A recent giveaway section in The Times newspaper (www.thetimes.co.uk) was called “Successful Modern Entrepreneurship”. It featured mostly interviews with UK business owners discussing how they manage to run their business successfully, whilst also making time for other activities in a work / life balance manner.

Several of the interviewees discussed how they were not only the MD / CEO of their business, but that they were also the people primarily responsible for marketing and promoting the company to others. This is a far from unusual situation – one I’ve come across very many times over the years I’ve been helping businesses to promote themselves over the internet.

As well as several other useful tips, one of the main ones that caught my eye was the instruction to “Do your marketing” – featured in their Top Ten list of things to do in order to achieve the best balance for running a successful operation. Their recommendation is based on: “..marketing takes time to work. Relationships take time to develop. Customers take time to know, like and trust you. Be the one who shows up regularly, not just when you’re desperate..” (As suggested by productivity guru, Grace Marshall).

Relating this to social media and blog writing, it’s clear that the recommendation would be to ensure you actually keep on top of these elements of your marketing, by doing them on a regular basis. I’m well aware that many businesspeople will concentrate on “day to day” activities and continually put things like updating their blog and posting on Facebook to the bottom of the “to do” list – often performing this action so often that they eventually decide they’re never going to have enough time to write anything worthwhile, so they may as well simply give up.

Hence the enormous number of “ghost town” blogs and social media accounts that serve little purpose other than to clutter up the web with nothing of any value. And certainly, an empty blog or social media presence is not especially likely to encourage potential clients to contact you. So if there’s one thing I always say is the most important factor in terms of maintaining your presence online, it is to actually do it. Write the blog, Facebook post, Tweet and get them online so people can see you actually do exist and are not only active, but worth contacting.

Making time for this isn’t something you should put off – as reinforced in the newspaper pullout referenced above – as it should be viewed as an essential part of your business activity, rather than something you can leave for another time. (And, of course, if you feel you really don’t have the time to do it yourself, you can always utilise the services of someone like me to keep on top of things for you!).