Tag: affiliate marketing

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3 Reasons to Automate and Outsource

As a business owner, it’s important to understand what your expertise is. If you’re spending time in areas that you lack skills or information, you may be making mistakes that you don’t even realize you’re making while sacrificing what you are good at doing.

 

When you understand the core business, you will know what you sell, who you’re selling it to, where your buyers are, and how to find them. You’ll also know how you’re going to distribute the product or serve the customer. Additionally, you know how you stand out from the competition, and you use that to your advantage by differentiating yourself in the marketplace.

 

Remove Bottlenecks

 

When you start to automate and outsource tasks in your business as you develop each process, you’ll start to notice that bottlenecks are a thing of the past. Because the truth is, in most small businesses, especially those run by people starting them from home with no business experience, the bottleneck is the business owner.

 

Sometimes lack of skill causes the roadblock. Sometimes they just lack desire or energy because everything becomes so overwhelming. But whatever the reason, if you are engaged in organizing and planning as business owners should do and focused on automating and outsourcing, ensuring that others are responsible for doing, you’re going to get more done.

 

Reduce Errors and Mistakes

 

When you work with software, fewer mistakes will happen once you set it up correctly. Even outsourcing to an expert will ensure that mistakes and errors are less likely to happen. The main reason is that you’re going to use software that is tried and tested, and you’re going to hire people who are experts.

 

The truth is, hiring experts or using automation software can reduce your errors and mistakes so much that the cost will produce an amazing return on investment. You’d probably spend a lot more time worrying over the issue than your customer service expert or the automation software will. But you’ll get superior results in the end.

Setting Boundaries: It’s Not Selfish to Go After What You Want

Spend Time on Higher Value Projects

 

This is the biggest reason of all to automate and outsource. Focus on your primary business, which is the core of your businesses’ existence. As a business owner, while you may need to do things in your business as a job, once you reach specific benchmarks, you should hand those tasks off to machines or to experts so that you can spend time on projects that produce a much higher value for yourself such as business planning and idea generation which is the key to business growth.

You live in an amazing time to be a business owner. You can find plenty of technology to implement in your automation plan and plenty of people to hire in your outsourcing plan. Figure out what you want to do, set your goals for doing it, and then follow through.

 

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How to Do More with Less

Many folks in western society have been taught by word and deed that being busy makes them a good person. The truth is, being busy does not mean that you are productive. You can be busy doing the wrong things. Getting more done with less implies that the impact you make is more significant than your effort.

 

Some ways to get more done with less:

 

  • Understand your key objectives – For any task, what is the point of doing it? Does this task actually impact any of your critical business objectives or the objective of the one task?
  • Automate – If you can document the steps you do for a task, you can likely automate a lot of it. From using macros within your documentation to implementing new automation tech, there is likely a way to do it.
  • Outsource – If you cannot automate it, you can likely get someone else to do it for you. As a business owner, you should actually make it your goal to outsource or automate almost every task in your business, with few exceptions.
  • Batch tasks – Once you’ve figured out what tasks you really do need to do, batch things together that make sense. The fewer steps you can take, the better. For example, if you need to do bookkeeping, save all your booking entries to do one day a week instead of doing it daily.
  • Avoid multitasking – When you are doing a task, do that task. Don’t do anything else that will take away your focus. No human really can multitask anyway.
  • Create realistic schedules – When you write your tasks into your calendar, it should make sense. If a task takes four hours, you need to ensure you really have four hours and not one. For example, include set up time, drive time, and all the time needed to finish the task as scheduled completely.
  • Do the hard things first – If there is one thing on your list you really don’t want to do, but you cannot eliminate it, automate it, or outsource it, get that out of the way first thing.
  • Track your time – When you first start doing things, it helps to track your time so that you stay mindful of how you’re spending it and so that you know how long any given thing really takes you.
  • Focus on money-making tasks – Note which tasks you do that generate invoicing or money in your pocket. These need to be done first thing.
  • Cut distractions – Set up your workspace to eliminate distractions and interruptions. Turn off notifications, your phone, the TV, or anything that can take your mind off what you are doing.
  • Use the right tools – Don’t skimp on investing in the tools of your trade. If a tool exists to use that helps streamline your business and eliminate busywork, you need it.
  • Know your top five – Everyone has off days, but if you create a list of the top five money-making must-dos for a basic day, then even when you have issues, you can focus on those top five tasks.

 

Remember that being organized in your business is part of what a business owner does. Business owners reduce risk in their business by organizing, planning, and generating new ideas that create new opportunities.

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What Do You Do All Day?

 

As a business owner, you have a lot on your plate. But, in order to figure out how to automate your business, you first need to know in detail what you do all day long so that you know which tasks can be automated, should be automated, and even whether it’s something you should be doing at all.

Review
Stay focused

In every business, you will have daily tasks, weekly tasks, monthly tasks, and even yearly tasks or quarterly tasks. The best thing to do is to get out a calendar and enter the items you know you have to do.

 

For example, you have to pay quarterly taxes, and you have to balance your books at the end of the month. You must buy a business license each October or January depending on your location and the rules and laws in your area. Whatever it is that you know for sure has to be done, enter it into your calendar, blocking off the approximate time it will take you to do it.

 

But there are also the daily things you do that generate your income. When it comes to generating income, it’s essential to specify which actions you are doing that generate income and which actions you’re doing that support generating income. Go through the steps you take in your day and write down what you’re doing, step by step.

What’s Your Job as The Owner of Your Business?

 

Coaches Example

 

Ø  Business: Coaches retired teachers starting a second career as independent course and project designers.

 

Ø  Morning: Checks the mail, email, and Trello to find out if there are any fires to put out this morning before paying any bills due for the day. Calls her group coaching clients for the weekly hour Zoom group coaching session. Writes 7 product educational and nurturing emails for a new one-on-one coaching product to market to her group coaching clients.

 

Ø  Afternoon: Records part of an online course in development. Transcribes the group call and sets up her part as a standalone presentation video.

 

Ø  Evening: Answers coaching client questions for those who signed up to receive daily emails and schedules them to be delivered in the morning.

 

As you can see, this is just one day out of an entire year and is not representative of all the money-making tasks this coach does, nor is it a complete picture of what happens in the business overall. But it does give you a great idea about where to start automating and even outsourcing. Once you see what you’re doing visually written out, it’s a lot easier to figure out places that you can improve your process. Take the time to write out every process you do each day that you do them. Once you’ve documented the different activities you do each day, you can identify what needs to be perfected and then automated or outsourced or both.

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What’s Your Job as The Owner of Your Business?

As a small business owner, you probably think that you have a lot of jobs to do. Some people like to describe the job of a business owner as one that wears many hats. As the saying goes, sometimes you have on your salesperson hat, sometimes you have on your finance hat.

 

It depends on what is happening what your job is at any moment. However, your main job description as a business owner is to plan and organize the daily operations of your business.

 

On any given day, you may be responsible for:

 

  • Developing your business plans
  • Arranging financing
  • Hiring staff or contractors
  • Reviewing sales
  • Developing marketing strategies
  • Overseeing daily activities
  • Identifying opportunities

 

All of these jobs represent your main function as a business owner, which is managing your risk.  In each of these jobs, you really don’t physically do anything other than analyzing what someone else did for you, whether it’s automation or human.

 

Therefore, when you realized that you don’t need to physically do the tasks that you design, your job as a business owner becomes a lot simpler and can be boiled down to risk management.

 

When you realize that your job as a business owner is really one of risk management, it becomes a lot clearer what your main function is as a business owner. Realistically, you may have to wear a lot of hats at first, doing the tasks defined for each, — but it’s your choice to do the projects yourself or not as a business owner.

 

In fact, one can argue that it’s best for a business owner not to physically do the tasks that don’t require them since you only have so many hours in the day. It’s always, or should always, be less expensive to outsource or automate where you can. But you do have to start someplace, and most small business owners start out doing all the tasks themselves.

 

In any case, it can help to understand that finding and setting up automation in your business is one of the roles you play as a business owner. By doing so, you’re going to reduce risks associated with your business because you’re going to ensure those tasks get done in a timely fashion by someone (or something) who knows what they’re doing.

 

The more you can automate, the fewer things you have to outsource, and the bigger and better you can build your business because you’re going to free up your time to do more of what an owner does instead of the tasks involved in each area. After all, one of the reasons you started your own business is so that you can have more work-life balance, right?

 

One can argue whether the idea of balance even exists, but it’s clear that if you’re doing the job of 10 people, it’s hard to find that time freedom, much less anything resembling balance. In fact, you’re very likely to get burned out if you’re a small business owner who thinks that you have to physically do everything in your business. Instead, realize that part of risk management is to find ways to free up your time so that you can devote yourself to discovering new opportunities for your business.

 

 

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What’s Your Customer’s Buying Journey

 

One of the first things you need to learn about your business is your customer’s buying journey based on the sales funnel. Big businesses like to call this their customer relationship management pipeline. They tend to use a few basic pipeline structures that follow their customer’s buying journey from awareness to delight.

 

The truth is that no matter what type of business you have, the basic sales funnel is the same and defines the buyer’s journey.

 

  • Awareness
  • Interest
  • Consideration
  • Decision
  • Delight

 

Map your customer’s potential journey so that you can visualize where you need to place touchpoints. For example:

 

  • Awareness – Sync your favorite apps such as Google Sheets, Aweber.com, and other apps using software like Automate.io or Zapier.com to deliver the right content at the right time based on the customer’s behavior.

 

  • Interest – Automatically deliver email subscribers content that teaches them about the products and services you offer via your email software as well as your website using auto sequences and conversational chatbots.

 

  • Consideration – This is when the buyer really wants what you have to offer, and it’s your sale to lose or gain. You can automate content delivery that asks for the sale, such as delivering a free webinar to them. Using the right software, such as offered by HubSpot Automation and others, you can even let the software generate new one time offers based on their behavior.

 

  • Decision – Depending upon the type of business structure you have, whether it’s a course or a physical product or not, you’ll want to help them make the choice to buy by setting up automated discovery call appointments. You can synchronize your website with scheduling software like Acuityscheduling.com to let your customers schedule their own call.

 

  • Delight – Finally, you can create a whole new funnel to use during the post-purchase stage in order to elicit customer delight. When you delight your customers, they’re going to make more purchases and recommend others to you. One way to do this is to automate the onboarding of new customers so that they receive enough information to want to stick with you.

 

People add different steps along the way to each of their funnels based on the path the buyer likes to travel on their buying journey. Each step is a chance to streamline and automate part of the process. To make your customer’s buying journey successful, you’ll hopefully lead them through the entire process past the point they decide to buy your product to include customer delight, loyalty, and advocacy when it’s appropriate.

 

 

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What’s Your Business Type?

 

Do you have a store where people purchase products, or do you offer a service like coaching?

Maybe you offer courses and classes, or you provide customer support or something else entirely? Whatever you offer, how you have structured your business is vital to determine before you start your automation plans.

3 step plan

If you have an online store that people come to in order to purchase products from you, the way you automate and run your business will be very different from the way someone who offers courses or one-on-one personal services does.

 

So, consider what your business type is.

 

Online Store

 

If you sell any type of product, whether it’s physical or digital, with a shopping cart, you have an online store. You may be selling books, content, and even courses if you’re selling them as a product without your extra coaching and input. Essentially if you sell anything online in a shopping cart, you have an online store and can use a lot of automation tips for online stores.

 

Virtual Services

 

If you sell any type of service, administrative, one-on-one coaching, and so forth that you perform at a distance, using your website as your storefront, you are a service-based business. As a service-based business, you’ll organize your business and market yourself differently from an online store where you don’t speak to the customers directly yourself and sell products directly.

 

Virtual Support and Consulting

 

You may also offer only virtual support and consulting without offering direct service. For example, you may coach your clients to create a sales page, set up a freebie, set up a discovery call, but you don’t do it yourself, you simply advise them on what to do, and the client with their team does it. This is an entirely different business structure than a business that does the services directly or delivers the product directly.

 

Virtual Training

 

If you offer classes and “how-to” information to your customers via courses, classes, and content, you have a business that provides classes either self-paced or teacher-led this is a training business. A training business sometimes needs more personal input and engagement than a storefront that just sells the complete self-paced course.

 

There are numerous opportunities for automation in each of these business structures. But first, you need to write it down. What does the composition of your business look like? What do you do for customers and clients, and how do you do it? Is it hands-off or hands-on, or a combination of both? The more you can document how your business works, the easier it will be to find ways to automate and outsource.

 

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The Fundamental Parts of Your Small Business

 

The first thing to think about when you seek to make your days more manageable and more effective is the parts of your small business. What parts of your business are essential to your success? For each business, you’ll need to look at your own situation to determine it, but this can get you started.

 

  • Human Resources – If you hire or contract out to others, you’ll need to concern yourself with setting up, organizing, and managing all your HR. Having some knowledge of this even if you think you’re going to do everything yourself is essential because you should not do it all yourself, and there are laws to consider.

 

  • Accounting and Finance – Every business must figure out how they plan to keep track of income and expenses and set up benchmarks for planning purposes. There is a lot you can automate in this area too.

 

  • Marketing and Advertising – No business can exist if they don’t get the word out about their solutions.

 

  • Production – If you have a product, whether physical or digital, the product has to be produced somehow. Much of production can be automated depending on the type of products you have.

 

  • Information Technology – Most small businesses today do have to deal with technology in some way, which means you need to have a general understanding of the technology available in your industry to help you manage and do your business.

 

  • Operations – The inner workings of your business are ripe for automation. It doesn’t matter if you sell products, manufacture products, or perform services, someone has to be in control of this work, and that’s typically the small business owner because they don’t typically hire managers, but you can.

 

  • Customer Service – Even if you only serve five customers a year, you need to focus on customer care in order to keep your customers happy. A lot of this process can be automated too.

 

  • Purchasing – This is a department that will often fall to the owner of a small business but exists as a separate department in a large business. In this department, you’ll want to figure out what the business needs, how much, when, and negotiate better prices, and so forth.

 

  • Legal Department – This is one of the first areas to go for a small self-owned business, but it is still important to acknowledge this area. You always want to make sure what you do is legal and follows the laws.

 

  • Business Development and Growth – This includes sales, marketing, project management, product management, and more. If you focus on business development, you’ll focus on how you can use what you have to expand your audience and make more money.

 

While in general, all businesses share the same fundamental parts, some businesses, especially home solopreneurs, may place importance on different parts depending on their goals. But these potential fundamental parts of your small business bare considering so that you can create a solid automation plan.

 

 

 

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6 WAYS YOU CAN TRACK YOUR PROGRESS

 

When you are truly committed to something, the best way to succeed is by making goals and then measuring and tracking your progress toward reaching those goals. Most life coaches love the saying, “If you fail to plan, you’re planning to fail.” And, whether you like it or not, that’s the truth. If you want to succeed in your walking plans to improve your health goals, then track your progress.

Walking

Let’s look at some different ways that you can track your walking progress.

 

* Buy a Pedometer – There are many different types of pedometers out there. You can get one for about ten bucks nowadays. A pedometer counts your steps for you so that you can simply wear it all day or when you are exercising to ensure you are getting as far as you want to get each day.

* Write in Your Calendar / Planner – A low-tech way (unless you use an online calendar) is to simply write down in your calendar how far you walked each day. That way you can ensure you’re hitting your daily goals, which will also ensure you reach your long-term goals. Even if you are using an electronic means of tracking, sometimes it’s more motivating to see your calendar filled with walking data.

* Join an Accountability Group – On Facebook and other social media platforms, there are numerous support and accountability groups for walkers that you can join. You can tell the group your goals and sometimes find a mentor that will hold you accountable in your walking goals.

 

* Get a Fun Tracker Like Fitbit – Fitbit.com offers not only an app that is essentially a pedometer, but also more features such as joining with others to track your walking, sharing your walking, and meeting up with others who love walking.

 

* Get Fun Personal Training Software – Need even more motivation to track your progress? A fun app that can help you stay motivated is called Endomondo. You can sign up for free, and it’s like having a personal trainer in your pocket each day while you’re also keeping track of your progress.

Link – https://www.endomondo.com/

* MapMyWalk – This is an app that tracks your walking progress. However, it’s even more than that because you can find walking trails in cities across the world that you might want to try. Plus, you can keep track of your time and distance with the app.

Link – https://www.mapmywalk.com/app/

 

Tracking walking progress is essential to ensuring your success with walking for health issues. The only real way to be sure you are doing what you have set as your goal is to double-check your progress using any of these methods. If you write it down and look at it regularly, it will motivate you to do more.

 

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TIPS TO SMART WALKING

 

The main thing to remember, no matter what you’re setting a goal for, is that your goals should be SMART. That means they need to be specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and timely. If you make a habit of creating goals for all aspects of your life using this acronym, you’ll be a lot more successful – no matter what you do.

 

But before you get started with your SMART walking goals, let’s talk about some factors to consider as you’re creating your goals.

 

1) Know Your Fitness Level – Almost everyone can walk. This includes people who are very unhealthy, even if they can only walk for five minutes. Start with your fitness level and set your goals accordingly.

 

2) Know What You’re Working Toward – Pretend you stuck to everything you are supposed to on this journey; what is the dream goal you’re working toward? Even if it seems crazy, knowing that final goal is essential for designing your plans.

3) Know Your Time Availability – This is part of being realistic because if you have roadblocks to having enough time to devote to walking for health to meet your goals, you may not succeed

Creating SMART Walking Goals

Walking

Here is an example of a healthy yet sedentary office worker for you to follow:

 

* Specific – My goal is to walk a minimum of 10,000 steps per day by the end of six months, starting where I am now at 1000 steps per day.

 

* Measurable – Every day, I will add 100 steps to my total. It will take me 90 days to reach 10,000 steps per day.

 

* Attainable – I am overweight but with no health problems, so my goal to walk 10,000 steps a day by the end of 90 days and to maintain it for 6 months is entirely doable in terms of my health.

 

* Realistic – Adding in 100 steps a day is realistic because I am healthy, and I have enough time. It’ll take me about an hour and a half at my walking pace to reach 10,000 steps. I plan to walk each morning between 7 and 9 am. I also have an indoor place I can walk when the weather is terrible.

 

* Timely – By adding the goal of reaching 10,000 steps in 90 days, then maintaining that for six months, it makes the goal timely – meaning it has a time limit that you have set for you to reach your goal.

As you see, crafting SMART walking goals will help you set up a plan that is achievable if you simply follow it. Once you have set the plan up, you can put it in your calendar, tell your accountability partner, and then just follow it. You will reach your goal without issue.

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HOW TO CHOOSE THE RIGHT SHOES

 

One of the things you need to consider if you want to start a walking program for yourself is your footwear. Finding the right shoe for walking is essential because if you have foot pain or problems with your feet, it can cause problems with the rest of your body too – from your legs to your knees to your back and more.

Walking

Buy a Walking Shoe

 

If you’re going to use the shoes for walking, you should buy a walking shoe. Walking shoes are typically lightweight, allow for ventilation to prevent moisture, have outsoles that provide traction, plus they offer the right type of arch support.

 

You Don’t Have to Buy Expensive Shoes

 

You really don’t have to buy an expensive walking shoe to protect your feet. You only need to make sure it has the right walking shoe features such as those mentioned above. Look for shoe sales in January and April to get the best deals on walking shoes.

Think About How Your Foot Is Shaped

 

Everyone is different, so once you start looking at walking shoes you want to figure out what type of foot you have. How wide is your foot? How long is your foot? Do you have a big arch or a small arch? Different walking shoes will fit different criteria.

 

Ensure That the Shoe Fits

 

When it comes to walking shoes, you don’t need to “break them in.” They should feel comfortable from the moment you put them on. When trying on the shoes, be sure to wear the type of socks you plan to wear while walking to ensure that they fit the same. Also, try shopping for shoes after you have been walking so that your feet are at their largest size. Get your feet measured too, because you may be wearing the wrong size out of habit.

 

Don’t Wear Old Shoes

You really do need to buy new shoes more often than you might think. A good walking shoe will last about 400 miles of use, but you can also choose to get rid of them when the outsole is worn (as a guide). The best thing though is to check your mileage, just like you would for your car tires. If the outsole is not in good shape, it can cause a considerable impact on the rest of your body due to not giving you enough traction or cushion for your steps.

Wearing the right walking shoes will prevent issues such as blisters, as well as body pain that can be caused by the shock of your foot hitting the pavement. That’s why a walking shoe is lighter, has good shock absorption due to the way the outsole is made, and good materials inside to cushion the impact of hitting the ground with each step. Your feet will thank you, and your entire body will thank you too.

13 WAYS WALKING CAN BENEFIT YOU