If you’re anything like me, you may be subject to the occasional bouts of laziness. The only problem is that to market online effectively requires consistency. Whether it’s blogging, social media, or your email newsletter, you’ve got to demonstrate consistency to get people to know, like, and trust you.
How can you do that and still be lazy? Or at least make the most use of your time?
The Answer To Lazy Marketing
The answer: Batching.
Batching (or batch processing) is a method for increasing productivity. What you do is set aside a block of time, and do a series of similar activities. The idea is that it will decrease distraction and increase your productivity during that time.
How Does Batching Work?
Simply set aside a half day to write the majority of your online marketing for a given month. You may be able to do it at home, at the office, or maybe at a coffee shop somewhere. But create your blog entries, social media, and email newsletters ahead of time.
With today’s technology, all of that can be created well in advance, previewed ahead of time, then scheduled to go out on a consistent, regular schedule.
For blogging, I always suggest using WordPress. It started as a blogging platform, and can easily run entire websites now. But when you use it to blog, you can preview your blog posts to see what they’ll look like, but schedule them to go online at a future date.
Social media can be scheduled ahead of time using tools like HootSuite. And you can set up your blog to be shared online as soon as it’s published using tools like twitterfeed.com and dlvr.it.
Finally, email newsletters can be created in MailChimp and scheduled to go out later. You can preview the email right in MailChimp, and can even send yourself a test email to make sure you know how it will look. Tip: Be sure to check all the links.
You can easily do this once a month, creating all your content for the month at one time. While you’ll still need to respond when people communicate with you, you don’t have to be consistently pro-active throughout the entire month. You can really be a lazy online marketer!