Marketing a book is tough work. Building a platform, generating a blog following, mastering Twitter and Facebook all take time. Lots of it.

Adding to the sensation of drowning in a river of work is the tsunami of information available online.

I buy one book and hardly finish it when I hear of another. Often these experts offer contradictory advice. Who do I listen to? What advice should I follow?

Here are five tips for marketing your book more efficiently:

1. Write down your goals and tasks for the week and day. The tried and to do list is a great tool. So figure out what you want to achieve, break it all down into smaller steps, and schedule when you will do them. Building a wordpress blog involves a learning curve, so don’t try to get it all done in a day.

2. Watch your schedule. You want to make sure you keep working at the marketing, but not at the expense of actual writing. If you don’t keep creating more articles, short stories, or books, you won’t have much need to keep marketing. Make sure your schedule includes writing time, not just marketing

3. Get help. Technical problems with plugins or RSS feeds can be frustrating to fix, especially if you aren’t sure what you are doing. Don’t waste too much time on these. If you can’t figure it out in a reasonable amount of time, pay someone to solve the problem for you.

4. Don’t rush. Throwing any old blog post up on your blog so you can mark it off your to do list won’t help you in the long run. No one is going to follow a mediocre blog or one with countless typos. All your blog posts have one purpose: to give readers value, so they come back for more. p

5. Analyze what is working. Once you have a strategy in place for awhile, ask yourself if is working. Sometimes this can be more of an art than a science, but tools like Google Analytics are good place to start. These tools can tell you how long readers stay on your website, which pages they look at, and other information that can help you refine your marketing.

And sometimes you don’t have to do any analysis to know something is wrong. I had a twitter glitch last month, so missed about a week, and reduced the number of times a day I was tweeting. I also changed my content. My number of followers has tripled, but sales are way down. It’s time to think about some other adjustments to my twitter strategy.

How do you manage to juggle writing and marketing? Take some time to think about how to schedule writing and marketing your books so that you can make the most of your time.