'I'm Too Busy to Market':
Time Management and the Solopreneur

It’s a crazy world. Everyone wants a piece of your time. To-do lists are made and tossed aside. And e-mails, well, they’re like those insistent knocks on the door–impossible to ignore.

The next issue of our e-zine, The Solo Way, goes out in ten days. One of our regular columns, “The 15-Minute Marketer,” gives our subscribers practical ways to promote their business in as little as 900 seconds a day. Don’t have 15 minutes, you say?

I just stumbled on a resource that might help: an interesting post on the infomarketing blog. The author suggested some ways to free up more time for the important stuff (like marketing):

1. Make four hours of your work day uninterruptable. This means absolutely no checking, sending or answering e-mails (if you are like me, it is an addiction that steals precious minutes every day). No making or receiving phone calls. No checking messages. (I say, let the voice mail take over. That’s what it’s for.)

2. Limit the windows open on your computer to one or two. This applies to the tabs for e-mail (you know, the ones that light up and ping, “Open me! Open me!”).

3. Say “no” more often. Bob, my business (and life) partner has this problem. In fact, I’ve suggested that he stand in front of the mirror and practice using those particular facial muscles until the word comes out more easily.

4. When it comes to your work projects, change your attitude from “I have to…” to “I want to…”. Seems like a subtle change, but the mindset of choosing over feeling forced to complete something can make a huge difference.

My friend Betsy Talbot, small business coach extraordinare, offers a time management tip. You know the 80/20 marketing rule (that 80% of your revenues usually come from 20% of your client base)? The rule works for time management, too.

If you dedicate 20% of your day to income generating projects, you can get an 80% return on that investment. But if you spend that 20% block of time on junk, you’ll get an 80% junk return. Betsy says she makes sure that she blocks out that 20% every single day, which for her is about 90 minutes.

So, whether you schedule four hours of uninterruptible work time a time (for most of us, very hard to do) or use Betsy’s 90-minute block method, it’ll get easier to keep that sacred 15-minute marketing time every day. Done consistently, it is bound to bring you some nice results.

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From the Smallbizmarketingblog.com:

Why Many Profit-Driven Blogs Fail
Running Your Solo Biz: What's Passion Got to Do with It?
Look What YouTube Started: Shine in Your Own Online Video

© Marketing Hotspots 2008 - Vol. 1, Issue 13