Focus to Move Forward

Entrepreneurs are faced with innumerable marketing opportunities to grow their businesses. Speaking from experience, I have so many options when I’m looking to market my business and I’m frequently approached by business owners with a giant list of internet marketing to-do’s that they want to pursue. Blogs, social media, social bookmarking, articles, press releases, AdWords, ebooks, you name it! Being able to market your business in all of these different ways is exciting…but it can also be overwhelming. And I’ve found that when business owners are faced with a lot of choices, they end up trying not to do too much at once and they don’t do any of those choices very well.

So here’s what I would advise:

If you are marketing by yourself…
Let’s say that you are considering some of the standard internet marketing opportunities out there: Social media, blogs, articles, press releases, and reports. It can be tempting to dive into all of these but you’ll just end up doing a sub-par job. Your social media won’t necessarily connect with your readers, your blogs will be few and far between (and will often begin with the sentence “I haven’t blogged in a while…”), your articles and press releases won’t get pushed out as frequently as they need to be, and your reports will just get delayed. I see this happen so often from businesses that try to take on too much at once.

If you are going to do your marketing all by yourself (without any outsourced or delegated help), you should pick just a couple options and become consistent at them before building outwards. For example, start blogging. Once you’ve become consistent with that, add Twitter. Once you’ve become consistent with that, write articles. Once you’ve become consistent with that, add reports.

This system works because you’re developing good marketing habits one at a time, which will help you to succeed far more effectively than if you tried to add a whole bunch of marketing habits at once.

If you are marketing with help from others…
Of course, it’s a little different if you get help from others because you can outsource a lot of your internet marketing and there are less consistency habits you need to manage. However, you’ll still want to build methodically and strategically, adding a few at a time. Otherwise, you could end up with a lot of loose ends that need to be managed.

So, for example, you might manage your own Twitter account but you might pass article writing and blog posting off to an assistant. Later, add reports and press releases. Because you’re paying someone to do this, it’s not a matter of building up good marketing habits for you; rather, it’s a matter of managing someone else to do the work and remembering to follow up with them.

The web offers so many great marketing opportunities and it will continue to do so as new technologies develop. You can take advantage of these opportunities but you should do so in a methodical way to ensure that you do each one with excellence – and make sure it’s entrenched in your schedule – before moving on to the next one.

Happy Marketing!