Uhhh… good. Really good. Yeah. Things are going great right now. I have 8,972 Twitter followers. No problem. Excellent. Amazing in fact…
Did I mention the 8,972 Twitter followers?
All right, I’m not where I want to be, which brings us to the real point of this post:
Staying on Track
The biggest danger of a marketing plan is that we think of it as set-it and forget-it, like a land mine. And like a land mine such thinking can blow up in our faces.
What have I done with my marketing plan?
- Built my twitter following
- Made desultory attempts to build my facebook page
- Blogged a lot
- Thought about how to re-jig the marketing plan to improve it
And that’s it. Because I have a plan, and once you’ve got the plan, that’s half the game, right?
Right. A half-won game is called a loss. What I want is a win.
The first step in fixing a problem is admitting you have one. So having done that in as public a manner as possible, it’s time to start fixing it.
So, how do we do that?
COMMIT!
A marketing plan isn’t like online dating. It’s a long-term relationship that needs to be nurtured, checked in on, and developed. Sometimes it needs to be chucked and started over, but that’s a different conversation.
I have not been checking in on the marketing plan. I’ve been faithful about building my twitter followers and keeping my feed fun and alive. I’ve been fairly faithful about blogging, but that’s about it. It’s the equivalent of doing the dishes once a week and saying you’ve done your share of the housework.
Avoid the “Tyranny of the Urgent”
(Not my phrase, and if you know whose it is, let me know so I can credit them properly.)
Remember that post on scheduling? Urgent/not urgent/important/not important? I’ve allowed my attention to get swallowed up by the urgent. Now some of that urgent is important:
- Taking care of my child
- Keeping my relationship with my girlfriend healthy
- Earning money to pay the bills
But a lot of it is not:
- Must finish that computer game
- Must check twitter every 5 minutes
- Must read the news compulsively
- Must track friends on Facebook
- Must find out what happens next on Protect the Boss (Korea does good drama, by the way).
None of that gets me any closer to the big goal of this marketing plan (selling more copies of True Magics) nor does it help me build a viable marketing platform to use for future book sales. And looking closely at that first list of important and urgent things I’m doing, what do you not see?
Writing.
My writing. Client writing is under “earning money to pay the bills” but just paying the bills isn’t the goal, is it?
The goal is to write my books/stories/screenplays/we series for a living, and if I am not writing, and if I’m not marketing, I’m not getting near my goal.
Well, that’s enough of that, folks.
Getting Back on Track
The first step is to get back on schedule overall, with the necessary changes to make it happen. I revamped mine over the weekend. It includes:
- Daily writing time
- Daily marketing time
- Daily client time
- Family time
- Internet/TV time (very limited)
Second step is to turn my anti-distraction software back on. I use Antisocial, which I highly recommend if you have a Mac.
Third step is the hardest one: get to work. Because planning is one thing, but if you’re not doing, you’re not going anywhere. For my marketing plan, that means:
- Get the marketing plan up on the calendar!
- Set goals for each week based on the plan
- Meet that week’s goals
- Measuring the success of those goals
- Set next week’s goals based on the plan and success of previous week’s goals
So back on track and let’s get this plan going! And speaking of planning…
Next week: Building a Marketing Plan Part 1 (and yes, I should have talked about this earlier)