One way to ensure that your self-promotions go smoothly and get results is to give yourself enough time to plan for every campaign and every promotion you do. While ideally, you want a 90-day lead on your business, even a month to six weeks ahead of any launch gives enough time to at least manage a planned promotion properly.

Create an Editorial/Publication Calendar

One way to be more purposeful in your self-promotion is to create a calendar in advance of everything that you need to create and do for any launch including everyday business activity. As the CEO of your business, you are responsible for planning everything that is done in your business but so many sole proprietors tend to skip the planning and do a lot of busy work that gets them nowhere each day. That won’t be you if you create plans ahead of time.

Organize Content According to Planned Launches

As you work on content ideas, look to the products you plan to sell or launch. What type of content do you need for each? You probably need blog content, email content, social content, and even content for your affiliates. All of it needs to be in the planner so that you can simply go to work each day knowing you’re doing something that gets you to the launch and helps make more sales.

Look for Complementary Products or Services

You don’t need to only sell things that you make and launch. You can fill in the spaces by promoting other people’s products and services as an affiliate. This is a great way to make more money faster. But you’ll still need advance content, training content, and so forth whether you created it or not.

Shoot for 90 Days Planned

While even a month in advance is a good thing, shooting for 90 days in advance is better. If you can get to the point where you’ve planned out all the work that needs to be completed in your calendar and have the tasks scheduled for the person to do them that is responsible for them, it’s much more likely to get done.

Send to Your Contractors Early

Once you have the outlines and information, you can send the work to your contractors to get done. When you are working 90 days in advance, the thing that is going to help the most with organization is the fact that it’s a good lead time so if mistakes happen, someone gets sick, and so forth you have some leeway without cancelling the launch.

Use a Project Management System

Even if you do all the work yourself, using a project management system of some kind will help you get more done. There are many choices such as Basecamp.com or something like Trello.com that can work. Set up a system, even if it’s a combination of Google Apps, so that you can easily schedule your work and organize it to get done promptly in the order it’s needed.

When you give yourself plenty of time to create promotions, you’ll be able to give your contractors plenty of lead time. When you do that, you’ll be able to plan them, think everything through, and get the work done in plenty of time without doing it alone.