you are when there is a timer clicking away in the background.

5) Connect Your Accounts

Make sure that you connect all of your social media and information accounts that you can connect.

As an example, you can add your Twitter account to your EzineArticles account. Then, whenever you publish an article, your Twitter account will be automatically updated with your newest article.

Again, you can add Twitter to your Facebook account, so that your “Twitters” appear on your Facebook profile. Take some time to investigate all the ways that you can integrate and connect your accounts together. This will save you valuable time in the long-run.

6) Recycle Your Efforts

Whenever I write an article, I reuse it in many different ways. Here is an example:

Imagine that I write an article titled, “7 Ways To Market On Facebook.” I, of course, publish that article in multiple article directories.

However, it doesn’t stop there. Then, I post that same article to my blog. After that I use the basic concept from my article for a YouTube video. After that, I Twitter about that concept as well.

The point is that when I have a new concept, I reuse that concept as many times as possible.

7) Track What Works and Focus Your Efforts There

You will soon find that when it comes to free marketing and social networking that it’s often difficult to accurately track your marketing statistics. For instance, when using PPC (pay-per-click) it is simple to add a code to your website and find out exactly how many people are visiting your website, opting-in to your form and making purchases.

This isn’t as simple when it comes to social marketing.

However, there are activities that you will notice add to your business success and activities that don’t do a thing for your business.

As an example, I found that managing all the “application requests” from Facebook was becoming quite a chore. So, I decided that I just couldn’t take the time to respond to every Christmas ornament, Starfish, etc. that I received. I had to begin to “ignore” those application requests.

You will need to make the same decisions.

Remember, free marketing work. In fact, I truly believe that free marketing often works better than paid marketing.

However, if you are going to optimize your free marketing plan make sure to implement these seven tips to help you effectively manage your time and energy.