Marketing Artfully

Successful entrepreneur marketing is all about focus and motivation! If you are an entrepreneur you better hope your boss is focused and a real task master or you will find yourself veering off track on an almost daily basis.

That is right, I said that entrepreneurs have a boss. Granted it is you, but you are still master of your own destiny and you better hope that there is a grand plan for success or you are doomed to failure!

I HATE when other people are right and I am wrong. There I said it, I was wrong. Sigh. When I was a Realtor, the gang over at Keller Williams was always saying that you should be working on the twenty percent of your business that is vital to growing and generates income. Gotta say that made me wicked mad as I could not figure out who was going to do that other eighty percent. Well here is my take on the VITAL 20 percent and the not so important other 80 percent!

Step One – Figuring out your ONLY important tasks

If you are an Entrepreneur you better make sure you are the rainmaker for your business. There is no one else who is going to be watching over your sales funnel to keep it stocked or hand you leads. With that in mind, I have to say that my most important function for Marketing Artfully is to make the rain. For me that means speaking, writing blog posts and networking with other humans online and in person. I have benchmarks that I am required to hit each day and week. For example I have to write one blog post a weekday. No excuses.

There are many other ways to generate leads like prospecting phone calls, leads groups, direct mail and email. It does not matter what type of marketing and prospecting you choose, make sure you have a quota and that you are accountable to yourself or someone else to hit that. BELIEVE ME, I know how easy it is to let these things slide, especially when you are busy and successful BUT you have to have a system in place and one that is unbreakable. If you say you are going to make 30 phone calls a day, do that, everyday. If you are going to do email, do not TRY to send out something every week, just do it. Like Yoda says, do or do not there is no try.

Step Two – Do what ever else MUST be done

So in my business I also have clients. They have paid me and I need to do things for them. This is another part of my eighty percent work. NOW, I do not have to physically do everything. There are parts that need my expertise and there are parts that need my supervision. Do not fall into the trap of thinking that you are the only one who can perform all the tasks for your business or you will not be able to grow.

I will give you a great example! There are about 6 pages of line items needed to set up a blog. However, there are only a couple of vital things like doing keyword research and SEOing blog posts so that they show up right on internet. These are tasks that I never give to anyone else. The other 5 pages of line items are MUCH better done by someone who is meticulous and checks off every box.

Look at your business and see what can be handled by someone else (who might even be better at it than you)! The things that do not need to be in your hands are 80 percent things that you can offload.

Step Three – Get rid of the rest

I have to say that there are lots of things that I think I SHOULD do or maybe things that I COULD do in a perfect world. These include tasks that are left over from past processes that are done now (we used to enter everyone into this convoluted CRM system that did not get used fully) or things you like to do (I have seen small business owners require that they review EVERYTHING an employee does – if you are that guy, stop it! Either get a better employee or chill out a bit).

Once you realize that everything on your to-do list will never get done, life gets better. One of the things I do to make myself more focused is to write my to-do list every day. Not just new things but all the old things too. Let me tell you, when you have moved something over for more than 5 days, it is really not all that important or should be outsourced to someone who will actually DO it instead of just thinking about it!

Another thing that helps with focus is to have three things a day that HAVE to be done. You get to pick them BUT nothing else matters until those three things are accomplished today. They say that after 21 days doing something becomes a habit. When I started my one blog post a day rule, writing a blog post was on my three things list. Now that I have been doing it for a while it is a habit and new things have replaced it. Doing this makes that increased effort your new “normal”. If you had told me at the start of my blogging efforts that I had to write a post a day, rain or shine, I would have been overwhelmed. Over the years I have increased the number of posts a week a couple of times until now writing 5 posts a week is normal and easy!

So that is it. Easy-peasy to get your business on track…:)

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