If you are like most people, each time you come across a new marketing idea you add it to your existing approach. You never think to weed out approaches which haven’t yielded any fruit yet. You just keep adding more. Time for that to change!

Marketing strategies and actions tend to accumulate. They hang around and continue to siphon off time from your day (even when they may not be working as well as you'd like). We get into habits of actions. Seldom do we take time in our busy schedule to really assess how we are spending our time.

To improve your marketing, you'll need to clean out some old ways of working. Start to make this a habit. Every week, at a minimum, schedule time in your busy day for a marketing tune-up. Ask yourself following questions during that tune-up:

1)What’s working in my current marketing efforts? 2)What’s not working at all? 3)What’s not working as well as it should and how can I improve it?

What’s Working?

These showed be hard to find. They are all marketing actions you are taking which are successfully getting your name in print, driving traffic to your website or blog, making phone ring, and selling product.

Based upon your business’ current stage, one strategy of growth will be better than another. There are seven stages associated with life of an online business. Let's call them:

·The Labored Beginnings ·The Toddler Stage ·The Adolescent Stage ·The Troubled Teen Stage ·The Young Adult Stage ·The Maturity Stage ·Death or Renewal Stage

The first stage of your business, Labored Beginnings Stage, is most difficult stage. In this stage you will be building foundation of your business. With a shoddy foundation, you will have a stillborn business. With a solid foundation, your business will experience a long and healthy life.

In this stage, you need to decide on focus of your business, its product, its business plan, its marketing plan, financial decisions, its legal form, and then launch business. Many sleepless nights will accompany this stage. You may wake up in a cold sweat wondering what hell you are doing. In this stage, your emotions will swing between unbridled optimism and heart palpitating fear.

Having successfully navigated first stage, your business will grow into its next stage, Toddler Stage. In Toddler stage, your business is just finding its legs. It takes a few steps forward. It takes a few steps backward. It occasionally falls on its butt.

In Toddler Stage, you are going to start selling your product on eBay™ . eBay™ is by far largest online auction site. If you want to make a good living selling online, eBay™ is place to start. In this stage, you will fully establish yourself as an online seller. You will observe powersellers, elite of eBay™. They are your models. Learn all you can.