When it comes to marketing on the internet it seems like there are a lot of moving parts to the most minor marketing tasks.
For instance, building a squeeze page:
Sounds simple, right? Just throw some words on a page, put the optin box there and get some subscribers…
Not exactly, because you have to write the squeeze page, have something of value to give away, then have some follow-up messages set up…
Plus, you have to decide if you’re going to provide whitelist instructions or just the default “Thank You” page…
Plus you should customize your autoreply message, the one that gets sent out automatically when a new subscriber joins…
And so on, and so forth…
It’s very easy to get bogged down and frustrated dealing with these little details that mean so much, but there’s a way out of that mindset trap.
THE Anti-Information Overload Tip… Compartmentalization is key here…
Think of assembly lines and how they “kicked off” the Industrial Revolution…
Assembly lines broke down each of the many moving parts into seperate tasks handled by methods, machines, or people who were experts at doing that one task extremely well.
Many marketing coaches (myself included) like to say that you should treat your business like you would treat the prospect of eating an elephant, you have to do it one bite at a time.
Maybe a better metaphor would be:
Treat your business like you’re creating a Model T Ford…
There are many moving parts to a business, and if you were to try and build a car going from one station to the next, it would take you a very long time…
But if you employ the assembly-line method to organizing and carrying out your marketing duites, then you’ll be a whole lot more relaxed and a heck of a lot more efficient.
Example:
I do some article marketing for backlinks and traffic and I write the articles myself, but I wait until I’m in the mood to write that way and I do it all day long.
I write until I reached my goal or until I get burned out writing. This may take 2-3 days, but I’m done with that task for the month and I won’t have to go back to it until next month.
Then I move on to blog posts. I have 20 blogs that I write to on a regular basis, and again, I have these tasks compartmentalized as well.
When I feel like writing about link building and SEO, I write posts on my link building services site. If there are home business opportunities worth reviewing, I will write a blog post or 2 on that subject on my home business reviews site.
If I have a lot to review and write about, I write several blog posts, and save some as drafts so I don’t spew out 4 posts in a day.
…but even my sites are getting compartmentalized now, since I don’t try to have one site be about absolutely everything.
The list goes on and one and I don’t want to bore you, so here’s a more general view of how you can beat information overload and overcome a lack of focus:
Pick one thing and learn it well, become obsessed by it. I spent a good part of 2008 totally involved with SEO stuff and it was fun and exasperating, but after 8 1/2 months of learning what I could by trial and error, I moved on…
One thing that I’ve always been complacent about is list building, for the reasons stated below:
- What to write on the squeeze page?
- What to give away?
- Whitelest, or default Thank You pages?
- Follow up series email? how many and What are they about?
- etc…
When I turned my attentions back to list building, I learned from my past moments of inneffective, time-wasting, scatterbrained behavior.
I compartmentalized the making of a squeeze page by doing one thing at a time.
Here’s how I did that:
I wrote the squeeze page first, and I made life easy for myself by copying a template I had used before and just changed the words aorund a bit
As I developed the squeeze page, I felt like offering more and more in this newsletter series that I was going to be giving away.
The more I offered in the newsletter, the more potential follow up emails I would have to write, but at least there was plenty of content ideas for the follow up series ( a true Ecourse not a sale spitch-a-day newsletter).
Once squeeze page was done, I went to work on the newsletter.
This took 3 days of writing since there were/are 26 emails in the newsletter (so far).
As I started writing the newsletter, it occurred to me that I hadn’t thought of what product recommendations would tie in appropriately so I started to get agitated again, and losing focus.
But the funny things is, every 2d or 3d email require the newsletter reader to go look at a product I recommended…
So this part took care of itself nicley, and it came naturally without stress or aforethought.
Since I didn’t anticipate finding anywhere appropriate to list the product recommendations before, I didn’t have my affiliate links handy.
I ALMOST stopped writing the newsletter to go find them, but I didn’t.
I stayed the course and finished the newsletter and finnaly completed it.
At this point, in one week’s time, I had written my articles for the month, built a squeeze page and a newsletter.
Time to sit back and say, “WHEW!” huh?
Not exactly…
Now I want traffic to this squeeze page so I got some backlinks pointing towards them to help that get get some search-engine-generated traffic.
This may sound like a lot of work to you, but for me it was fun, since I was doing what I felt like doing at that time and was enjoying myself.
When you’re in a “zone” enjoying yourself, and are focussed on doing one thing and one thing only really well, you will get a lot more done that you ever could have realized.
Compartmentalization…
Absorb this…
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Daniel McGonagle
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Well Dan as usual when you get on a roll you have a lot to say . . .and you say it, no punches held back.
I am wrestling with my squeeze pages too, I used some instant ones for a while and got lots of hits and people downloaded the freebies but there was no follow up on my part and no follow me on their part. PHEW lesson learned. Write more than one email in the follow up series before starting it!