Rockstar Internet Marketing Tools for Setting Productivity Goals

I'm working on a series of articles about internet marketing like a Rockstar since lately it seems I can't get the whole Rockstar theme out of my head. Whether you party like a Rockstar or market like a Rockstar or simply carry a Rockstar attitude about you in your quest for success, I think it's all helpful in keeping you focused and disciplined toward achieving your goals. Most of us want to enjoy the freedom and bling of a Rockstar lifestyle or at the very least, we want a taste of the independence and bravado that comes with most portrayals of what it means to be a Rockstar even if it's more glam and theatrics than reality.


Well you can't be a Rockstar Internet Marketer without a plan. I've been loosely working on keeping myself focused using two tools that I've committed to paper for your use. One is the Internet Marketing Efforts Analysis and the other is the Productivity Points Schedule.


The Internet Marketing Efforts Analysis is a tool that allows you to input all of the different media and tools that you use in your marketing: forums, social networks, social bookmarks, websites that you use, websites that you own, websites and blogs that you promote, RSS feed services, autoresponders--anything and everything that you use to run, promote, or network in your business should be added to this spreadsheet. You then choose categories for each of these mediums and evaluate your usage:

• Profit (used in list building, one of your products or services, or something where you are an affiliate)
• Promotion (used to promote your sites or used for networking)
• Provisions (used as a tool in running your websites or providing your products) and
  
• Usage (whether your use of this medium is high, medium, or low)

Based on your categorization and usage, each of the mediums is scored. High scores show you where you are spending the most of your time and low scores show you where you need to consider whether the time spent is really worth the effort. Each of the categories is rated differently as are the scores for usage with the final score being a function of what the medium does for you by way of Profit, Promotion, or Provision and actual usage. The spreadsheet has sample values based on my own usage and does the addition automatically so feel free to play around with your own data input. Sort the final scores from high to low and see if your scores align with where you believe you should be spending your internet marketing time and dollars.


The Productivity Points Schedule allows you to track what you do each day, each week or each month and determine what value your efforts are having in relation to goals that you can set to make the most of your time.
Sample activities related to creating product or content, conducting promotional activities, focusing on your existing customers or clients, networking for new business, or making site enhancements are all given a set and constant value. Some activities are rated more highly than others because they have greater impact on your business. For example, creating a feature weblog article is valued at 15 points where commenting on a site is 4 points. If you do more than one of the item in a day, week, or month, just multiply the value by the times you did it.


You can use the tool to decide what activities you want to get done each day, week or month and based on the total values that yet get for conducting these activities, you can determine whether you need to do more or less at whatever frequency makes sense for you. Again, I've provided example activities and values with some scores to get you started using the tool. I'm aiming for a daily score of around 19 or 20 (write a short post each day, bookmark the post and send a note to Twitter, and comment on another site) with a weekly score of around 50 (write a feature article, write a long post, write an email autoresponder article). I may be too aggressive in these goals but the point is to have a guideline to use for establishing baseline goals and being able to track my progress to the plan in a way that keeps me focused.


The idea for the Productivity Points Schedule came from a post I saw on Ben Cooks' Blogging Experiment with reference to work done by Darren Rouse at Problogger.net. I've gone a step further and enhanced the tools with some activities, addesd columns for frequency, provided summary totals that calculate automatically at the bottom and provided actual Excel spreadsheets that you can tweak for your own delight and amazement. Get both of these Rockstar Internet Marketing Tools at my articles directory.