How do you manage / log your micro-marketing tasks?

I’m surprised you haven’t gotten anything in way of a response here. I wish I had a great system to track just the sort of thing you’re talking about. Maybe we could reason something out within the “collective”?

The first thing I thought of would be to make sure you’re getting some good stats on where your site traffic is generated. There’s a number of good products, but Google Analytics is free, easy to use, and easy to get set up. The information you gather can give you an idea of where traffic is coming from and what areas may be most successful there. Of course this doesn’t cover the other items you mention like your business cards or networking.

For those sorts of things your ‘data’ is going to be mostly anecdotal, asking prospective clients/customers how they heard about you, keeping track of referrals, or just jotting down how you met someone. I would guess over time, if you keep these experiences you could categorize them and eventually find out if shaking hands or leaving comments is working out better (as an example).

For the scheduling part, I think it would come down to what works best for the individual. The problem I always run into is that I always put the actual work first instead of putting the time in to find more work/customers/business. So I plow through a project and then have nothing lined up afterwards or nothing to track the impact of the work I’ve just done. Putting time aside each day/week/month for marketing and evaluation would probably be a good start. What do you think the right percentage of time would be? 15–20? Right around one day a week?

I’d love to hear if you’ve found something comprehensive out there to take care of this sort of thing and I hope more folks jump in on the conversation.