Time Management Strategy

If you’re an online marketer who’s already seeing some success in your business than you’re probably well aware of the need for a time management strategy.

Proper time management is a necessity for anybody who’s marketing any kind of product or service online. Once you begin achieving success online you’ll realize that things that normally didn’t take much time from your day to day work schedule are compounded until they take up a considerable amount of time.

First off, when you begin becoming successful you’ll realize many more sales. While more sales is what every person wants, it quickly becomes obvious that more sales can be a very time consuming process in itself.

The more sales you make the more customer service that’s required. People who have questions and support issues amass in greater number. Depending on the way you set up your online business these can all lead to increased emails, phone calls and unhappy customers if they are not responded to within a short period of time.

If you’re smart you’ll use some of the money from these increased sales to turn around and buy advertising. This way you can continue the forward business growth and multiply your earnings. Unfortunately this means increased time spent on creating advertising copy. It also entails spending time looking for the best place to buy advertising as well as monitoring your advertising for performance.

Another thing that tends to happen as your business grows is your product line grows. Either that or your existing product line needs to be improved. These means hours of time spent on research and development. This time can frequently result in hours lost and often interferes with the potential of your business.

Every single one of these time consuming events require proper time management or else you’ll quickly become overwhelmed. You could lose valuable time and money that could have been made by using a productive approach to time management.

So, what should you do to get better at time management and complete the things that mean the most to your success? First you have to consider things logically. What action that you take will have the most impact on your overall business?

More often than not if you’re an established business than it’s an easy question to answer. Your customers should come first.

Customer service is critical because the majority of your sales should come from repeat business or word of mouth. Your customers should be your business. If you have a customer or potential customer with a problem or a question to ask, don’t put them off. You should avoid bad customer service at all costs because you want happy customers who gladly promote and encourage others to try your product.

There are many ways you can easily answer emails without personally answering them each day. One way that I’ve found to do this is through the use of a frequently asked questions section on your website. A FAQ section detailing the most commonly asked questions is a life saver when it comes to answering questions that happen day after day.

In addition to a FAQ section I recommend you set up a ticket center. A ticket center shows the customer the FAQ section then asks if they have further questions to sign up and send a ticket for assistance.

This does several things. First it shows that you potentially are large enough to have a staff. This gives the appearance of a professional company. It also makes people think about their question before asking it. I’ve noticed the quality of questions have gone up considerably after the installation of a ticket system.

A free support center script that I recommend can be downloaded at:http://www.maianscriptworld.co.uk/scripts_support.html

After customer service, you should concentrate on other actions that will bring you the most money. This means you should concentrate on traffic generation techniques. Promotional activities should come before development of a new product if you’ve already established one that is making money.

Once all of your advertising is finished, then you can think about improving your product or service. If you’re earning very little, all of the product improvements you can think of won’t mean a thing.

Now that the critical business actions are completed, you can concentrate on other less important activities. If you’ve got new ideas, want to research a new online development, check out the competition, etc. These are activities you should save until after you’ve worked on and finished all of your pressing money making actions.

However, if you’re new to making money online than your time management strategy and priorities should be radically different from the ones above. You need to find one opportunity, focus on it with laser guided precision and work until you’ve begun profiting from it.

This means you need to focus on one significant KRA. This is your ‘key result area’ and is the important key result you’d like to accomplish. Anything you do through out the day you need to ask yourself if it contributes to your KRA.

Here’s a video about how to establish your KRA in time management strategy.

[video]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1rFMWRYnT18[/video]

Here’s another time management video that will show you how to get things done faster.

Posted in Goal Setting, Internet Marketing Video