“Mar­ket­ing is very sim­ple; you put some­thing (or the aware­ness of some­thing) in front of a per­son or group that needs or wants it.”

A habit­ual mar­keter is a mar­keter that is in the habit of mar­ket­ing; some­one who con­ducts con­sis­tent mar­ket­ing activ­ity. Habit­ual mar­keters are typ­i­cally peo­ple who pick 3 – 4 (or more) mar­ket­ing activ­i­ties and prac­tice them as often as they can.

A one-time mar­keter is a mar­keter that latches onto a sin­gle idea, prod­uct or ser­vice and does every­thing in his or her power to pro­mote that which they are marketing.

Which is right for you? The answer is rel­a­tive, rel­a­tive to what your mar­ket­ing, the audi­ence you mar­ket to and your per­sonal style of mar­ket­ing. For me per­son­ally, I aspire to be the best habit­ual mar­keter I can be. Inter­net rev­enue is all about ‘catch & release’, throw some­thing at the wall and stick with it until it isn’t of value to your audi­ence any­more then move on. That isn’t easy to do with a one-time mar­ket­ing approach, one-time mar­ket­ing takes a big invest­ment of resources to be able to say, “I did all I could do to make it work”. It’s a valid and accept­able approach mind you, just doesn’t fit into my per­sonal busi­ness model.

Habit­ual mar­ket­ing allows you to take mar­ket­ing activ­i­ties that you develop and apply them to your cur­rent mar­ket­ing efforts, regard­less of the prod­uct ser­vice that you mar­ket. It allows you to develop a ‘method’ of mar­ket­ing a prod­uct or ser­vice (some would call it a dis­tri­b­u­tion chan­nel). The only thing you have to do is deter­mine; will the prod­uct or ser­vice be desir­able to my audience?

It has been said that if you do some­thing for 21 days in a row that it is more than likely going to become a habit for you.  You need to get into the habit of mar­ket­ing, by doing mar­ket­ing. Sounds sim­ple enough eh? It really isn’t as easy as it sounds though, it takes a deter­mined per­son with focus to con­sis­tently do ‘some­thing’ every­day that is related to a par­tic­u­lar project or endeavor. If you want to teach your­self to be a habit­ual mar­keter then you are read­ing the right stuff!

The first item of busi­ness for teach­ing your­self to become a habit­ual mar­keter is to design a ‘game plan’; start the processes by telling your­self that you will become a habit­ual mar­keter. Make the game plan by design­ing a structure:

• Define the objec­tive, what do you hope to accom­plish? You want to become a habit­ual marketer
• Define the steps that you need to take to achieve the objective
  • Step 1: Define 3 – 4 sim­ple mar­ket­ing activities
    • Blog­ging
    • Com­ment­ing in forums and other online communities
    • Sta­tus updates on your social networks
    • Find new social net­works to sign-up for
    • Start an affil­i­ate sales account with Com­mis­sion Junc­tion or Click-bank
    • Place affil­i­ate links in the sig­na­ture line of your email accounts and in social net­work profiles
  • Step 2: Define the inter­val that you feel you can con­sis­tently pre­form the activ­i­ties from step 1
    • Daily (ideal)
    • Every other day
    • Weekly
  • Step 3: Make the unwa­ver­ing com­mit­ment to your­self that you will per­form the mar­ket­ing activ­i­ties you decide upon, in the inter­val you decide upon for a period of no less than 21 days
• Exe­cute the ‘game plan’

It doesn’t stop there, mar­ket­ing isn’t a robotic activ­ity, you have to apply some thought and intel­li­gence to it.  If you just post and talk about ran­dom, off-the-wall stuff no one is going to lis­ten to you.  You have to talk about what you know and what you can advise peo­ple on, you have to relate to your audience.

Writ­ten By:

Ryan Huff
ryan@rthconsultants.com

http://rthconsultants.com

Ryan Huff is a free­lance web devel­oper, tech­nol­ogy men­tor, mar­tial artist, busi­ness devel­oper and an avid inter­net mar­keter. You can con­nect with Ryan at http://rthconsultants.com, fol­low Ryan at http://twitter.com/rthconsultants or at http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1567943288