As small business owners, one of the things that we’re short on is time and particularly time to do marketing. Marketing is just one of those things that goes by the wayside when everything gets busy isn’t it?

Here’s the problem though. If you only do marketing only when things gets are quiet and then don’t do any when you’re busy with other work, it will lead very quickly to peaks and troughs in your business. The trick to sorting this out is to do marketing all the time even when you’re busy.

Not so easy if you don’t have any time though….

So how do we sort this out?

Well let’s look at getting time to do marketing in a bit more detail. Is time really the issue here? Small business owners say that they don’t have the time to do marketing, but often that’s not the case.

What’s really going on with small business owners is this:

• They don’t know what marketing to do

• They don’t know where to start with their marketing

• They do some marketing and it doesn’t work so they get frustrated with marketing

Result – for whatever reason is that no marketing actually gets done. Time is blamed, but that’s not really the issue.

If you can resonate with what I’m saying here, then we need to get you out of this trap. Here’s how:

1. The first thing to do is get some ideas of what marketing you can do for your business. Go to www.exceptionalthinking.co.uk, fill in your details on the home page and you’ll get instant access to our 50 ideas to promote your business. This will give you loads of ideas that you can use to promote your business.

2. Once you’ve got some ideas, the next thing to do is learn how to do them. Many small businesses get put off implementing an idea because they’re not sure how to do it. The answer to this is learn. Learn as much as you can about IT, cold calling, speaking or whatever you’re stuck on. Imagine your business is a University and you’re a student. Your job is to learn so get cracking.

3. Step three is to let go of the past. Yes, some things might not have worked for you previously and you may be frustrated with marketing. But, all the ideas I’m going to give you when you download the 50 ideas to promote your business factsheet are free or very low cost to do. They may take you a bit of time to do but as they won’t be costing you any money to do, you can just try them out.

4. Do some marketing. Even if you do five minutes of marketing each day, that’s much better than doing nothing and eventually you’ll find that your peaks and troughs of your business even themselves out.

5. Finally, keep an eye on what’s working for you and what’s not. If some promotional activity isn’t working, drop it but keep on with the activities that are.

The trick to getting some time to do marketing in your business is to actually make some time. Follow the steps I’ve outlined above and see what happens.