How to Overcome Online Marketing Overwhelm

Once you decide to do some, or all, of your online marketing yourself, there’s a lot of different things that you could do in a day in order to build your network and generate leads.

Maintaining your website. Figuring out  your important keywords. Creating new web content. Building a subscriber list. Increasing your social media contacts. Sharing your new content on social media. Building relationships with your social media connections. Keeping your web visitors engaged. Replying to comments. Commenting on other people’s blog. Creating new web content for other people’s blogs (guest blogs). Checking your Analytics to see how your marketing activities performed. Monitoring your web traffic. Checking how many conversions you’re getting for your efforts. Revising your activities and trying them again. Reading blogs, watching videos and absorbing new content to keep up with all of the above, and everything that changes in relation to all of the above, all of the time.

And in between all that you need to provide a timely and professional response to the leads that your marketing generates.

Oh yeah, and you also need to run your business and continue providing products or services to your clients!

Online Marketing can be OverWhelming

If you feel overwhelmed by all the online marketing related activities that you could do each day… to the point where you can’t find time for any of them… read on… you’re not the only one who feels that way.

Online marketing is my home turf but as much as I love knowing how to do everything myself, some days I used to feel like I just couldn’t fit any of it in.

Then I spoke to Erin from Activate 28, who specialises in helping people to “think clearly and get important things done”.

At the time I was planning to refresh my Google Analytics training, which involved watching around 6 videos that were all about an hour long.

I told Erin that I didn’t feel like I ever had an hour to spare to even start the training, let along finding six hours to watch all the videos.

That’s when she said the magic words:

 Mel, just aim to do 15 minutes per day.

I instantly realised that if I did 15 minutes per day then within 4 days I would have watched a whole 1 hour video, instead of having spent  4 days doing other things and not fitting in any training.

The “15 minutes per day” approach took away the “overwhelm” and totally changed my ability to get things done

Now, I take full advantage of time slots that are 15 minutes long to:

• Write articles, bits of articles and write down ideas for new articles
• Read other people’s articles and share them on social media
• Schedule updates on Facebook
• Jump over to Twitter, Facebook and Google + to reply to comments and get involved in conversations (this is particularly enjoyable when passing the time on public transport)
• Reply to comments
• Make updates to my own website that I often feel I never make enough time to do
• Review my Google Analytics stats.

So the next time you’re not sure where to start, spend 15 minutes writing a list of the online marketing activities that you would like to fit in during the next week. Then break it down to things that can be completed in 15 minute time slots and work out which day you’ll do what.

Once you get used to the 15 minute approach you’ll amaze yourself with how much you can get done in that short time period.

And of course, if you have the resources, there’s always the option of outsourcing.

Image courtesy of Salvatore Vuono / FreeDigitalPhotos.net