Planning for Success

Time for just a quick, new 10-minute “What’s Working” task for you today before I have to head off on the road again. Driving back to the farm today before heading down to Michigan for more workout filming over the weekend. Big plans for a BIG project in 2013.

And that’s the theme of the day. Planning.

So I’m leaving you with some homework.

No matter how busy you are, you must always be thinking ahead and planning out your promotions for the next few months, and heck, even a basic idea of the next year wouldn’t hurt.

I use an excel spreadsheet to do this, and have been doing it this way for over 6 years.

Here’s  a screenshot.

You can see that this spreadsheet has over 4175 entries in it. I’ve tracked a lot of email subject lines, open rates, promotions, product launches, and more over the years. It takes a little manual labor, but it is worth it.

In the left hand column is the subject line of the email. These fields are highlighted in yellow because it means the email still needs to be written.

Each week is delineated by a pink field with that week’s content focus. The one red field in there is just a hard reminder that I need to fit that priority email in somewhere – SOON.

Some of the fields are populated with suggested subject lines or simple reminders about what the content needs to be about.The columns to the right of that are the date, the day of the week, the number of people that the email was sent to, and the number of opens of the email.

Again, these emails haven’t been sent, so there is no data to report.

I didn’t show you the rest of the sheet, but there are several more columns to the right that show sales totals and revenue breakdown among my various businesses.

So that’s one way to plan things out.

Here’s another promotional calendar that was set up by Mike Whitfield for all of the Publishing Partners in my business. It helped them organize their promotions, because we found that there were over-lapping launches and that led to ineffective promotions and poor sales.

This calendar is a Google document that is easy to share.

The bottom line is that you need to get organized and plan ahead. It doesn’t matter how you do it.

Take 10-minutes and start planning out the way you are going to plan out your promotions for the rest of 2012 and for 2013.

If you can tie it in with a way to track your results, that’s even better.

Plan for profits,
Craig Ballantyne

Keep On Pushing