Source: http://blog.marketingtipsforauthors.com/2010/08/clone-yourself-marketing-tips-that-help.html

By Tony Eldridge, creator of Marketing Tips For Authors

Do you ever wish you had 26 hours in a day or that you could be in two places at once? One way to handle this conundrum is to hire people to do some of the things you just don’t have time to do. But in some cases, the answer to your time-crunch dilemma may be a simple, free solution that you can set up today. I’m talking about automated services that help you get your marketing messages out for you so you can focus on other marketing activities.

In the near past, I would have provided a list of services that you can use to accomplish this. While I will mention a few services that I use, this post will focus simply on educating you on the types of activities that you have available. Why? Because these time-saving services are so widespread and similar in features that a simple Google search will return a virtual smorgasbord of results for you to feast on.

1. Automatically Announce Your New Blog Posts- You could spend an hour each day manually adding your new post to your social sites or you could hire someone to do this for you. But in today’s world, you can set up a service to automatically detect and post the title and link to your social sites. Most of these services will even shorten your URL for micro sites like Twitter.

Before you get all excited and start to sign up for these services, I have a some advice.

• Check out the free services before you pay for this. You may eventually decide to pay for services that offer unique benefits you find desirable, but you may also find that the free services do exactly what you need.
• Be careful not to sign up for multiple services that do the same thing. You may find two cool services that offer unique benefits but they both also post your new blog title to your accounts. You don’t want to flood your social followers with the same announcements over and over.
• Remember that you can set these services up coming or going. What I mean by that is that you can have sites like Twitter pull in your new blog posts or you can even have your blog send out your new posts to sites like Twitter. And there are a host of third party applications that will act as the go-between between services like your blog and Twitter.
• Many applications will post to multiple spots like Twitter and Facebook at the same time, so you may want to look at managing one application rather than managing multiple applications that all do the same thing.

2. Automatically Schedule Your Messages- I love services like Social Oomph. Their free version will allow you to create a tweet that you might want to send out multiple times, save it, and schedule it to run whenever you wish with a few clicks of your mouse. I have hundreds of blog titles going back a couple of years that are still relevant today as they were when I first posted them. Now, once a week or once every two weeks, I can schedule old posts to tweet out to new followers. This can keep great content out of the morgue and help them continue to give benefits to your followers.

3. Have Your Mail Client Sort Your Incoming Mail- Rather than spend your day prioritizing your e-mail or hiring an assistant to do it for you, you can set up folders for incoming e-mails and then set up rules to have incoming mail automatically move messages to these folders. Then, all you have to do is glance through your folders to visually see priority messages.

For example, I never want to miss an e-mail from my wife, Emily. I have a folder in Outlook called, creatively enough, “Emily.” Anytime she sends me an e-mail, it goes straight to that folder and the folder turns bold to let me know an unread message is there. I have folders set up for blogs I follow, incoming bills, Twitter alerts and about 25 other folders. TechTrax has a great written tutorial on setting up rules or for those who learn better by watching, VideoTrainingPro has a video tutorial that will help you set up rules.

4. Make It Easy For Your Followers To Share Through Automation- You love it when people tweet about your post or share it with their Facebook friends, right? Well, people are more likely to do just that if you make it quick and easy for them. Early on, I actually changed the HTML template of this blog to add the TweetMeMe button on all my posts. Now, Blogger has a tool that will add it for you with a click or two of the mouse. Regardless of what tool you use, or where you get it, if you give your readers a simple button to click in order to share your posts, it will increase the chances that they will follow through.

I hope these ideas help you find ways you can automate your daily tasks and free up time to do the other marketing tasks that need to be done. If so, you will be surprised at how productive you will become.

About the Author

Tony Eldridge is the author of the award winning action/adventure novel, The Samson Effect, which Clive Cussler calls a “first rate thriller brimming with intrigue and adventure.” He is also the creator of Marketing Tips for Authors, a site that publishes free tips and videos to help authors learn marketing techniques for their books. You can read the serial release of The Samson Effect at http://samsoneffect.marketingtipsforauthors.com/

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