Marketing Success In 30 Minutes A Day

One of the hardest things to do as a business owner is make time to work on growing your own business. We’re so busy working for our clients, creating the products or services we sell, or reacting to the Tyranny of the Important that there just isn’t enough time to give to our business.

Successful businesses learn that they must prioritize marketing. (That means actually doing some!)

You might reject the intent of spending time on your marketing because these hours aren’t billable. And, when you have a business in which billable hours fuel the engine, it’s a difficult choice to make.

However, there won’t BE an engine unless you’re growing the business, attracting and retaining customers, and coming up with new ways to offer them value.

Demonstrate your commitment

If you’re really serious about making marketing a regular activity, begin by scheduling time with yourself on your calendar. Don’t adopt you’ll just remember it, or that you’ll do it first thing in the morning. Get serious and write down an appointment.

How much is enough time to work?

When I first started to schedule sessions with myself, I’d block off entire half-days. I thought I’d knock out a bunch of work at one fell swoop, but I found it hard to stay on task for that long, especially knowing all the client work that was inactivity to be done.

After compromising myself down to an absurdly short 15 minutes (less time than I spend reading the news online!), I found that 30-minute, focused work periods were saint for me.

Focused 30-minute work periods

It’s simple to accomplish something in 30 minutes if you’re focused. It’s too short a time to dawdle or disturb it with phone calls, or else you won’t get anything done.

Some people use a kitchen timer to keep on track. For them, the ticking sound it makes is a reminder to focus on the work and the remaining minutes. However you select to do it, be sure to keep the time and stop when you’ve concurred to. Otherwise, you might run way overtime and feel resentful. Let the timer remind you to respect your own boundaries and not near yourself too hard.

Can you write a marketing plan in 30 minutes a day?

Sure, you could, but that’s not really the purpose of this time. I’d advocate doing planning at another time dedicated just to that, and then executing and refining it during your regular marketing exercise.

Honor your commitment

Once you’ve scheduled these times on your calendar, honor your commitment. Treat these appointments as respectfully as you would one with your most important client. That means you’re never late or a no-show, and, if you totally MUST do something else at that time, you reschedule the appointment by immediately writing a alternative down somewhere else on your calendar.

Remember that others will notice how you treat your commitments to yourself and to your business, among them your clients, employees and vendors. You also send a signal to your Self (your spirit or soul, however you want to call it) and the Universe. It doesn’t feel good to be last on your own list, and somewhere in the mechanism the message “my business isn’t worth as much to me as the business of others” gets filed away.

Honor yourself by keeping promises and nurturing your own business.

Accountability partners

An accountability partner is simply someone who concurs to follow up with you about things you commit to do. Usually you find someone else who wants support in getting something done. Just as two exercise partners can keep either other motivated and on-track, so can you accomplish more when someone else is checking with you and supporting you.

After several months of partnering with a friend on our weekly goals, I found it quite simple to schedule and keep commitments to myself and to work regularly on my marketing.

What’s a good thing to do during your regular – or thrice weekly – marketing exercises?

Here’s a list of things you could do:

* Think about how to improve your marketing message.
* Call a lapsed client and find out why you haven’t heard from them.
* Call a raving fan and find out why they continue to do business with you.
* Meditate or pray.
* Imagine how you’d like your business to look in six months.
* Visit a competitors’ store or web site.
* Make a list of what to do with your marketing time over the next month.
* Attend a networking event.
* Study something useful about marketing, business or your industry.
* Take a achievement while holding the intention, “I am open to receiving ideas about how to grow my business.”

Here’s a list of things you should not do:

* Answer the phone.
* Chat with passersby. (Remember, this exercise might look like you are doing nothing, so be sure to let people who might see you know that you’re busy increasing the value of your business.)
* Check email.
* Get distracted by something on the World wide web (you only have 30 minutes for your business – you can read everything else later).
* Pay bills.

Billable vs non-billable hours

Although you’re not technically paying yourself for the time you spend working on your own marketing, this exercise will definitely pay off for you. You’ll be more centered, more in-control, more effective, and you’ll have more clients, money and profits. So, get out your calendar and make an appointment with yourself right now!

Marketing Success In 30 Minutes A Day

Marketing Property To The Max

The property market is currently in serious trouble with home prices dropping by the day and competition to sell homes is severe. There is no longer the spare cash around that there used to be so more people are renting than buying. That said, new developments are still being constructed and this is where you could get a good deal if you were in it for the long haul, holding onto your property until prices pick up again.

New build developers are offering more and more incentives for buyers to take up their properties as opposed to others and this is one area of business that requires a strong marketing ethic above all others. The properties need to stand out as something exceptional, to make people believe that if they go through one particular company, they are going to get so much more for their money than if they went elsewhere. This never happens from sitting back inactivity for buyers to come to you. You have to go out and grab them, entice them with simple, visual and monetary things that appeal to the investor.

When it comes to marketing property, the use of CGI is undoubtedly worth each penny a developer might spend on it. We’ve all seen the papers form an estate agent with written descriptions and dimensions, possibly a plain pic or two. However, it is impossible to glean any sort of region from this alone. You can't visualise yourself in the property, gauge the amount of space once furnishings are in place or get any feel for the lighting.

This is where CGI differs to the flat, soul-less advertising of estate agents leaflets. CGI’s can be created even before a building is finished and with many developers wishing to sell off plan (before a project is completed) and buyers wanting the cheaper deals that accompany off plan buying, then CGI is a must. They would make very few income from a floor plan alone or even accompanying pictures of a building site!

For those with world wide web access, and that is most people these days, you can sit in the comfort of your own home and get to take a virtual tour of your next one. You can see how the positioning of different size furniture would work, you can look at the facilities and layout of a kitchen that is to scale and get a real feel for how it would be to stand in that room. You can even get a good grasp of the way the building faces, the way the light falls into it and the surrounding scenery.

CGI is a world away from the marketing methods of the estate agents of old and adds a very realistic extra dimension to your income technique. It will pay for itself in no time at all and could well mean the difference to a understanding or being stuck with that property for the foreseeable.

Developments are rife in London and CGI is often used to grant people to see inside the properties either the way they are now or the way they will be when complete. The Royal Military Academy in Woolwich is being developed by the Durkan Group who intend to create 334 new homes from this listed building. CGI is acquirable for the first 33 apartments and houses acquirable and prices begin at 185,000. pounds

Other developments in and around London include 60 exclusive residential apartments and commercial offices on The Broadway in Wimbledon. An exclusive address if ever there was one and one that makes commuting to central London easy. The conversion of an old school in Ecclesbourne has nearly sold out of its one and two bedroom apartments and houses, many through the use of CGI marketing.

So, it would seem, all is not lost when it comes to the housing market but competition is fierce and anything that makes a development look superior has to be worth the investment.

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