To achieve better health, all kinds of diet are available today such as weight loss diet, the “veggie-fruit diet”, lean food diet, liquid food diet, and the ubiquitous balanced diet. Athletes, sports people, astronauts, and weight trainers have special diets too. What’s diet got to do with success in online marketing, you might ask? A diet is a special program created for food intake and general health. If you were out to market your blog, business, or any other web property, you’d need a specific program to help you achieve what you need. That takes a singular minded, focused, and a relentless approach. Let’s call that a “digital diet” and here are at least eight types of digital diet that work together you help you achieve success: 
The Email Diet
Craig Jarrow who blogs at Time Management Ninja suggests checking your email 3 times a day. Some other productivity experts go so as to suggest checking email just once a day. While the frequency of email checking really depends on your business, virtually no business warrants checking email all day long. Since email drains you of your precious time and sanity, it’s no wonder that Inbox Zero is such a sought after goal for many people today.
The Email diet can be any frequency you find apt for your business. Even the busiest of the web-based entrepreneurs can do with checking email three times day. Desktop notifications are distracting, so switch them off. Avoid opening your inbox except for specific time periods you set aside for just that purpose. Use smart tools and plugins such as RightInbox and Boomerang to schedule emails to be sent out later.
Information, Media, and News Diet
Work comes first; information and news can wait. Go on a media diet. Your work is certainly more important than to know about President Obama’s latest Immigration bill or healthcare reforms. You’ll really not gain much – certainly not at the cost of not being productive — from checking out 50 Super Cars Owned by Celebrities and the humongous list of 100 places to visit before you die can certainly wait until the weekend or whenever you find time to catch up with reading. Tools such as Evernote, Pocket, and Flipboard can help you collect and organize your favorite reads for other times when you are off work.
Link Building Diet
Link building is a critical part of your online marketing campaign but it’s not a volume game. Lots of links don’t always mean success. Since there’s an element of quality inbred into your link building campaigns, your marketing approach should be ruthless. Seek links only from quality sources. Don’t trade your reputation and long-term goals for links. Predetermine and guard your link sources and backlinks. For instance, remove any accidental links from poorly written articles or blog posts. Remove links from web directories that don’t relate to your business. Audit your links, check for bad-quality links that point to you from irrelevant sources, guest posts, other articles on web 2.0 sites, etc.
Web-tools Diet
Technology just made running a business a lot easier. Today, you’d practically lose count of the number of web-based tools, applications, and services available for every aspect of running your business. CRM; accounting and Finance; Marketing; Human Resources and Recruiting; Link Building; SEO; Social media, etc. Each of these broad functions will have even more web-based tools and services to help you battle specific business problems.
By the time you get around to choose a few applications to work with, new ones go into beta and are then released. In a nutshell, you’ll have a tough time just to choose the right solutions for your business. Start with a few popular ones and try not to shift or grab a new tool for helping you solve the same problem. For instance, if you choose a CRM solution, work with it until you find that the tool can’t do something you need it to do. Pick not more than two options for every specific problem.
Social Media Diet
A Vertical Response survey reveals that social media is one of those things small businesses spend an inordinate amount of time on. First, it’s hard (but not impossible) to ascertain a specific ROI value for social media. Second, it takes more time than you can afford to spend. It’s important to have a social media diet to control your time, activity, and the returns for your effort on social media. Set yourself a schedule to get on social media. Tools such as HootSuite, Social Oomph, and Nimble CRM, help you plan and publish social media content. Further, spend not more than 1 hour per account per day.
Web Browsing Diet
On the Internet, one thing always leads to the other. Decide to browse casually online and you’ll be tempted to click, go on and read a post, watch a video, listen to a podcast, and then read another post before heading into a forum. The cycle never ends, unfortunately. Causal web browsing is one of the most distracting elements in your typical workday. Fight the need to browse. Resist the need to browse, except for work-related browsing. You can always spend your spare time, if any, to do this.
Human Connections and Communications Diet
Mobile phones are a convenience for you; they are not others to assert their right to reach you since the right doesn’t even exist. It’s just the way humans are built. People would invariable call to discuss absolutely nothing of value. Most people get distracted by incoming phone calls and short messages, which further eat into time available for the day. State your unavailability for periods of time clearly.
Shut off the phone and don’t respond to any messages (unless your response saves someone’s life). If possible, use an answering machine. Some others would like to have lunch, meet for coffee, and have a random chat – schedule these for another time. Let people know you are busy and that you have work to do. Only two things happen when you get ruthless about your time: either they respect you or they avoid you (both of which are good for you).
Lean Marketing Diet
Plan your online marketing strategy even before you set out to make your website. Lean marketing pertains to using only those channels that actually work for your business. For instance, lets say that you deploy online marketing campaigns through a variety of channels such as email campaigns, PPC campaigns, SEO, Social Media, content marketing (which includes blogging, guest posting, eBooks, sharable reports, etc.) – which of these work for you?
You can do monthly checks using analytics tools and then determine the best returns for your investment. Once you find the channels that work for you. These are only channels you’ll use. You can make exceptions when you want to experiment with other new ways as they come about but the channels you choose for lean marketing form the basis of your marketing code. Which of these diet forms will you adopt?
Check out our previous articles:
- 5 Social Network Insights that Help People Choose Better Cars
- Niche Advertising and Marketing: Zeroing in on your Target
- Social Media is a New Virtual Market! Know How?
- Content Writing and StumbleUpon Traffic Driving Strategy
- Powerful Landing Page Tips for Your Success
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