In the five years that I have been marketing online, I have discovered that stuff happens. It is inevitable. The number of problems that can pop up in regard to your marketing are staggering. You have everything from hosting problems to sites going down on you to spam to you name it. You know what I am talking about. It seems that every single day that goes by, there is another problem. Sometimes they pile up. When that happens, you need to stay focused and stay calm. This article will show you just how I do it.
The first thing you need to do, in order to deal with problems as they arise, is to make a regular schedule of what you need to get done on a daily basis. This is your normal and regular work. This should be written in stone as much as possible. Having a schedule keeps you focused so that you don't drift and get into things that aren't productive. However, having said that, things happen and when they do, you need to deal with them. But how?
You need to make a second to do list. This list will be all the problems that arise in a given day. You have to take each problem and prioritize it by giving it a rating. A 1 might mean that it is a minor problem and can wait until the end of the day. A 5 might mean that the problem is an emergency and has to be taken care of right away. What are examples of each? Well, I can't speak for everybody because one person's major problem is another person's minor annoyance. However, I will offer some guidelines.
If your web host contacts you and tells you that they are canceling your account because of spam complaints, regardless of whether or not you are at fault, then this is a serious problem. The canceling of your hosting essentially puts you out of business. So this needs to be taken care of right away. Fortunately, you can get new hosting in a heartbeat and your domain propagated to the new host in 24 hours or even less in some cases.
On the other hand, if you have a customer who writes to you to tell you that they didn't get the product that they paid for because either the link doesn't work or they're on a slow speed connection and they need you to send them the file, while it's important to take care of your customers, this isn't a dire emergency. Yes, you take care of the issue, but if you have things that are more pressing...like that hosting problem...you take care of that first.
The thing you have to do in all of this is to stay calm and handle each thing as you get to it. Eventually, all problems can be taken care of. Some just take more time than others.
To YOUR Success,
Steven Wagenheim
