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(I will never rent, trade, or sell your information) * = required fieldOnce you've got your website and blog online, your next tasks are to keep updating your content and publicizing your business to drive traffic to your site and blog. This can quickly become an overwhelming project. The key to keeping a consistent output of messages, without experiencing a total online burn-out is to schedule and systematize your efforts.
The first thing you need is to have a clear objective - what do you want people to do based on your communications strategy? Call you, email you, fill out a survey, make a product/service purchase online, resister for an event, sign up for your e-zine? Once you have your goal in mind, determine what sort of "funnel" a prospect needs to go through to complete that objective, and thus, where on your website they should be directed to. This might be a squeeze page, landing page, product info page, etc. Make sure the page is set up and functioning, with a view to providing the information needed to direct people to the action you desire.
There are different ways to get your message out and most likely you will eventually want to use several of them. Brainstorm about what sorts of campaigns might work for your market. Facebook messages, Twitter, Linked-in, online community postings, commenting on other people's blogs, blogging yourself, sending an e-zine, article marketing, video marketing, podcasting, vblogging, etc. are all options, but which you decide to use depends on your market, how they like to get information, what your skills and talents are, what sort of content you already have developed, or would like to develop, etc. Choose 3-5 different types of campaigns you would like to try.
Do not try to implement all of your new campaign ideas at once! This will quickly result in confusion, frustration, and the desire to throw in the towel. Instead, choose one, preferably the one which you feel most confident about, which is also reasonably quick or easy to implement, based on your current skills and resources.
Decide what you need to set up to make it possible for you to execute the campaign, for instance, if you plan on blogging, your own blog should be set up and you should be comfortable with using it. You might also want to make sure you have analytics set up on your blog, and possibly additional subscription options, via a service like feedburner. If you plan to start an article marketing campaign, you might install software to help you with your submissions, or research a list of good submission sites and sign up for accounts on each of them.
Next decide what your regular effort should be for your campaign. Perhaps you plan to blog on Tuesdays and Thursdays, or submit one article each week on Wednesday. Try to estimate how much time you should devote to these daily tasks, and then put it on your schedule to recur on each of those days you have committed to.
If the task is new to you, the first few weeks it will probably take longer, as you figure out the best way to work and get more comfortable with your tools. After awhile, the time it takes will become pretty consistent and you will have a better idea of how much time you need to allow.
The key is to choose to implement regular action for only one new thing at a time. Once you have become comfortable with your routine (Tu/Th blogging, for instance), then you can look at your list again and choose a new activity to implement (perhaps now you are ready to add the article marketing on Friday, for instance). Eventually, you should have a small marketing activity scheduled for each day, so you are taking regular action. If you miss a day, it's okay, because you are still doing 4 other things that week. Just make sure you pick up again the next day.
You need to give your new campaigns some time before they will show any results. Generally, at least a month or more of consistent action is needed to determine if something is worth the effort you are putting in. Check your various analytics, especially the traffic referrer reports to see where people are coming to your site from - is it from your blog or those articles you have been sending out? This is an easy way to see if your campaigns are effective.
If you are slogging away for many months without any results, take some time to figure out what is going wrong - are your prospects not paying attention to the places you are sending out your messages? Are your messages not compelling enough? Are you getting lots of traffic, but it isn't converting to your desired action? Try testing the landing page to get better conversion, or adjust your messages so they are more targeted to your real ideal clients and what you are offering.
Also keep in mind that when your marketing is content production and distribution, it has a cumulative effect. The more you put out that floats around online, the more chance your prospects will stumble upon it, or become aware of it. Some people will follow you for some time before they are ready to get in touch.
By taking small, consistent marketing actions, you can build your online credibility and drive traffic to your website to complete the sale. If you need help systematizing your online marketing, or having a website and blog to drive traffic to, contact me for a complementary strategy session today.
