I remember a poster in my dentist's office when I was little. It read: "You don't have to brush all of your teeth, just the ones you want to keep."
This lesson stays with you for your entire life....if you let things go and don't pay consistent attention to them, don't worry - they will go away. This is true about your relationships, your health and your business. Take them for granted and they won't be around very long to need your attention.
A colleague of mine was blogging consistently and seeing excellent traffic on her site. She got busy, ran out of ideas and let things slide for a couple of months. When she went back to publishing blogs again, she saw a significant decrease in the number of eyeballs to her blog. She felt as though she had let her readership down and they were responding with giving their attention elsewhere.
It does not take much to fall off people's radar. You may think - hey, where's the loyalty? It's not necessarily a case of loyalty as much as it is a fact that there are so many shinny objects. The distraction level is so high on the internet it is amazing. You have to make yourself stand out and commit to being present as much as possible. It's a real commitment. Marketing online is not a casual thing. You need to be where the masses are - consistently.
Anytime you put focused attention on any part of your business, you see positive results - increased sales, more visibility, etc. Your business will experience atrophy if you don't continue to work that muscle. The same goes for social media. As your engagement diminishes, so will your community's engagement with you diminish.
The best thing you can do when you find you have slacked off is to take action on it quickly. Adjust your schedule purposefully. If you usually get up at 6:00 am get up a half hour earlier. Use the first hour of your day to work on one element of your book, one piece of your business development plan, or one aspect of social media, etc. You won't have to keep this up forever, just long enough to get the momentum going again.
Use technology to help you. Start by using something as simple as a free account to schedule your Twitter posts, like SocialOomph. In one 30-minute block of time you can schedule all of your tweets for the entire week.
Pick a morning or evening (even in front of the television) to upload your blogs for the week and save them as Drafts. The individual url (or permalink) will already be assigned to each blog so you can also schedule your tweets in advance for blogs that are not yet published. Just use a shortened url service like Bit.ly so you have the links already programmed into your tweets. Now, each day you want to post a new blog, all you have to do is click Publish on a Draft version - a whole five minutes out of your day! Yippee.
No excuses - get moving so you can stay in the game!
Peggy McColl is a New York Times best-selling author and an internationally recognized expert in the field of personal and professional development and Internet marketing. As an entrepreneur, business owner, mentor and professional speaker Peggy has been inspiring individuals to pursue their personal and business objectives and achieve ultimate success. She provides effective Internet marketing solutions for entrepreneurs, authors, publishers, professionals, and business owners, who want to establish an online presence, achieve bestseller status, build their brand, grow and/or expand their business online. You can find out more about Peggy at her website, Destinies.com.