In Duct Tape Marketing, we often talk about the importance of “living by a calendar”. One of the main points of this advice is that creating a marketing system is not something that is accomplished over a long weekend. Rather, it takes a steady, consistent approach to create and maintain your marketing system.

When I’m working with customers, we generally discuss two broad ways to use a calendar to help us build a marketing system – 1) using monthly themes and 2) setting appointments with ourselves.

Setting a monthly theme

Many people find it helpful to pick a theme for a particular month and work on the project(s) they need to complete for that theme. For example, you could designate September as “website month”. Projects could include:

• Creating your site if you don’t have one
• Adding a blog to your site
• Adding and opt-in newsletter signup form
• Working on getting inbound links to your website

Setting regular appointment with yourself

The second way you should use your marketing calendar is to make appointments with yourself to work on your marketing. These appointments should be treated as if they were appointments with your most important customer. That means no rescheduling at the last minute, no interruptions, no reading email during the meeting, etc.

How often should you have these meetings? Ideally, I think you should schedule one meeting per week to work on your marketing. Some people prefer an every other week schedule. In my experience, people who try to have only one meeting per month struggle to make significant progress on their marketing system.

How long should the meeting be? Pick a duration that works best for you. For me, that tends to be about 90 minutes.

Consistency is the key

By using your calendar to schedule and keep your regular marketing appointments, you will soon have a marketing system in place that will help attract more of your ideal customers.

How do you make sure you set aside enough time to work on your marketing system?