Do you struggle to keep up sometimes?

I know I do.

There's not a week passes by without some new shiny object being proclaimed as the future of marketing or winning clients.

And since I teach marketing (and I'm a pretty extreme Resource Investigator) I just can't resist checking them out.

But when you have clients to support and products to build, you really don't have the time to try every new technique or tool. Let alone actually implement them properly.

And I know from speaking to many people that the constant pace of new things they're forever being told they need to know about can be pretty overwhelming.

I certainly don't have all the answers, but I do a couple of things that help.

Firstly, although I look at a lot of new things, I'm quite slow to change what I use “in anger” in my business. The thing I think you have to bear in mind is that changing some of the core things you do has a huge overhead.

You have to learn the new strategies and tactics. Then there's a bunch of time to put them in place. Then a whole lot of trial and error to get them to work. Then even more time to actually get them to perform at a level better than you were at before.

The end result is that unless the increase in performance is very big, all the gains you get are written off by the transition costs.

So I change my core marketing quite slowly.

Secondly, I've learned how to measure, analyse and test the effectiveness of my marketing.

That means that when something new comes along I start off with a pretty good sense of whether it will work for me, and I can test to see what the reality is.

That means I'm not just blindly implementing every new thing that comes out.

Finally, I've carved out time to test promising new ideas.

That may sound like more work, but it saves me in the long run.

For the last few years, for example, my main source of traffic and subscribers has been through blogging on my own site and other peoples. But after doing some experiments I switched over to focusing on Facebook advertising last year and it's saved me a ton of time.

Controlled experimentation, rather than just dabbling, lets you continuously improve to get better results for less investment of time.

Over the years my own tests have allowed me to get more subscribers and more clients with less investment of my own time to do so.

You can do the same.