Simple schedules to make your online marketing more effective

Getting your schedules, daily and weekly, is one of the keys to success in online marketing.

Some lessons come slowly - at least to me. Schedules are a necessary part to achieving goals. But sticking to them sometimes gets in the way of intuitive, right-brained, imaginative flights-of-fancy.

At least that's how I see it.

For some twenty-plus years, I was part of a corporate cult-ure which ate up over 60 hours of my time every week. There were policies, strategies, evaluations, analysis, production conferences, financial planning meetings, very few perks, and lots of penalties. So finally I quit and "retired" to the family farm to sort things out (which is going along quite well, I can say after 7 years here).

But I really developed a resistance to all this structure. I'm an artist at heart, but an engineer lives in there, too - so I'm all about figuring things out and letting out some of that inspired brilliance whenever I can.

So, like Europe after Rome collapsed (who saw frequent bathing as to "Romanesque"), I gave up all the structure of "weekly analysis based on the progress on strategic plan execution" in order to be more than a bit Bohemian. However, I did manage to keep to three time slots daily/weekly (one for farm, one for work, one for my artistic and Internet urges) out of necessity. Farm was to provide my room and board. Work keeps my bills paid. The third one is for "everything else".

Now this worked fine for awhile. I went back to college (for the first time) and was able to complete a few degrees. I wrote some books and started marketing them - having to learn all sorts of stuff about online marketing, which work still continues.

But when I really got torqued about my day job, I got motivated to do something about it. Like Napoleon Hill's "Think and Grow Rich", I now had a BURNING DESIRE (his emphasis). I hated my day job and would do most anything to replace it. A good sales pitch and a chunk of change on a credit card gave me an additional reason to succeed.

When I finally started taking their lessons to heart, I gave a post yesterday about the lesson's learned.

You have to start with your vision-to-accomplish and work this down into weekly and daily To-Do lists, when you then do. Each day, you need to review your vision statement (2 or 3 times or more is best and then your plan. From these, you then check over your recent To-Do's and see what it is you should now be doing next to move your existing scene toward your envisioned scene.

At the beginning of each week, you write a list of steps to do that will get parts of your current planning done. Then work from that weekly To-Do list to make your daily To-Do list. Simple.

Current planning? Yes, you are going to update your planning as you learn more and get more networking accomplished. Hill said to revise your planning as many times as you need to in order to get the best approach to your vision.

So this adds to yesterday's post on learning to make millions through eBay

You are going to have to have a daily schedule for your work - the stuff that's going to make you financially independent. And it's going to have to include:

1. Open your binder or folder where you keep all your traffic for that particular business. (Get one if you don't have one. This is a basic organizing tactic.)
   
2. Check and review your vision statement - and envisioning it with all the emotions connected to it, getting the idea that it's already here.
3. Check your plan to see if it's accurately going to achieve that vision statement - and tweaking/revising as needed.
4. Check your Weekly To-Do list for what is done and what you can do today.
5. Write your Daily To-Do list off that - and what you didn't finish yesterday.
6. Check your emails so they don't back up, which includes eliminating spam and opting out of non-productive mailing lists.
7. Review your RSS feed aggregator - and streamlining this to only those sites which give you truly useful data on a regular basis. (Sure, you can get your news this way, but take care you don't get sucked into Yahoo's daily 100 posts... "useful data" is the key.) You find and subscribe to useful blogs/sites so you get new data quickly, faster than you could log onto that many sites - and less distractive.
   
8. Allot some time here to leave appropriate comments on any site/post that allows you to leave your site url. (And consider unsubscribing from those who won't.)
   
9. Now, take some time to check your metrics and see how your sales are doing, how your website is converting your customers. Might be something you do one day out of the week. But if you can convert it to an hour or so daily, it will help you keep on top of things.
10. Note down poorly performing web pages you have. Or pages you can't metricize. (Google Analytics has a free program for you which fits on most public pages.) Figure out if you have to tweak these or note for later overhaul.
11. Your next piece of time will be in developing new products to sell and/or launching a marketing campaign for these. If you do a single new product every week, then spend the rest of that week (or the next week) marketing it, you'll have between 20 and 50 new products creating revenue every year.
12. Just before end of your slotted production time, check off the To-Do items you accomplished and note which are still in-progress. Put your list in your binder or folder to keep it secure, then close it for the day.
    

There you have it - a simple way to organize your life and business to stay on top of everything you have to do and to get it all done.

You have to be prepared to run your business as a business. Doesn't mean you can't love what you do - you really should, after all, because why are you doing what you really don't like to do?

Get your binder so you can organize your business into a highly efficient scene. And watch your profits grow and grow as your real work becomes more and more enjoyable.

Good Hunting!!