Top Tips for keeping up your online marketing during the summer holidays

Are you busy trying to entertain the kids during the summer holidays and schedule in some work to keep your business going? How are you keeping up with everything? After all, the blog needs feeding, as do your social media accounts. How’s a gal supposed to cope?

1. Quality not Quantity:

When it comes to social networking, I personally think you should only use the sites which you thoroughly enjoy using.

I’m a relatively new user to Facebook and Pinterest, but otherwise, only have a Twitter and Linkedin account.

I’m sure someone out there will rap me on the knuckles for typing such a travesty. However it strikes me that following absolutely everything like a slave simply because you feel you ought to, just in case you miss something, will only stretch your ability to engage with like-minded individuals in a meaningful way. And surely that’s the real point of social networking isn’t it?

Sure, we’ve all cottoned on to the fact that we can also use these to benefit our businesses, but if it starts to become a boring chore, then we’ve probably missed the point.

2. Automate wherever possible

There are some very handy Apps/Plugins out there which help you automate tasks wherever possible.

Blogging: Most blogging platforms have a handy schedule facility, which means that you can schedule your blog posts ahead of time. I set aside some time once a fortnight and type up my blog posts in bulk. I then schedule them to be posted to the blog at regular intervals, which ensures my blog traffic doesn’t fall. In fact, I use this method during term-time so I find this is a good habit which serves me well during the summer.

Social Media Accounts: Apps such as SocialOomph, HootSuite or TweetDeck enable you to schedule your updates to your social networking sites. Very handy if you have generic updates which you could do with automating on a regular basis – for example if you are promoting a specific product or service (incidentally, great tips here from Michael Hyatt on using Twitter to promote your new book ). Of course, there is a limit to how much you can automate. You still need to engage with people from time to time. Handy Social Media Apps for your Smartphone can help you to keep in touch when you’re on the move, otherwise, why not schedule in some time to catch up when you’re back at home. Which leads me to number (3)

3. Be disciplined with your time

You’re a super mum, but you’re not Supermum. You have a business to run, kids to entertain, and a household to keep together, something’s gotta give – particularly if like many of us, you became self-employed so that you could work more flexibly around the kids and enjoy the summer.

Try to resist the urge to keep up with your emails/online marketing/blogging/social networking every single waking moment of the day, or stopping frequently to check in case you’ve missed something.

If you are able to work reasonably flexibly, why not schedule in specific work time to ‘catch up’, then stick to doing it at that time only. You’ll feel far less stressed, and so much happier that you have managed to have fun AND get some work done.

And enjoy your summer!

So what tips would you add?  I’d love to hear them.

Mary

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Tagged online marketing, Social Networking, summer holidays, working from home