Let’s face it…We truly are all given the same 24 hours in a day. As an entrepreneur, on any day you likely have to handle your social networking, write an ezine or blog, answer a zillion emails, take care of clients, projects or customers, attend meetings of one sort or another, do some bookkeeping, and on and on and on.
On top of all that, with all the noise and competition out there, you have to be marketing your business constantly and consistently. Because if you don’t, people are quickly going to forget all about you and what you do—if they ever even noticed you exist to start with.
So forget sleeping more than four or five hours a night. Or taking even an afternoon off on the weekend. Unless you find a way to put your marketing on autopilot.
Because if you don’t keep marketing you don’t exist. And if you don’t take some tasks off your own plate you’re going to hit a plateau in your business and a wall in your life.
Luckily, there are three ways any overworked entrepreneur can put their marketing on autopilot…
- Replicate Experienced marketers rarely reinvent the wheel. Instead they find ways to replicate and repurpose everything they know, do or create into different forms and formats. A web page can become three emails, a press release and a postcard mailing. Ezine articles can become blog posts, Tweets, link builders, the foundation of your next book and more.When you do this, you get more marketing done with less effort. Plus you easily create your own ebooks, books, audio products and more. Thus gaining expert status, some passive revenue, and more ways to get your name out there.
- Automate If your business is on the Web—and if you have a Website, it is—you have to deal with everything from social networking to online sales, product delivery and follow-up processes. Plus all the marketing that goes with driving people to your site and turning them into subscriber, then a customer or client.Handling all this can be a full time job and then some. But if you’ve designed your Website properly it can handle all or most of the sales job for you. Combine that with the latest widgets, email marketing, microblogging and blogging tools to automate much of your online marketing and sales follow up, and you save yourself tons of time and hard work.
- Delegate Solo-entrepreneur is such a misleading title. Because no one can do it all alone anymore. That’s why you need to delegate. For a lot of small business owners, hiring an employee just isn’t in the budget. Instead the key is to outsource as much of your marketing as you can to your own team of experienced Virtual Assistants.These experienced assistants can set up all your online automation tools as well as handle much of what can’t be automated from their own home offices. Since they run Internet-based businesses they’re typically pretty savvy about the ways of the Web.That means you don’t have to teach them how to do something, you just need to explain what you want done. And you can scale up and down as your business and budget demands.
Taking any one of these three steps is going to start freeing you up to do the things you do best and enjoy the most. And because your marketing is going to be happening consistently without you turning that crank, you can grow your business without being chained to it.
Want help figuring out what and how to best put your own marketing on autopilot? I currently have a couple of consulting slots open each month just for this.
Interested? Email your phone number, time zone, and time of day that works for you to stacy @ theunchainedentrepreneur.com (without the spaces). I’ll get back to you with a time we can chat, so I can learn more about your business and see if this is indeed a good fit for you.
