How to get off the wheel of internet marketing
Internet Marketing Strategy
What’s the best way to approach Internet Marketing? Read here to find out…
HOW TO ORDER YOUR DAY
Charles Schwab who owns the famous investment company which bears his name, tells a story he had with a mentor. Mr. Schwab asked the mentor to tell him how to be more productive.
Rather than scheduling a mentoring session, the advisor simply told him, “Mr. Schwab, I will give you one piece of advice, and if you think it is worth anything, you can pay me $10,000.”
Charles agreed. One week later, Charles wrote the advisor a check for $10,000.
What do you think his advice was?
When I first heard this story, I really thought that the secret was stocks. Or maybe some other investment strategy, like buying up precious metals.
No, the secret that Charles Schwab received is so brain dead simple, that I don’t think he would have even looked at it twice if the advisor had not designated a value to it.
It really is that simple.
And that profound.
In fact, it is so profitable, I would attach a million dollars to it’s worth.
So what was the advice?
I almost hesitate to tell you lest you find it too elementary.
Write down the three most important things you need to do today.
Gah! Is that it? Is that really it? Yup.
But follow through is everything.
The Total Drag of Internet Marketing
Ok. I’ll admit. Sometimes internet marketing is not a blast.
There are mornings that you wake up with twenty non-fun things that just need to be finished yesterday.
And it doesn’t matter that you don’t feel good, or that your computer is slow, or even that you don’t feel creative enough today to write any content. Your public is counting on you to do your job.
At times like this, it helps to remember the following:
“Rome wasn’t built in a day”
Whether you are designing your own website, trying to rise in the search engines, or perfecting your e-commerce page, you need to remember…it takes time to get this all working together.
“The journey of a hundred miles begins with one step”
Most internet marketers jump from task to task, afraid they’ll forget what needs to be done. You need to focus on one step at a time
The monotony of the mundane.
Let’s get real. Some internet marketing tasks can seem repetitive and boring. If you own a blog, you have to check for updates that need to be installed.
If you process orders online, those are tasks that can seem mind-numbing in their lack of pizazz. Remember to tell yourself why you are doing these tasks, keeping the end result in mind. Play some jazzy music while you work. Be creative in how you can spice up your work time. Finally, always remember:
It doesn’t have to be fun, it just has to get done.
Yes, there will be times that no matter how fun you try to make something, in the end, it’s just flat boring. At times like these, you will need to look at your overall marketing plan, and remind yourself of why each task is so important.
Conclusion:
It takes discipline, diligence and determination to do what needs to be done. However, none of that will help you without a plan.
“Discipline without direction is drudgery”
If today you find yourself feeling like a string being pushed up hill, then let me breathe some fresh life into you with my internet marketing strategies. It’s all right here, but you need to get on board fast. Enrollment ends soon.
The Best Game Plan for your Business
Does your game plan keep disappearing from day to day, and getting replaced with the latest trick? Here are some common lies that are being promoted on the internet. Do you believe this internal dialogue?
“The best marketing plan for my business is one that gets me lots of followers on Facebook”
(next)
“The best marketing plan for my business is one that brings me traffic.”
Okay. That’s a good start. Let’s go on.
“The Best Marketing plan for my business is one that actually makes me sales, already!!
…you’re getting warm…
“The Best Marketing plan for my business is one the makes me Money, for crying out loud!
Partially true…read on…
The Best Marketing plan for my business is the one that actually makes me a profit…
…you’re almost there…
“Sue, what are you talking about? You don’t think it’s important that I make a profit”?
Let me explain–
If you get lots of people who:
- like your product,
- follow you on Facebook, Twitter Instagram…everything
- and who visit your website
and who even buy from you
but
what you spend in:
- advertising
- webhosting
- software
- “opportunities”
and other expenses—-if those expenses are deducted, and they actually DO bring you a profit, then you still have some math to do…because…
it really isn’t profit if your time isn’t paid for.
So. Let’s say that you make 25,000 a year in PURE PROFIT.
Let me ask you something….is the time you invested in making that money worth more than minimum wage? Because, if it is, then you didn’t even make that.
See, a lot of marketers are very good at bookkeeping, but they live in this carrot-on-the stick fantasy world.
They may not measure their success (like so many marketers do) in terms of social media activity, traffic or even sales, because they have been around the block, so to speak, and they have learned that it isn’t what you make, it’s what you keep (after buying leads, paying for ads, etceters.)
But one thing that almost every marketer struggles with is putting value on their time.
A lot of marketers are retired, on disablility, or just self-employed. So they don’t figure in the value of their time, because they just think, I’m not doing anything else with my time right now.
But time always has value, no matter how much of it you think that you have.
We would never hear of someone underselling their product because they have too much money on their hands. Yet marketers consistently undersell their product because they don’t factor in the value of their time, when they go to price their product.
You need to see the value of your time the way that a physical shop owner would price his “overhead”. You may not have the mortgage, lights and gas to pay on a separate building, you may not have inventory to account for, but you can be sure, if you are an internet marketer, you spend plenty time on your business each week.
And what a lot of marketers fail to do is to track the time they actually spend on their business, not taking into account basic things like creating a post, checking their stats, ect. All of these tasks are YOUR TIME that you are INVESTING in your business. You need to account for that when you figure out your profit margin.
How do you manage to track your time so you don’t waste it? Would love to hear your comments
Vision Casting
- Write down what you want to accomplish by the end of the year.
- Make a daily routine to work every goal into (this is super important). If you don’t already have a daily routine, then you won’t be able to get your other goals tidily arranged into your chaotic day.
The brain cramping, mentally torturous challenge all creative souls must rise to , in order to complete this exercise.
- Set a definite time for each task (ouch! don’t hate me I’m helping you). Look, free thinker, I GET IT….you detest the ball and chain of a schedule. But you neeed it. (don’t you know you need a schedule?). Here’s the beautiful thing, reader…it’s just a schedule and it’s not set in stone. Once you get that daily schedule at least written down, your beautiful brain will automatically go to work fine tuning it and tweaking it for each day’s uniqueness. Here’s the big secret about scheduling (at least for creative types). When you are creative,
Almost NOTHING gets done at its scheduled time even with a schedule.
But none of that matters, because if you will at least work on and write down a schedule, your brain can see very clearly how much time each task should take, and it gives you a point of reference to plan from. You only need to write the vision, and give it structure. But just as the magnetic north pole shifts, so will your scheduled times. Just give your brain SOME magnetic point of reference, and your give your thoughts some anchors, by writing down those tasks into scheduled times.
HOW TO CRAFT A BEAUTFIFUL, CUSTOMIZABLE SCHEDULE
Details here:
- Make and add your New Year’s resolutions. Once your daily schedule is established, it’s a cinch adding your resolutions. Just make sure to break your year end goal down into incremental daily goals
Here’s my goal…running in place for five full minutes. I did the math…all I need is one extra second of running each day, and I should be able to hit my goal early. If I keep adding one second of running in place each day, by the end of the year, I will be running in place for fifteen minutes. No crawling around the block when summer hits. I’ll hit the ground running! The neighbors won’t believe it! The kids will be SO PROUD! So what’s it’ going to take, reader? ONE EXTRA SECOND PER DAY. Like, can ANYONE do that? Yes! But they won’t, and here’s why….
Consistency. Finishing what you start. Holding yourself accountable. So what’s that going to require?
- Creating Your Daily Log. Do it reader. Go ahead. Make your daily log that shows you added one extra pushup to your workout routine, one extra second to your running time, or that you completed one foreign phrase each day. First, though, do the math. Just do it. Yes, you must do the math. Otherwise, you will do fifty pushups today and none next week. Remember…consistency. Planning. Charting. How many foreign phrases do you want to learn this year? Three hundred and sixty five sounds like a good goal toward fluency. How many pushups do you want to work up to by year’s end? 150 sounds awesome to me. That will require adding three pushups each week to my total. Just decide on a year end goal (by the end of the year, I want to have learned________________;I want to be able to_______________.
- Break it down and write it down.
Did you do the math? You must do the math. Get out the calculator or tabulate by hand. Just do it.
Now, write it down. And don’t put it off. I have a bad case of this, reader. So let me tell you how I motivate myself— I bolt my chart down. Over the toilet, inside the kitchen cabinet, on the living room wall. I mean, I write the vision and MAKE IT PLAIN. See, as much as I’m hammering you on writing it all down, let’s get real. My dreams are so numerous, vast and awesome, I usually need all of January just to write them all out! And then, there’s my dream floating around….somewhere. No, reader, that won’t work for me. I post my dreams everywhere, and get them all filled in, fine tuned, and scheduled by January. Remember, the resolution is just to reach my goal by the end of the year. January is really my planning month. But I can’t plan what I forget about planning for!
What it takes.
Let’s get real, reader. If you’re like me (and most of you seem to be), then your beautiful creative soul needs the equivalent of a whiteboard. As in, your entire wall. Did you know you can use colored chalk on your white walls? Yes, you can. Will your family appreciate it? Are they creative too? Under six years old? Cool? Well, okay, but at least post a chalkboard. Put up your list and post it on wrapping paper with a cardboard frame around it. Make it look good, but make sure you can see it….every day. You want the emphasis to be on the list. If you look at your list every day for a month, and then finally do it, well, you did it! You got started! Reader, write EVERY SINGLE GOAL down, and make a daily chart for each goal. You must chart your progress in each goal every single day. You must write the vision AND make it plain; otherwise, it’s just turning to dust in your drawer.
This year’s going to be different. This year, it’s all going on paper and getting accounted for.
Remember: The columns of your template need to be, your goal, each day’s date, what you did that day. And don’t forget to plan how much you need to do each day to reach your year end goal.
Do you have any tips for reaching your New Year’s goals? Share your insight with us!
How to Sell Anything Online 