Creating a Schedule That Works For You

bymelissakemp

114 followers

Updated 9 years ago

Scheduling!! Making time for classes, training, adding to your blog, learning all the ways to monetize it!! Along with Lions and Tigers and Bears, OH MY!!!!!

Seriously, scheduling is one of the major components of making this marketing thing work. One of our great participants here, wrote a blog about success being a lot about not falling into the "shiny new object" syndrome, where this is new and exciting and as the work piles up, you fall down a bit. Scheduling can help you around that.

I am a person who has several part-time jobs I must work on call. And must is a real must as this is my only way to make a living, and it's a pretty meager one at the moment. It's feast or famine--a deluge of work or none. So you can see how this might wreak havoc on any sort of scheduling. How am I dealing with this?

Here are some tips I'm working that are making a difference and keeping me on track:

1. Using auto-schedulers--I auto-schedule tweets and posts so that I don't have to try to keep up with them during the week, or more accurately, I get posts daily on days when I'm too busy to post.
2. Working A LOT on the weekends--I often have periods where my on-call freelance writing stacks up heavily during the week for two employers. Sometimes they overlap. So I can't really stop to write for my blog, or I'm too mentally tired to do it. So, I am now trying to write 3 blog posts on the weekends and scheduling them to post at different times during the week. You can do this through the publishing section of WordPress where you can choose when your post will appear on your blog.
3. Brush up on your "marketing language." Marketing copy is a little less prosaic then I like and am used to, so I've had to get down with writing what readers want to read as opposed to what I want to write. As a degreed writer, it sorta breaks my heart to have to write like this, but I also wanna make a living. So, I'm doing what's necessary.

So be sure to be realistic about your scheduling. If you know you need to put in 10+ (and it's a lot of plus) hours to make your marketing work, then really mine your schedule for when those 10+ hours can be had. For me, it's the uninterrupted Sunday time that I can do it. When's your best time? Is it on a calendar? What sorts of automation can you add into your work to get more productivity out of those hours? Good luck and happy scheduling.