Having a communication calendar is one of the effective and systematic ways of carrying out your promotional events and activities. If you want to be successful in your internet business, it's important for you to create a calendar of events and activities to avoid doing things by accident. Draw a roadmap of your work early enough so that you do not spend your time and valuable resources unprofitably. Always enter the New Year with a communication calendar.
What's a communication calendar?
It's just a simple plan comprising of all your scheduled marketing campaigns, events and activities in the course of 12 months. It's also a record of the different ways you plan to use to remain in touch with your customers. These may include email marketing, newsletters, article writing and submission, information updates, advertising campaigns, product and website promotions. The onus is on you to think of any other promotional activities that you may include in your calendar or plan.
For instance, if your plan is to use article marketing and a newsletter in January to boost your online business, you should specify in your communication calendar when and what you intend to do as in the example below:
January:
i. Articles (8 articles, 2 per week, submitted for distribution on Tuesdays & Fridays) on email marketing and auto responders.
ii. Newsletter (one newsletter, submitted in first week) on Happy New Year and website promotion.
Your communication calendar should have the right amount of communication to your customers. It should neither be too little or too much for it to act as an important tool for boosting your online business. It's important for you to know what you want to achieve and come up with your calendar of activities. If you give too little or too much, your communication calendar will not be effective.
For instance, I have come across many article marketers, who upload and distribute over 15 articles in just one month. If you are an article marketer, remember that you have readers who subscribe to your RSS Feed and continue to receive each and every article you submit. While quantity is very important in article marketing, quality is even more important. Your readers may not want to be bombarded with so many articles, especially if they lack in quality content, within a very short period. They also read useful information from other sources and have limited time.
You can have different communication calendars for different customer groups depending on their needs and problems for which you are trying to provide a solution. For instance, you can choose to have a plan for existing customers and another one for prospects.
Why should you have a communication calendar?
People create plans for various reasons. But let me share with you 5 reasons I consider to be crosscutting.
1. A communication calendar helps you to maintain a trusting relationship with your customers, which requires a high level of quality service delivery, believing in your words and promises, listening to your customers, solving their problems and being innovative. You can never achieve in all those areas if you do things haphazardly.
2. Having a communication calendar makes your planning easier. You are able to know what to do and when to do it. You are able to know how to do your tasks from a well informed point of view. You can attend to your customers' needs and expectations by analyzing the flow of touches from their point of view and reflecting yourself on important aspects of your business vis-à-vis your customers. Am I doing enough or too much? Am I doing the right activities and in the right order?
3. A communication calendar makes it easier to transmute your desires, thoughts and innovations, into actions that will help you to grow your business. Having it written down and committing yourself to fulfill each and every aspect of it is a proven way of walking your way to success in your online business. Transforming your desires, thoughts and ideas into their monetary equivalency is only achievable by taking action and the channel through which you attain your plans is your communication calendar.
4. Your communication calendar helps you to coordinate your activities. Online marketing entails performing various activities to boost your business and it's not easy to fulfill those activities in a more coordinated manner without proper planning. Each part of your calendar supports and links to each other. Your calendar therefore helps you to be efficient and effective.
5. Having a communication calendar is very rewarding. There is nothing more motivating than seeing yourself achieving in each and every aspect of your plan. At the end of each day, each week, each month and each year, you are able to evaluate yourself depending on the achievements made. This is great! Even when your achievements have not been transmuted into their monetary equivalency, you derive satisfaction from the progress, which in turn is a basis for future achievements.
As I wind up, it's important for you to know that while creating your communication calendar, your challenge is to think hard and deep, basing your planning on different sources of information like the feedback you get from your customers. A well thought-out plan, which is exhaustive enough and well-balanced, can help you to boost your online business. Try it out!
Charles Kiyimba owns http://www.cashwithgoleza.com/ and http://www.golezadesigners.com/ where popular home business ideas and opportunities are tested rigorously to find out what works and what doesn't. Visit today to discover the secrets behind building a successful home business.
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