As part of your regular marketing activities, you'll often need to complete various Web forms. To greatly speed up the process, create a marketing cheat sheet. This is simply a text file containing all the information that you have to provide over and over again.
Start with the obvious things like your name, company name, address, phone number, URL, email contact, etc.
For search engine and directory submissions, add your web site title, several descriptions of varying lengths and keywords sorted most important first, so that when a form only accepts half of them, it gets the best half. If you have multiple sites, provide this information for each one.
Also include several versions of your main ads – both for your website and products / services, plus those for any affilate products you regularly promote – varying their length and style together with a selection of your best headlines for each.
Type each item or group of information on a separate line (visualize the boxes in online submission forms). Save it in an easily opened format that's not taxing on your system memory, such as Notepad (Mac owners can use TextEdit, or Stickies).
Put your data file or a Shortcut (the Windows version of Mac's Alias) to it in an easily accessible place – it can be a real pain if you have to ferret through open file dialogues for it every single time you want it!
Keep your marketing cheat sheet open whenever you're doing promotion work online and simply copy and paste the information as you need it.
You'll save even more time if you get a multiple clipboard utility for your computer.
The shareware CopyPaste for Mac which now offers a CopyPaste for Windows version as well, is the best. It allows up to 100 clipboards which can also be saved through restarts, plus many, many other useful features.
This enables you to keep the items you need most permanently in memory without needing to copy them each time.
You can also get Firefox, Safari or Internet Explorer to help with your form filling. All have form autofill features (via plugin for Firefox) that will complete the basic information like your name, address, etc., with just a click of a button.
You can also make good use of the auto complete functions by storing much of the information you'll use repeatedly (such as URLs, web site titles, etc.) in the browser's memory, so that whenever you need it you'll only have to type one or two letters, instead of the whole thing.
If your willing to be a bit more creative, prefix the information you want to store with a number and then just type in the number for the whole lot to be instantly pasted into the form field.
Since the text is always hilighted when inserted, it's very quick to remove the unwanted number at the beginning. A single press of the left arrow key on your keyboard followed by a single forward delete will leave you with just the text you want.
Whilst I find both of these features to be extremely useful time savers, I still turn to my trusty marketing cheat sheet for all my major promotion tasks.
