When was the last time you got out of the house and went for a walk or a run? And by extension, when was the last time you gave your website the same treatment?

After speaking to Jennifer about being a contributor to the SEM Post I was trying to decide what to write my first post about. I thought about technical posts, speculative posts and all manner of subjects that, when I need more inspiration for posts I am sure I will forget! It was while I was out running, trying to keep my 40 year old body in some sort of shape that it hit me. Digital marketing is just like keeping fit!

So what do digital marketing and keeping fit have in common you may ask? Both require a balanced approach that is different for every person, just like marketing is for your brand.

Balance in Life & SEO

When it comes to being healthy, we need to have a balance between healthy eating, exercise, sleep, and even just simple downtime. But just as many don’t quite manage the balance when it comes to a healthy lifestyle, as marketers, many of us are missing out on that healthy balance in the life of our websites as well.

A huge difficulty with digital marketing is trying to make sure that you don’t get too hung up on one thing, because to be truly successful you have to balance and juggle a number of things at once – and see the bigger picture.  If not, you will likely see your site fails on many levels, including the all-important SEO level, simply because you were too focused on that one important thing that you failed to do anything else.

Unfortunately, too many marketers forget to take care of both themselves and their websites.

Bring on Digital marketing fitness plan

Digital marketing requires balance, just like fitness. If you focus too much on one thing the others suffer. If you focus totally on SEO, your social media presence could be weak; but if you focus too much on social and don’t invest in SEO, you could lose out there. This goes even further the deeper you look into it; what social networks you invest your time in, and what search strategy you follow etc.

Keep fit digitally

Whatever your brand you can definitely benefit from keeping digitally fit. Each brand requires a different fitness plan; depending on your company the biggest rewards may be SEO, in social media or content marketing. Whatever your plan entails, you can be sure that a plan tailored to your own brand’s needs will be much more effective in the long term rather than an off the shelf approach.

Don’t overdo it

Just like keeping fit, it is important to not over do anything enough to cause yourself an injury (or penalty). Don’t over-optimise content or build too many links with the same anchor text for example. The key to success is being able to take a step back and objectively look at what you are doing and how effective it is on a regular basis.

Measure your progress

It is important to measure your progress in your marketing efforts. Rather than have one big goal (although you can have that too), it is good to have lots of smaller, more reachable goals that can be used to indicate key successes along the way.  Whether it is complete certain tasks for SEO or adding additional content, it is important to keep track of all the improvements you make.

Enjoy the journey

Enjoying the journey is a bit of an odd thing to encourage, especially when trying to apply it to your digital marketing efforts. By this I mean that digital marketing success, just like reaching a peak level of fitness takes time. Enjoy meeting all of the small goals and enjoy the journey, especially when it comes to social media and content marketing for example, where your mood can come through.

This is even more important if you are representing a client on their journey; each step of the way they will look to you for reassurance and guidance, be it for successes or failures.

Maintain your fitness

If you want to remain competitive you have to remember to maintain your digital fitness, even after you have met your goals. Everyone else is training just as hard as you, if not harder; and while you may be at your best level of fitness than you have ever had, there is always room to improve and if you don’t maintain your fitness you will lose it over time and have to rebuild it.

This may be one of the weirdest descriptions about digital marketing that you have read, but the question is: are you digitally fit?