Strategic Time Allocation

Below you will find an archive of our strategic time allocation marketing tips, or you can view our latest StreetSmart Marketer Tips.

• 6 Dirty Little Secrets About Building A Business Success
  It almost doesn't matter what business you are in, direct mail properly executed works. Sometimes it may not be very economical if you sell a low priced item, but a well crafted letter can get a prospect to take action.
• A Bug's Story.
  The simpliest things in life can give us a better perspective on why we do things the way we do. A bug struggling to get out of a car can represent an entrepreneur's struggle to grow his business. Why continue to do things the same way when you want different results, try something different, try looking for advice in a different place. Make a commitment to change.
• A Creative Way To Get The Tools And Knowledge You Need To Excel.
  Do you get frustrated when you cannot learn quickly enough or are having a hard time mastering a new skill. Learn from the experts, take a course, buy a book, or ask an expert for advice. Don't waste more time.
• A Few Of My Favourite Outsourcing Sites. NEW
  Here is a list of a number of sites where you can find outsourcing for many different tasks, such as virtual assistants, web site design and development, programming, copywriting, graphic design, training design and ghost writing.
• A Foolproof Way to Evaluate Marketing Advice
  From time to time we have all been disappointed by someone selling marketing advice and services, who it turns out has no business doing so. Mostly you only find out once you have engaged them and spent the money. Here is a way I have always protected myself from people like this. 
• A Quick Source Of New Revenue
  When you think of growing your business or of increasing your profits, do you immediately think of finding new clients. If so you are not alone. Obviously if you are a start-up, bringing in new clients is likely to be a preoccupation for you. However, StreetSmart Marketers know that bringing in new customers is a most time consuming and expensive way for any organization to increase their profits.  They look for ways to grow without spending gobs of money on expensive marketing campaigns.
• A Shortcut To Business Success
  I woke up on this morning with a revelation about my business. It was so simple, I couldn't believe it had taken me 2 years to figure it out. The interesting thing was that despite huge amounts of time thinking about this challenge, the actual answer came to me in a split second. I was reflecting on a discussion with a successful business person while at gym the day before. He didn't give me the answer but he pointed me in the right direction.
• A Simple Way To Find Any File On Your Computer
  I always have a hard time when it comes to locating data on my computer. I spend ages going through directories or waiting for search results. It is my fault because I keep almost everything and I am not a great filer. To make matters worse, I often have multiple places where I could have filed the item I am looking for.
• Be Your Own Customer
  There is a story that when Apple was developing its early products, Steve Jobs made sure he checked out the design of the packaging and the product himself before it ever went to customers. He felt that he needed to understand how a customer felt to receive and open what Apple was selling.
• Become A Recognized Expert In Your Industry
  StreetSmart Marketers know that one of the best lead generators is the free publicity generated when you are perceived to be a recognized expert in your industry. It doesn’t matter what field of business you are in. It can be in carpet cleaning, auto repair, gardening or quantum physics. If your clients and the media perceive you to be an expert, they will seek you out for advice...
• "Busyness" is the Thief of Creativity
  Do you believe in business time equals money, that if you work longer and harder you will earn more? The only real competitive advantage you have in business today is your ability to think creatively. In order to do so you need to find the time.
• Finding Solutions To Things That Slow Us Down
  Have you ever had a business problem that stopped you dead? One minute you are going along fine, the next minute you are stuck, not sure how to move forward. I know I have.
  That’s why last week, Rick Wolfe of Poststone Corporation and I met with a group of successful business owners to discuss how to problem-solve in situations where you are slowed considerably or stopped completely.
• Fresh Hot Pizza Delivered To Your Door In Under 30 Minutes Or Its Free! Guaranteed.
  Don’t limit yourself or your business with a fear of lawsuits. Build and grow your business with integrity and ethics, make sure that your value system leaves your clients and prospects in better shape than when you found them.
• How Many Months Do You Have Left to Achieve Your Dreams?
  Over the last year I have noticed an interesting phenomenon. Despite the very positive feedback I get from people on the value and practical nature of the marketing ideas I supply in this newsletter, in my courses and in my consulting, many people seem to find it hard to take the personal action needed.
• How Much is Failing To Communicate Regularly With Your Existing Customers Costing You?
  If you are an established business, how much time, resources and energy do you spend on marketing. StreetSmart Marketers have numbers that look like: 10% of their time and energy to the total market, 30% to ideal prospects and 60% to their existing customers.
• How The Most Successful Business Owners Will Use Leverage to Dramatically Grow Profits in ‘08 NEW
  As part of your annual business plan, include a marketing calendar that will help you grow your business. Use leverage in order to increase your clients, your sales and your response rate for mailing pieces.
• How To Drop The Balls
  Most business owners, especially those with rapidly growing businesses have far too many tasks on their plates. How do they juggle all the priorities? It seems that the only way is to either delegate or to simply drop some of the tasks. Here’s a way to look at dropping tasks and get more leverage on your time
• How To Generate More Leads From Your Advertising
  I received a call the other day from a consultant, whose specialty is improving the performance of corporate web sites. He told me he had been advertising his services in two magazines and that the results had been disappointing to say the least. He wanted to know how to generate more leads from his advertising.
• How To Get More Out Of Your Networking
  Networking is the marketing tool of choice for many business owners, but many are only mildly effective at it, resulting in a huge wasted opportunity. StreetSmart Marketers constantly find ways to optimize every marketing dollar and every marketing activity. Here's how you can optimize your networking.
• How to Make Sure You Have a Great Weekend
  I have been preaching for sometime that entrepreneurs need to take more time off rather than less. But how do you get started? Well for a start, try taking weekends off and spending time with your family doing things you enjoy
• How To Overcome Your Fears Of Selling, guest article by Tessa Stowe
  What would be the benefit of feeling more relaxed and confident about selling in your business. Find out the answers.
• How To Recession Proof Your Business NEW
  With the USA in an economic recession, Canadians will feel the squeeze as well. You will need to market harder and wiser in order to stay on top.
• If You Know The Answers, Why Aren't You Getting What You Want?
  Most people know the simple steps that are needed to grow their business, but don't often put them into place. Find out what is needed to get yourself moving in the right direction.
• Insider Secrets on Big Ticket Selling
  Subscribe to Graham MacGregor’s “The Big Ticket Selling Report” and receive strategies and techniques that produce remarkable big ticket sales ideas to rapidly increase your big ticket sales.
• Interview with Jim Blasingame, Small Business Advocate
  Michael Hepworth speaks with Jim Blasingame about how to become more focused on your business.
• Invest Time In Working With Your Staff
  Where are we going? What's expected of me? What's in it for me? Where do I go when I need help? If your staff, particularly the customer-facing ones, don't know the answers to these four simple questions, they may be moving your organization in directions you don't want to go.
• Keep Your Marketing At The Leading Edge in 2005
  If you want to continuously create marketing that delivers, you should tune up your marketing engine at least once a year. I like to do it early in each new year.
• Knowing Means Doing NEW
  You may know the things that you need to do in order to be successful in your business, but are you doing them? There are times when a good coach can make all the difference in your business.
• Leverage: The Key That Unlocks The Door To Growing Your Business
  George Beshara of Montreal developed a series of modular training programs to help people manage their lives better. They are excellent programs, and everyone who has been exposed to them agrees, but there is a problem. He only knows a relatively small number of suitable prospects. Should he go directly to the end user or should he go through a group of people who are already connected to the people who need his training programs?
• Leveraging Time; How To Avoid Being Busy and Broke
  You have heard it many times. Time is your scarcest resource! Time is your most perishable resource! Its true, and I believe before you can take advantage of leveraging other resources and assets, you first have to learn how to leverage your time more effectively.
• May The Force Be With You! Leverage Is Everywhere You Look.
  "Leverage is like 'Star Wars' 'The Force": It's what entrepreneurs do to become successful, it's all around us, but we don't recognize it as such. But if you understand it and learn its power, then you are able to make much more consistent, strategic and proactive use of it."
• Power of Partnerships
  Ask an owner of a small business if they want a partner and they look at you as though you are mad. Its true most of us don't want or need an equity partner in our business, however it may not be possible to really succeed in business unless you embrace the notion of partnerships.
• Simple Strategy For Getting Past Voice Mail When Cold Calling
  Many people are frustrated with voice mail. It seems like an impenetrable wall between you and your prospects. It often seems the harder you try, the more voice mail you get to. Leaving a meaningful message when you hit voicemail, for my money is the preferred strategy. We all have to learn to deal with voice mail. It is a fact of life.
• The 80/20 Rule Turned on Its Head
  Everyone knows the 80/20 rule. Prevailing wisdom says that 80% of your revenues and profits come from 20% of your customers. That being the case we are advised to focus our attention on this 20% and not worry about the 80%, perhaps even going to the extent of firing them.
• The Busy Man Is Never Wise, And The Wise Man Is Never Busy..  Lin Yutang, Chinese Philosopher.
  Lin Yutang was critical of North Americans for being too busy. He believed we are too subservient to the business culture. He saw us as slaves to our work, who worry ourselves to death. I have long believed, time away from one’s business is one of the most important ingredients for success.
• The Difference Between Action and Inertia
  I was reminded recently, that it is not what we know that is important, but what we do with it that makes all the difference.  Over the last few weeks I had reason to speak to a number of people who attended a keynote address I did for a group of insurance agents early in 2004. Most of the conversations were fairly routine, but two stood out.
• The End of Time Management NEW
  When a day with all your tasks completed is as much a reality as Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny, learn how giving up certain activities will achieve more than working on trying to do as much as possible.
• The Kiss Of Death For Yellow Pages Advertising
  If you want to continually improve the performance of advertising without increasing cost. Here is some extraordinary research that has relevance for Yellow Pages Advertising, but also for anyone who advertises to a local market.
• The Power of Personal Branding
  According to a UCLA study, 85% of all decisions are made with our eyes. This holds true when we meet people for the first time. We make an impression in three ways: Visual, Verbal and Vocal. What's most interesting is that the visual component is the most important by far.
• The Power of Thank You Notes
  At one time it was common practice to send hand written thank you notes for almost everything. It was simply considered good manners. Sadly this has died out over the years, to the point where it is relatively rare to receive a hand written thank you note
• The Role of The Small Business CEO as an Allocator of Resources
  The primary job of a business owner is to continually look for ways to increase the rate of return on the equity in their business. This is true if you are a sole practitioner or the head of a large multi-national. As owners of small businesses we don't always realize this.
• The Secret To Achieving Success In Any Business
  I meet many people during the course of my work who go into business for themselves, simply because they are good at what they do. Take Susan, a physiotherapist who loves what she does. She worked in a multi-disciplinary clinic for some years before branching out on her own. Because she was good and she was in demand at the clinic, she believed the same would be true if she went out on her own.
• Time Myths NEW
  Entrepreneurs leverage time into money. To make this statement a reality you need to stop wasting time and stop doing the things that waste your time.
• The Value Of Great Ideas
  "If you have an apple and I have an apple and we exchange these apples, then you and I will still each have one apple. But if you have an idea and I have an idea and we exchange these ideas, then each of us will have two ideas."- George Bernard Shaw
  I believe there is an old Chinese proverb that asks; "When is the best time to plant a tree?" The answer is "Twenty Years ago!" The truth is that if you only plant a tree when you need it, you never get what you need, until it is too late.
• Value Your Negatives With Paradoxical Thinking
  Here's a great article from Jim Blasingame, The Small Business Advocate. "http://www.smallbusinessadvocate.com". One of the most interesting things to observe about humans is how paradoxical we are.
• What I Learned From a Granddad Doing Magic Tricks
  While waiting for a plane back home at San Diego airport, I watched a granddad entertain his grandson with a few simple magic tricks. I have always been fascinated by magic. I know it’s not magic and I always try to figure out how it is done. Sometimes I am pretty sure I know the answers, but it still fascinates me. Watching the two having fun together, got me thinking; magic and marketing are in some ways very similar.
• What Makes A Business Successful
  For years business owners have told me that the answer is access to timely, quality information. They've said that their ability to make important decisions is based upon experience, top advisors and information.
• What We Can Learn From Bill Clinton About Networking
  Last week Alain Gervais, one of my readers called me to ask me the difference between networking and referrals. He had been  successfully generating referrals and wondered if he was missing something.
• What's The Difference Between Traditional Marketing and StreetSmart Marketing
  Almost everyone in marketing dreams of a never-ending flow of qualified leads streaming into their business. This has been a lifelong quest for me. It has been a strange and exhilarating journey. Along the way, I have built four businesses and learned many valuable lessons; many of them the hard way, bumping my head as I went.
• Whether You Acknowledge It or Not, Your Business Buys Customers!
  Do you have plenty of clients and business but would like to upgrade your clients to ones who will spend more money and spend more frequently. If you get better at marketing than your competitors, then it becomes cheaper for you to acquire each customer than it does for your competitors and the more customers you get. What's more you can become more selective in the type of customers you acquire.
• Why Business Seminars Don’t Work!
  People don't want to waste their time seeing the same presentation or hearing the same advice. But you can not advance in your business unless you actually implement what you learn.
• Why Even The Smallest Business Can’t Avoid Outsourcing NEW
  So your business is running but it is not going where you need it to. You may be feeling frustrated and there seems to be a never ending stream of tasks to get done. Growing a business is not easy, but by outsourcing, you can make it a lot easier.
• Why Simple Advice Is Sometimes The Best Advice
  Don’t reject learning or advice, simply because it seems simple. The secrets to building a successful business lie not in exotic new ideas, but in consistently implementing straight forward rules and ideas that have changed little over time.
• Why You Shouldn't Make New Year's Resolutions!
  Fail at your New Year's resolutions, try goal setting instead and review regularly with the help of a vision board.
• You Can Learn Anything You Want
  Most business owners are too busy to read sufficiently to learn everything they need to run their business. If you would like to read more than you do, but don't have the time, consider reading book summaries.
• You Can Network Anywhere, Anytime, On Any Occasion ~ Even At A Funeral ~
  For a master networker, networking is a lifestyle, and it's something that can be incorporated into everything one does. But you must always follow the #1 rule...

© 2005-2010 StreetSmart Marketer Paul Tobey
Helping business owners create programs that create new customers.

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