The Glocal Wave and the Future of The Marketing Spotlight
Can you stop marketing, take a break, and still come back to success? Yes, you can.
When Friends, Followers and Customer Evangelists: The 2010 Business Owner’s Guide to Social Media (#FFCE) was being prepared, David Hancock (Founder, Morgan James Publishing) asked me to stop marketing. That’s a radical position for a publisher, don’t you think?
In all fairness to David, he was only telling me to wait until after the Author 101 Conference in March 2010. David had no idea I was planning to take a “marketing vacation” until just a few weeks before the official publication date for #FFCE.
The return from my little marketing vacation happened when an ad went live in RTIR (Radio Television Interview Report). That was mid-June – just 6 ½ weeks before the official publication date for #FFCE.
Since then, I’ve been ramping up my marketing activities. As part of that effort, I went to a conference with Armand Morin in Minneapolis. Here’s a side note: When you get a chance to be taught by Armand Morin – take it!
Armand, his team, and several of his AM2 Platinum members spent 3 days showing us what works, what doesn’t, and how to grow our businesses. I’m glad I went with a friend, because it took both of us to get all the notes written down. Those 3 days in Minneapolis clarified my vision, focused my efforts, and started my planning.
I say started because I’ve spent the last two weeks working out the plan that was started in Minneapolis. What I’m doing today is sharing that plan with you. Maybe it will help you to make progress with your online efforts.
The first step is understanding that I have more than one business to run. To make that a little simpler, we’re combining Conrad Hall Copywriting and The Marketing Spotlight. The new URL is TheConradHall.com, and it is for everything related to copywriting, authoring books, tours and speaking engagements.
Then there is a small PR Agency, a marketing service/consulting firm, and a blog talk radio program on Social Media.
Now take a good look at those two paragraphs. Notice that there are 4 businesses, and they’re all very closely related. Other business interests are being put on hold to develop these ones. Those being put on hold are far enough away from these core efforts that they were distractions rather than being helpful. I’ll get back to them later when these 4 are flourishing.
One of the things that took up a lot of my attention is balancing all the effort. You know how it is…you think about setting up a blog for each business, what about social media profiles, and then there’s all the offline advertising – and on and on it goes, right?
So I started thinking:
- What are the topics I cover?
- Can writing about a topic be tied to reading newsletters?
- How do I stay up to date on everything?
Now, let me be real clear on this point: When you’re working on your own, you truly can’t keep up on everything. There’s just too much work to do in a day.
Loral Langemeier has some great advice for this.
- Hire a housekeeper. When you’re working from home, your house and life eat up a lot of your time. Hire someone to do the cleaning, cooking and groceries so you get that time back to invest in your business.
- Hire a scheduler. This is a personal assistant who schedules all your appointments. Personally, I find it hugely helpful to have someone who keeps me on track throughout the day.
And yes, I have someone scheduling my time. We haven’t hired a housekeeper because we have 3 kids, and I think they make good cleaners. So we save the payroll cost and the kids learn to be responsible.
So here’s how I’m dividing up my week and day to provide content to you, keep up to date fairly well (i.e. keep learning), grow my businesses and develop new products/services.
Monday – Information Product Creation
The blog post for this day can be text, audio or video. Naturally audio and video are big time savers so I’ll be using them whenever I can.
This is the day when I read the newsletters, post comments, and do research that relates to this element of my work. There are still e-mails to be answered, phone calls to make/receive, and day-to-day chores to be done, but about half of my day goes into working on the topic of Information Product Creation.
So half my day is on a specific topic. Another quarter is given to routine tasks. And the other quarter?
Well, that goes to other topics. There’s almost always something that comes up related to another project. You know how it goes…30 minutes or even an hour disappears while you take care something important that just “cropped up.” Okay. So be sure to plan for that kind of time in your day.
Tuesday – Local Business Marketing
There is an entire army of sites, applications and materials coming into the marketplace to make local business marketing better. Anyone could easily pick just this as their niche and have a wealth of material to work with.
Wednesday – The Small Business America Tour
It was hard to decide on giving this a day in the week. For a while, I thought it could be rolled into a day when I write about social media.
What I discovered is that the tour really fits better with the blog talk radio show, and the success stories I’m gathering from local business owners. So it gets its own day, and it’s an opportunity to put the spotlight onto other people for a while. After all, who wants to listen to me gabble on every day, right?
Thursday – Social Media
As I mentioned earlier, it’s easy to see how all these topics tie together. Social Media is something that helps to tie everything else together, so I think it will work well near the end of the week.
The focus is on new features and sites, and how to tie social media into your current local business marketing. For example, Meetup.com has made a lot of changes to their service. I definitely want to spend time on that because Meetup is far more powerful than Facebook for local business marketing.
Friday – The Glocal Wave
This is a combination of “showing you the future of marketing” and giving you a peek at one of the new titles I’m working on. It definitely ties into the other four days.
Wrap Up
Yes, there is a lot more to the plan than this outline of an editorial calendar. Unfortunately, there just isn’t room to put everything into just one post. (I’m already way over 1,000 words as it is.)
On the bright side, the limited space and attention of a blog post means I stop gabbing before spilling all the beans and giving the farm away. That’s good.
And what’s the grand point of this whole post? Let’s go back to the opening paragraph…
Can you stop marketing, take a break, and still come back to success?
In my case, taking a break is exactly what was needed to sharpen my focus and lay the groundwork for future success. Are you needing the same sort rejuvenation?
Maybe you can do it faster than the 3 months I spent on this. Try just taking a holiday. That might be a radical change for some of us – a few days off. The grand point of this whole post is twofold – One, the time off has been well used, and two, I’m back!
Are you ready to keep up?