Feb 12, 2009 Posted in Marketing Ideas

How Big is Your Marketing Brain?

If you’ve ever heard of Rich Shefren, you know what a big marketing brain looks like. The dude is a genius when it comes to helping people set up online entities. Rich has written a number of very valuable reports that he gives away for free on his site Strategic Profits.

I don’t know what made me think of it but I re-read his Internet Business Manifesto the other day and it made one thing abundantly clear. There is a lot of things to do if you’re running an online business or an online marketing department.

This is an image from his report. They say an image tells a thousand words but this image tells a lot more than that. Rich, I hope you don’t mind me using this. If it is a problem just let me know and I’ll remove it.

Take a look at all the things that must be done to make an online business viable. You can click on the image to enlarge it. If you’re still thinking that an online business is simple and that you can start one up in a few hours and maintain in 45 minutes every night, think again.

On the other hand, the good news is that many of these tasks are repetitive and tedious. That means they can either be automated or outsourced. My suggestion is to automate everything as much as possible and outsource everything else that you’re not good at or don’t enjoy doing.

This way you can focus on the things you enjoy (which makes life a lot more fun) but the annoying little things still get done and your business continues to grow.

Compare this to what most online entrepreneurs try to do. That is, do everything themselves. There just isn’t enough hours in the day and even if there were you don’t want to spend all 24 doing stuff you hate.

Nope. Automate, outsource, enjoy. That is the ticket for any business.