I spend a lot of time talking about how you can improve your marketing. The truth is, there are so many things you can do, you could easily spend all of your time doing them. Today, I’m going to give you some guidelines about how to decide where you should be spending your time.

It’s not that some marketing ideas are inherently more valuable than others – it’s that some marketing ideas are inherently more valuable for your situation.

We all spend a huge amount of time doing stuff. Some of us have a “system,” diligently check things off our to-do list, but at the end of the day, we don’t get anything done. It’s like we’re running around in circles very fast to create the illusion of progress.

Bottom line – we need to get smarter about where we spend our time. This is particularly true for those of us who own small businesses, but the idea applies to everyone. Successfully choosing where to spend our time requires a shift in mindset from being “task focused” to being “goal focused.”

Obviously, this means you need to have goals.

You need to have goals that are specific and measurable so that you (or anyone else) can easily see if you’ve achieved them. For example, “grow my business” is not a good goal because it is too vague. By adding specifics, that goal can become something like “increase monthly revenue by 15% within six months.” Now you have a specific goal that you can easily measure. In practice, you’ll have a few of these that you are working toward at any given time.

Now that you have some goals, how do you stay on track? We all know how easy it is to spend a lot of time responding to email and doing other low value tasks that do nothing to get us closer to our goals. Get in the habit of asking yourself two questions every time you are about to start a task.

Should I be doing this task at all? By asking this question, you’re asking if completing this task brings you closer to any of your goals. If the answer is no, but it’s something that has be addressed (bookkeeping, making sure the latest updates are installed on the computers, etc), delegate it to someone else. If it isn’t something that has to be addressed, forget about it entirely or come back to it after you’ve completed all the tasks that contribute to reaching your goals.

Am I the best person to be doing this task? A common entrepreneurial trait is the desire to do everything yourself (believe me, I know). The problem here is you often spend time trying to do something that you simply aren’t that good at doing. It takes longer and the result is of lower quality than what could have been done by someone else.

Perhaps you’re thinking “I can’t afford to hire people to do things for me.” I’m sure that in some cases, you simply can’t afford to pay someone to provide a service to you. In most cases, I’d say that you can’t afford not to.

Let’s say you spend 6 hours working on your website. That’s 6 hours that you weren’t talking to your customers, selling to your prospects, or doing any of the things that your customers are paying you to do. You know from measuring your results that the work you didn’t do would have earned $300 per hour for your business. Doing the website work yourself cost your business $1,800.

You could have hired a freelance web designer or programmer to do that work, probably for much less than $100 per hour. Since they are much better at it than you are, they could have finished in 3 hours – total cost to your business, $300.

Because you hired that freelancer, you spent those 6 hours doing the things you should be doing and making $1,800 for the business in the process. In this example, do it yourself and lose $1,800. Hire someone else and earn a net profit of $1,500. It’s a no-brainer.

Start applying this idea to your business today. I’m certain that you’ll start to see returns quickly.

To your success