Tag: Business Building

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Putting It All Together And Developing A Routine That Will Keep You On Track

Over the course of the past six blog posts, we’ve talked about the importance of consistency and how it can help you grow your traffic, your subscribers, your customers, your product catalogue, and most importantly your income. Now it’s time to bring it all together and create a daily, weekly, and monthly routine that will keep you on track to continue to grow your business.

 

Any online business can be broken down into three different areas that need your effort and attention. They are traffic, list, and offer. You need visitors to your website. Then you need to convert those visitors into subscribers. Finally, you need to make those subscribers an offer so you can make money. Keep this in mind as you build your routine.

 

Do something every single day to send more traffic your way. This could be content marketing. It could be social media. It could be tweaking your SEO. Or it could be paid ads. Start by making a master list of things you can do to get more traffic. Pick things you can quickly do and rotate through one or more of them on a daily basis. Things that take a bit longer should become part of your weekly and monthly routine. For example, you may choose to learn how to run Facebook ads this month as one of your bigger projects. The most important part is to do things consistently to drive more traffic to your website.

 

Next, think about what you can do to get more subscribers. Adding an opt-in box to your latest blog post is a quick task that could go on your daily to-do list. Setting up a new opt-in funnel with a fresh lead magnet may make a great weekly project. Writing a book to tap into a new market via Amazon would be more of a project that takes a month or more. Come up with a variety of different things you can try, tweak, and do more to grow your list consistently.

6 Things to Include on Your Freebie Opt-in Page

Last but not least, you’ve got to make an offer. This could be something evergreen like crafting a new autoresponder email for your flagship product. It could be a daily task of running and tweaking ads. Or it could be a free SEO and social media campaign that you work on for a few weeks. Make a list of what you can do to get your offers in front of fresh eyeballs and get to work. And don’t forget to set aside some time each week to work on the next paid product as well.

 

Keep chipping away and continuing to build and fine-tune your routine. Your consistent efforts will start to pay off and more importantly, they will begin to compound as you get more traffic, grow your list by leaps and bounds, and add more products each new customer may be interested in. Keep at it. Consistency is the key to long-term profit.

 

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Set Up A Product Creation Schedule For Yourself And Your Team

Let’s talk about money. More importantly, let’s talk about how you profit from your online properties. You do it through ads, by making affiliate sales, or my personal favorite – by selling your own products. Those products are what we’ll be talking about today. More specifically, we’ll be discussing creating information products consistently. Why information products? Because you create them once and sell them again and again. No supply line, no storage, no overhead. When you make a sale, it’s almost pure profit.

 

I’m going to let you in on a secret it took me a while to discover when I first started out. It’s much easier to sell an existing customer a second product than it is to find a brand new customer. It’s even easier to sell them the third, fourth, fifth one. You get the idea. That’s because you’ve done all the hard work of earning this person’s trust already and if you’ve done your job right, the first thing they purchased from you is already helping them solve their problem. That’s what information products are all about. Solving a problem. To create that next product, look at where your customers are at and think about what they need to do next. What’s another problem they will face and how can you help them solve it.

 

For example, your first product may be an eBook or course on setting up a WordPress site. Next, your customers may need to learn about creating content that attracts the right type of reader. And then they need to learn about traffic, and list building, and effective social media strategies. Each one of these could be a new info product or new content for your paid membership site.

 

Once you have an idea of what types of products you want to create, it’s important to get them out consistently. You want to have a new product out there for your existing customers to buy. Of course, you’ll also attract new buyers along the way who will then not only buy the new thing you’ve come out with but hopefully also some of the other titles and courses you have out there.

 

Start with a list of products you want to create. Do your best to estimate how long it will take you to create the product and all the infrastructure that goes along with it like a sales page, a download page, autoresponders, and solo emails to promote it, a promotion schedule, etc. Make a list of everything you need to do before you can launch this new product. Then get to work. Chip away at it every day and continue to consistently work towards each of these new product launches, adjusting your timeframe as needed.

Outsourcing: The Key to Success for The Life Affirming Entrepreneur

In the beginning, it will probably be just you working on this product creation. Maybe you’re hiring out the graphics. Put that on the schedule and communicate with your graphic designer early to avoid bottlenecks. As time goes by, you may choose to outsource some of the product creation. Maybe you’re hiring an editor to proofread your work. Or a VA to help with the setup, infrastructure, and customer service. Eventually, you may even hire some writers to create these products for you. As your team expands, it’s even more important to have a schedule everyone works off to make sure these new products come out regularly.

 

 

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Struggling With Social Media? A Calendar And System Can Help

Do you have a hard time with social media? Either you aren’t finding the time to get around to posting regularly and getting discouraged by a lack of results you’re getting. You know what I’m talking about. You aren’t getting a lot of new followers on your page on Facebook for example and when you post something only a small fraction of those people see the post. It can be discouraging and feel like you have to pay to play by buying ads if you want your content to be seen. Thankfully that’s not true. What is true however is that consistency can help you grow your reach on any social media platform. It can help you with Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, and anywhere else where your ideal customers choose to hang out.

 

This brings up an important point. Before you dive in and invest a lot of time and effort on every single platform, take a look around. Where are your people hanging out? What media does your tribe prefer? For example, if you’re running a recipe blog, you have to be on Pinterest, and depending on your particular niche, you may also want a Facebook presence, including a group, and possibly a YouTube channel. If you’re into sourdough, you’ve got to be on Instagram… Do your research and do your best to determine where you want to be before you get started.

 

Once you have that figured it, it’s time to come up with a posting schedule. Remember, consistency is key. You’re better off doing fewer posts and shares more regularly than overdoing it and burning out. Start with a conservative number that you’re comfortable with across all platforms and write it down. For example, you may choose to do 5 tweets per week, 10 pins, 3 Facebook posts, one Facebook Live video, and a new YouTube video every other week.

 

Once you have your schedule, it’s time to schedule the actual content using a calendar. You can use Google Calendar or an old-fashioned paper one. The key is being able to stay organized and having your social media goals in writing to ensure it gets done and posted regularly. How far out should you schedule? That’s up to you. If you like to plan in big batches every few months, go for it. If you prefer to be more spontaneous, do it once a week. Play around with different time frames and see what works best for you. When you know what you’ll be posting about and have the text and images ready ahead of time, it’s quick and easy to keep up with social media.

 

To save even more time and make social media content more hands-off, take a look at some of the scheduling tools available. I like Hootsuite, MeetEdgar, PostPlanner, and Tailwind (for Pinterest). Use them to schedule and loop posts that will go out without you having to log into your social media profiles every single day.  Instead, you can set aside time once every couple of weeks to do the bulk of your work. Then check-in from your phone throughout the week to respond to comments etc. Getting organized and figuring out a system that works for you can be such a game-changer when it comes to being consistent on social media and growing an engaged following. When you have those main posts going out on schedule, you can then pop in and interact & post in real-time as and when time allows.

 

Tools and Tips to Help You Automate Social Media Marketing

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Why You Need To Mail Your List Regularly

I have a question for you. How often are you mailing your list? Do you sit down once a month to create a newsletter for your existing subscribers? Or are you waiting to reach a certain number of subscribers before you even start to mail? If so, I think you’re making a big mistake.

 

Mailing lists only work when you use them to get in touch with your subscribers regularly. If you wait too long, they’ll forget about you. When you’re no longer relevant or important to them, they’ll unsubscribe, or worse, mark your emails as spam. Yes, even if it is something they opted in to receive. People forget. It’s your job to stay on top of mind. And you do that by emailing them regularly.

 

Mailing once a week is a good start for most people. If you’re not crafting email messages for your readers regularly right now, start there. Send out a message and let your readers know what to expect. Good mailing lists are all about setting and meeting expectations. Tell them that you’re excited to kick things off and that you’ll have something fun and valuable stuff to share with them each week. If possible, set a date and time and tell them to keep an eye out for your emails. This will do wonders for your open rates. For example, you could tell them to look for a new message from you every Wednesday morning. Then deliver on that promise.

 

Meeting expectations builds trust. Not only are your subscribers more likely to stick around, open, and read your emails, they’ll also trust you when you make an offer or a recommendation. That means you’ll start to see more clicks and sales on your affiliate links, and of course higher conversions on your own product offers. Build that relationship with your target audience and move people from prospect to customer, and eventually to a raving fan by staying in touch regularly via email.

 

And here’s a little bonus tip. Ask your readers to share you with others. Every so often invite them to share your opt-in page or even ask them to forward one of your emails to people they know who may be interested in the topic. Keep it light and casual and don’t overdo it. You’ll be surprised how quickly your subscriber list will grow when you enlist the help of current readers.

 

To get started, commit to an email schedule. Start weekly and stick to it for a couple of months. Use the email schedule features of your autoresponder service to make sure it happens even if life gets crazy. Don’t miss an issue and work on building that reputation of being reliable and consistent and see what happens. I think you’ll be hooked.

How to Optimize Your Email Subject Lines

 

 

 

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Keep Readers And Search Engines Happy By Publishing Content Consistently

One area where consistency will start to pay off quickly is when it comes to your website or blog. Putting out fresh content regularly is great for both your readers and search engines. Both will reward you for your hard work in their own ways. Let’s take a look.

 

Let’s start with the golden grail of web development. Free search engine traffic. We all want Google to send us as many new potential customers as possible, right?  They in turn want to send the freshest and most up-to-date information to their customers. Who are their customers? People who search for something via their search engine, of course. And it’s the search engine company’s job to ensure they deliver the best possible result. What does that have to do with you and consistency? Great question!

 

When you update your site regularly, you’re showing the search engines that you are up to date and relevant. This isn’t an article or blog post on a site that’s been sitting there for ten years and could be outdated. This is something you’re actively working on and the search engines will reward you by giving you higher priority over dormant sites. Of course, there are many other factors that go into ranking, but the easiest thing you can do to improve your SEO is to create content consistently.

 

Just as important is nourishing the relationship you have with these readers. Think back on the last time you’ve landed on a new blog or website through a Google search. Assuming the content was up to snuff, you appreciated the information, but you were probably a long way off from considering buying from this site or even giving them your email address. But if you were curious enough to browse around, you may have become interested enough to bookmark the site, or at the very least have it on your radar when you come across it again later. By the way, making sure that happens is becoming easier with targeted advertising like FB ads for example. But that’s outside the scope of this post.

 

When you update your site regularly, you’re training your website visitors to come back for more. They’ll get in the habit of visiting and reading often. Of course, that’s not going to happen with every single person who comes across your site, and that’s okay. You want your ideal target audience, the people who are really interested in what you have to share. You’ll get their attention by publishing regularly and as they read and engage with you on your blog, they’ll move closer to becoming a subscriber and then a customer.

10 Content Marketing Tips for Email Marketing Success

Of course, as an added bonus all this content you’re adding regularly is out there attracting new people through search engines, social media, and other people sharing links to your valuable content. That’s why you want to publish consistently to continue to grow.

 

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Eat One Meal a Week with Your Extended Family or Close Friends

One thing that is very important for your long-term happiness, even if you’re the biggest introvert alive, is the strength of your relationships within your family and your connection to the world at large. Study after study shows that maintaining a connection to others regularly is essential for health and happiness and is directly correlated with longevity.

Positive Attitude

A favored way to stay connected to someone is through sharing a meal. Everyone has to eat, and eating is an emotional experience for human beings. When you share an emotional experience with other humans, it connects you. This is probably why we’ve invented so many food-related holidays and even associate funerals with food.

 

Along with other positive ways to connect like phone calls, emails, and text messages – enjoying a regular meal with those who are important in your life, or those you desire to be important in your life, will make a huge difference in how connected you feel to them and how connected they feel to you.

 

If one of your long-term life goals is to have strong, loving, and powerful relationships, you know that focusing on the long term is the most effective way to impact this part of your life as it’s what you do over time that impacts today, and what you do today that impacts tomorrow. How your relationships feel about you will be about combining the last memorable connections weighted toward the last time you were together.

 

Since you understand this and want to start now forming daily habits that change your life and set you up for success, start setting aside one day a week, at a minimum, for enjoying a meal with someone in your extended family or to share a meal with someone outside of your family.

 

One week it might be that you enjoy lunch with Aunt Alice, and the next week it might be drinks and wings with a business connection – it’s okay to mix it up as long as you make it a habit to clear your schedule to enjoy a meal with someone outside your immediate family on a weekly basis.

 

This one addition to your calendar and act will keep you connected to the world at large and expose you to new ideas and thoughts, as well as solidify a deeper connection to those you choose to meet again and again. Plus, it may even push you out of your comfort zone and allow you space to discover new things and interests.

Write Down 3 Things You’re Grateful for Each Day

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Daily Mindset Habit: Value Your Time Over Everything Else

If you’ve ever been told that you have the same 24 hours as the next person, pay close attention to this post and take this daily mindset habit idea to heart. A mindset of the rich that differs from their non-rich counterparts is that the rich tend to place a high value on their time.

 

Time Not Money is Finite

 

We love acting like money, and certain natural resources are so limited, but the truth is, it’s time and not money that is finite. And due to money, you can actually buy other people’s time, thus placing a higher value on your time than theirs.

 

For example, if you know that your time is worth $100 an hour because that’s how much your boss pays you or how much you bill your clients, why would you wait in a 30-minute line to return a $10 item? Likewise, why would you spend an hour grocery shopping when you can pay someone enabling you to earn more money?

 

Calculate The Worth of Your Time

 

Part of the problem is that most people have never calculated the worth of their time. They know how much their boss pays them, or they know how much they want to bill their clients, but often these numbers are completely arbitrary and are simply the “going rate” that is not based on reality either. In fact, if more people established the worth of their time based on reality, they’d demand a lot more money from their employers.

 

Most HR departments use the number of 2080 yearly hours to designate full-time work. So even if you’re on a salary, they’re going to say that you earn your paycheck by working full time, which is equal to 40 hours a week for 52 weeks a year, for a total of 2080 hours.

 

This HR department magic number ends up on the companies compensation records as part of the benefits of the job and health insurance, paid time off (PTO), and other compensation. This is a great place for you to start figuring how much your time is worth but doesn’t consider the entire picture. After all, if you’re on salary, you don’t work only 40 hours a week.

 

So, to calculate your hourly worth, let’s focus on what you would like your life to be like, not what it currently is. If you want a specific lifestyle, go ahead, and add up what that would really cost. Then add in how much you want to work, not how much you do work, and that is your hourly worth even if you’re not there yet.

 

For example, if you want to earn 120K a year before taxes by working 20 hours a week, that equates to only 1040 hours of work a year, making your hourly worth over $115 an hour. Knowing this, since you don’t love mowing your lawn, you should jump at the chance of paying Billy down the street $50 bucks a week to keep your lawn nice because it’s worth it to you based on how much your time is really worth according to your life design.

 

Some Things Are Priceless

 

One thing the rich have figured out that hasn’t been passed down to the masses is that some things are priceless. Your child’s birth, their first birthday, kindergarten graduation, and anything that takes you away from those types of things – the things that will never happen again – should come at a much higher price and even be considered priceless. When you start to think of your own time as priceless and irreplaceable, productivity becomes almost automatic because you know there is no time to waste.

 

When you truly understand not only the value of your time, but the probability of the length of your life, and how you cannot go back in time, or forward, and that you only have right now – when you really get that – it becomes so much easier to habitually value your time above all else – because your time is the most precious thing you have. You cannot get it back once squandered.

 

How to Create Repeatable Workflows for Better Time Management

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Learn The SMART Goal Making Process

Proper goal setting is one of the most important skills you can learn in terms of how much goodness it’ll add to your life. By learning this goal-setting system, you’ll gain a sense of direction so that you can organize your resources in a way that helps you reach your goals.

 

When you craft a SMART goal, the way you phrase the goal helps you focus on what’s important so that you can make decisions about the actions you’re taking in a way that impacts your goal. Not only that, but the goal also provides the motivation you need to take the small daily actions toward success.

 

Example of a SMART Goal: “By Sunday night, I’m going to increase my total weekly word count from 7000 words to 10,000 words a week by adding 427 words a day to my normal daily 1000-word goal.”

 

  • Specific – The goal you set has to be very precise in order to help the person reading the goal understand and become certain about the expected impact or deliverables. Ask yourself questions to get this right, such as: What am I doing, why am I doing it, what do I need to do it right?

 

  • Measurable – As you craft the goal, you also need to use numbers that allow you to judge whether or not you’re reaching your objectives. Numbers like time, range, weight, steps, and so forth all make sense.

 

  • Attainable – Don’t bother setting impossible goals. If you have never walked an hour a day in your life, don’t start with that as your goal. Instead, start with five minutes and then craft a plan to add on a minute a day until you reach your goal of walking an hour a day.

 

  • Relevant – Also, each goal that you make has an overarching objective you’re trying to accomplish. For example, if you’re trying to write a novel writing the words is just one aspect of the novel publishing goal, but it is directly related.

 

  • Timely – Never leave a goal timeline open-ended. Even if you have to adjust the timeframe due to reality, the truth is we all fill up the time we give ourselves. If you give yourself three hours to check the mail, you’re going to take three hours. Tighten up your timelines to create a schedule that includes structured action that is easy to habituate – no motivation needed.

 

As you craft your goals, consider who will do the actions that help you reach the goal and think about what you really want to accomplish. When you do that and create a realistic time frame for it all to be done, you’re more likely actually to achieve the results you want and need.

Better Goal Setting Tips for Maximum Productivity

 

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Daily Habits to Get Smarter: Read Daily For At Least 15 Minutes

One stat about reading you should know is that people who read at least 15 minutes a day are happier, more successful, and of course, they know more. Finding an hour to read might be hard for busy folks, but everyone can find 15 minutes to read. In order to build this habit of reading each day, simply follow these tips.

Invest in More Training and Education

  • Choose Long and Challenging Books – When you incorporate this reading practice, you don’t want to use your 15 minutes of reading articles on the internet. Instead, choose challenging and interesting books for this particular challenge, such as the philosophy greats or something college level you want to learn.

 

  • Make a List of Books to Read – After you’ve set the criteria for the books you want to read, make a list of them. Put them in order of your interest. It can help to figure out what’s coming up in your life so that you can read things that help you with your current reality, but you don’t have to.

 

  • Schedule The Reading Time – You’ve read at least once about the importance of scheduling in everything you want to do each day, and reading for 15 minutes is no different. If you schedule a time and make it into a ritual, it’ll become a habit faster than if you just go by the seat of your pants.

 

  • Create a Comfortable Reading Space – You’ll need a good place to sit so that you can comfortably read the book using good posture. You’ll also need good lighting so you can see the words on the page or tablet. A table to put a drink, a place to put up your feet, good lighting, and temperature-controlled will ensure that you don’t feel tortured while reading.

 

  • Keep Dictionaries Nearby – You don’t want to interrupt your reading to find the dictionary or other manuscripts that can help you understand, so keep these in your reading area.

 

  • Keep a Reading Log or Journal – After you’ve finished your 15 minutes of reading, it can also help you log what you read and your thoughts about it. You can just log the time, or you can log your thoughts too. It’s up to you.

 

  • Get In Extra – Keep a book in your purse or car that you can pull out and read whenever you want to. It doesn’t need to be the same book you’re reading during your 15 minutes of daily reading, but a book you want to read that is easy to leave for a time and come back to, using wait time in a good way.

 

Choose a list of books to read during your daily 15 minutes that are long, well written, books that are philosophical like The Bible, The Sound and The Fury, by William Faulkner, or Beyond Good and Evil, by Nietzsche. It’s up to you but make them challenging books that need more study beyond the main text for understanding. Not only will you experience more success in life, but you’ll feel happier about it too.

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Daily Health Habits: Mind Your Posture

Sometimes it’s truly mind-blowing how something that seems on the surface not to matter at all is really life-changing. If you want to be healthy long-term, paying close attention to the actions you take every day will make a difference, like drinking plenty of water, exercising, eating right, and so forth are all important, but if you don’t mind your posture, you could end up suffering more than you think.

 

Proper posture can help reduce lower back pain, headaches, neck, and shoulder tension, wear and tear on your joints, increased lung capacity, better circulation, better digestion, and more energy, all benefits of checking and correcting your posture.

 

Get Expert Advice

 

If you have any type of body pain, it’s important to find out from a physical therapist or a personal trainer the best way to hold your posture living the life you live. You can also find professionals talking about posture and proper posture on YouTube. Just make sure you follow someone who really knows what they’re doing and saying.

 

Buy a Good Bed

 

Don’t skimp on buying the right bed for your needs. Spending money investing in a good bed with a long warranty designed for your type of sleeping and your personal needs will be one of the main things that help you sleep well and live a mostly pain-free life.

 

Invest In the Right Furniture

 

Like your bed is important for your posture, so is the furniture you buy and use for pleasure and work. Each person has different needs, as someone with lower back pain will need a firm surface and perhaps specialized seating. In contrast, someone without issues now will simply need to buy high-quality ergonomic and comfortable items.

 

Invest In Your Workspace

 

Like you invest in the comfort of your home, don’t forget any areas you work in. It’s not good for you to work in your bed with poor posture. Instead, set up your workspace so that it’s good for long-term use and avoids pressure or repetitive injury.

 

Make a list showing items that you need to purchase or replace to ensure that you have a comfortable home and work environment that isn’t just attractive but also good for your posture. You won’t regret it. Then each day, when you first get up, do a few posture-affirming stretches so that you can become more mindful of your posture the rest of the day.