By Liz Lockard

I don’t know about you, but I *hate* having to make my life work around my business instead of making my business work around my life. There are a few exceptions, but I’ve built a pretty good toolbox of virtual marketing tools to reduce the number of instances where my life can’t come first, though not eliminate!

A little background: I’m a web marketing geek who helps small businesses get more marketing action out of their websites – meaning I “speak” Google Analytics and also help small businesses develop and implement SEO (aka get more traffic) plans for their sites.

A usual week for me includes: Monday blog post, Tuesday email newsletter, various client work, prospect calls, guest post writing (like this one!), social networking, and other audience-growing efforts.

It can get to be a lot and I used to get stressed about getting it all done and on time – I never wanted to miss a blog post or a marketing tip newsletter once I started to make that commitment to my audience. Overwhelming? You bet, at least until I found mini-systems to take the pressure off.

Here’s the inside scoop on two of my favorites:

1 – Blog Post Mini-System

My blog posts go live every Monday morning, but I don’t want to have to always be up at 6am to post them. Instead, I use the following steps to keep me to my blog post schedule without having to preserve my early Monday mornings for WordPress posts:

Some point the week before:
a – write a blog post from topic list/editorial calendar (I use Google Docs for my draft, then copy and paste into the WordPress editor)
b – review, edit, insert photo & credit from photopin.com
c – edit the post date for Monday morning, 7am-ish.
d – hit Schedule to post in the future
e – use bit.ly to shorten post link
f – schedule post-Tweet with Hootsuite

My system is the same for when I publish guest posts on my blog (like this one from SystemsRock). I would love to have these lined up for a month out, but realistically it doesn’t happen. Keeping it to about 2 weeks out or less keeps me flexible and my content relevant.

2 – Email Marketing Newsletter Mini-System

I developed this system for the same reason as my blog post system – I didn’t want to have to preserve my Tuesday morning every week just to hit send. This works best with an email marketing service provider (yes, you need one) – I use MailChimp, but your choice here 🙂

My newsletters include a link to my blog post in addition to the subscriber-only weekly tip, so I usually wait until I have the blog post written before beginning this process.

a – once blog post is written, draft marketing tip using Google Docs (from newsletter topic list)
b – start a new campaign by replicating old campaign in MailChimp
c – paste newsletter as plain text, format
d – use pop-up preview to read for errors, test links
e – schedule post for 9am-ish EST that Tuesday

Is there room for improvement here? Definitely. I do have my own personal address on my list so I can see that each newsletter is delivered, but I could be using MailChimp’s campaign testing tools, or setting up a template for my newsletter instead of formatting each time. (My newsletter formatting is simple enough but could still save a few moments with a template)

Other honorable mentions for favorite systems: Asana for client management systems; Freshbooks for accounting systems; and of course, Google Reader for information processing.

I don’t disagree that my systems aren’t perfect – but I’m a believer that there’s always room for improvement and the pursuit of perfection is applaudable but often keeps you from acting.

Action > Perfection 🙂

But what about you? Do you use any of the same mini-systems I mention here or something similar? Have a favorite of your own? Share it in the comments!

Bio:

Liz Lockard is a self-confessed web marketing geek who loves helping small businesses get their websites to spill their traffic secrets with Google Analytics tune-ups and take the wha? factor out of SEO with built-just-for-you plans and coaching services. Grab a free copy of her 3 Most Common Website Marketing Mistakes report or follow her on Twitter @lizlockard.