Tag: Focus

Posted on

Why Is Business Resilience Important?

It doesn’t matter who you are or how many resources you have available, something will happen within the next year, or so that will disrupt your business somehow. It may be a family matter, a purely business issue inside your operation, or it may be an external matter entirely out of your control – but it is going to happen.

 

Because of the certainty that disruption happens, having a plan in place that makes your business more resilient to these influences is imperative. The thing that causes problems is going to happen, and probably more than once. But no worries, if you have a plan in place, you’ll be able to build resilience into your business as you grow your business.

 

People Perform Better with a Plan

 

When disaster strikes, one thing is clear about human nature – if we have a plan that we’ve practiced, such as a fire drill, for example – it saves lives and property. If you have a plan in place for emergencies and other issues such as taking a sick day, you’ll naturally perform better due to having the plan in place.

 

To Safeguard Assets

 

As a business owner, you have numerous assets that you may not realize you have. Your email list, your website, the software you use, your products, and services that you provide are all assets in a way, some are more obvious than others, but future planning can mitigate the need to lose the critical parts of your business and life if something goes wrong.

 

This may come in the form of setting up the right business entity to protect your personal assets should the business fail for some reason, or it may come from another element in your plan, but it will work to safeguard your assets due to thinking about the potential before anything happens.

 

Increases Workflow Understanding

 

When you plan for disruptions, it requires that you develop standardized systems and plans for your business that designs workflows for yourself and your employees or contractors to follow. When you have a proper workflow, you will notice in advance the potential for disruptions and thus create a plan to avoid it. For example, what if your email autoresponder service goes out of business? What will you do? Have you identified an alternative that makes it easy for you to move over?

 

Disruptions Will Happen

 

Whether you get sick, or someone else does, or you experience a weather emergency, or killer technology destroys your business (after all, no one uses VHS tapes, now, right?), something is going to happen to disrupt your business. If you can accept that and plan for it, you’ll automatically start building a truly resilient business.

 

If you accept that things will happen to cause setbacks, whether parts of your everyday life, such as chronic illness or something out of a disaster movie (weather, pandemics, political turmoil), you can develop a plan that makes you more resilient personally as well as professionally. You probably can’t plan for every single thing, but the planning process itself will help you learn more about yourself and your business so that you can overcome, one way or another, almost anything.

What Is Business Resilience?

Posted on

Free and Low-Cost Automation Tools You Can Implement Today

Now that you’ve read a lot about automation, you may want to give some a try. The good news is you can test out a few options for free. This list is not comprehensive. There are free trials for most software these days, mostly cloud-based, so do try out the free options for the solutions you want to try before investing your money.

 

  • Google Docs – Even if you are using the free Gmail and Google and not the paid business version, you can use Google Docs to keep your documents organized and easily accessible and shareable via the cloud.

 

  • Trello.com – You can use Trello.com for free to organize your business and manage your employees or contractors. Set it up so that your clients can assign work for you and set up projects.

 

  • Join. me – If you want to host online meetings, this solution might work for you. It will work great for discovery calls and onboarding new customers, and it’s free.

 

  • Zapier.com – This works on the “if this, then that” process just like the next offering. Combine them both so that you can take advantage of using the free zaps to get more done each day.

 

  • IFTTT.com – You can use this solution to set up applets or little programs to perform repetitive tasks for you. For each account, you’ll get a few free options, but you may have to pay to get more. It’s not expensive, though, and it’s more than worth it to automate those tedious tasks.

 

  • PayPal and PayPal Invoicing – Most online business owners must get a Paypal.com business account anyway these days. It’s the number one payment method, and it’s free for anyone to set up. They have impressive invoicing capabilities, too, including recurring invoicing.

 

  • Invoicely.com – It’s free and allows you to manage more than one business using this amazing platform. You can see all your finances in one place, making it a lot easier to keep track. Not only that, you can track time, expenses, and so forth while also accepting online payments from anywhere.

 

  • Apptivo.com – This all-in-one solution offers CRM, project management, invoicing, and more for your small business. They offer a free starter account for up to 3 users, with a more advanced lite version opening up to more members soon.

 

  • Mybrightbook.com – This 100 percent free accounting software is made for non-accountants, so it’s easy to set up. You don’t have to know what you’re doing, and you can automate your entries and more. Free.

 

  • Salesautopilot.com – While not free, you can use this system for less than 100 dollars a month, and it has a lot of amazing features such as dynamic landing pages, scheduled campaigns, behavior-oriented triggers, and so much more.

 

  • Recurpost.com – This app will automatically share any post that you want on a recurring basis. You already know that if you want people to read your content, you must promote it multiple times. This system can be set up to share on a schedule you choose automatically.

 

  • Hubspot.com (CRM) – You can use HubSpot CRM free with an easy-to-understand view of your entire sales pipeline. It even has unlimited users, and there is no time limit. You can use this system for free if you’re alone or have a large team.

 

  • Metigy.oglecom – This platform will help you plan and collaborate on your marketing calendar, content and assets, account management, and more. It has lots of learning resources to help you learn more about online marketing too. They have a limited free plan that you can use for up to 3 social profiles. You can stay free forever, but for about $25 a month, you can upgrade to the professional version.

 

If you use any of these solutions or another one, please comment below on what you use and why you like it. Sharing solutions that work for you is good for the entire community because there is so much out there to try that no one person can really find it all.

 

 

Posted on

10 Ways Small Business Benefits from Smart Automation

All businesses benefit from smart automation. Automation today is not expensive. You can implement much different productivity-improving automation free and inexpensively that will not just save time but will save money and increase your revenue exponentially.

 

  1. Increased Scalability – When you automate, even if you’re just one person, if you choose what to automate wisely, you’ll be able to scale your business in ways you may not have thought possible.

 

  1. Reduced Errors – There is no way around it, but machines, once set up properly, make fewer errors than humans. If you can set up an automaton that works, you’re going to reduce the errors you’re used to making and letting by. It’s not about perfection, though. It’s just about being able to do something simple without having to worry about the errors once it’s set up.

 

  1. Better Customer Satisfaction – When customers get service fast like they want, and it’s accurate and timely, they are always happier with you—today’s customers like using self-service automation and don’t mind using chatbots at all.

 

  1. Reduced Labor Costs – When you can automate instead of outsourcing, this is always a good thing because technology is cheaper than a human being. Your time is also worth way more than your chatbot’s time.

 

  1. Better Work-Life Balance – Automating things even that take you five minutes a day can add up and save you so much time that you start experiencing that elusive work-life balance people love to talk about.

 

  1. Use Resources More Efficiently – When you set up automation, it is always more efficient than human resources. Not only does it work more accurately, but it also costs less to start with than hiring a person.

 

  1. Decreased Operating Costs – When you use technology to increase productivity, you can keep your operating costs lower because you’re not using extra human resources or your time, which is always more expensive than tech.

 

  1. Improved Decision Making – If you have an accurate picture of the research involved, which using automation can help you with, you’re going to make better business decisions. Imagine if you set up a Zap to send reports generated in Google Analytics to a Dropbox for you to view every Friday – so much more straightforward than having to get the reports yourself.

 

  1. Boost Productivity – When you have to do fewer steps to get to the deliverable, you will become super productive. Remember that there is a lot more to being productive than movement or being busy. Finishing projects and tasks makes you productive.

 

  1. Increased Competitiveness – When you can get more done in less time and done accurately, you’re going to please customers more, and that’s going to make you more competitive.

 

When you decide to implement automation in your small business, choose from the things you do right now, already, that are repetitive in nature, and you can’t go wrong—no need to invent new things to do until you automate what you already do every single day.

 

Posted on

Project Management Tools to Try

When it comes to project management, the worst thing you can do is either use nothing to organize yourself or use a tool that you don’t understand enough to utilize fully. Try out a few different options to find out what works smoothly for you within your budget.

 

  • Smartsheet.com – If you’re accustomed to using spreadsheets to organize your work, this might be the system to work for your needs. It’s easily customizable, supports automation, but you do have to use other software if you want time tracking and built-in project management features.

 

  • Wrike.com – This is the PM system used by big businesses like Paypal.com and Hootsuite.com, but it’s not overpriced, so you can afford to use it too. This is a true all in one project management system that allows you to collaborate not only with contractors and employees but your customers too.

 

  • Monday.com – This platform is very helpful in managing tasks and creating impressive and effective workflows. It’s really billed as an online collaboration application, but you can use it to manage projects too. It’s very customizable and easy to understand.

 

  • Easy Projects – This cloud-based project management software works for small and big businesses. It allows you to work with anyone interested in the following projects. You can give permissions that keep people notified of the action being taken.

 

  • Zoho Projects – Competitively priced, cloud-based, fully-featured, and intuitive. This is really a standard in project management. It’s especially good with individuals and small teams. It’s responsive and not really hard to understand and set up. Try the free trial.

 

  • Basecamp.com – This option has been around for a long time. It is a popular choice among virtual assistants, graphic designers, and others who want to be able to let their customers sign-on and assign work to them in a project management system. It’s easy to understand and has tons of features you’re used to in a dedicated project management system.

 

  • Trello.com – If you think visually, you’re going to love using Trello. You can organize your workflows and teams, or you can just use it for your own organization. There are many public free and premium templates you can get too. What’s more, is you can use it free.

 

  • Honeybook.com – A super popular choice for virtual assistants and service providers, this easy-to-use platform helps small business owners get control of their processes and manage clients from start to complete projects, including proposals, contracts, project tracking, and payments.

 

  • LiquidPlanner.com – Manage projects, tasks, and human resources, and more with this fully featured project management system. Track tasks but also track resources, including HR, to best keep your company lean and mean. While this one is a little more expensive than some of the other choices, it’s well worth every penny because of what it can help you do for your business.

 

  • Asana.com – People who use Asana are fans of it and love to brag about using it. It’s a unique online collaboration tool that helps improve your workflow management. It’s not really a full project management since there is no time tracking, but many service providers love it and use it regularly.

 

  • Quire.io – This project management and collaboration tool can help you launch your projects fast. Users love the fact that it’s super intuitive and easy to understand how to use it. They use Kanban boards, which many people love, to help get organized.

 

Almost any of these choices will work for most small businesses to manage their projects and keep their work organized and on task. Being productive is about using your time wisely. Don’t use a system you don’t grasp almost immediately. Test it out, and if it’s too hard to get, move on to another one so that you are using what works with your way of thinking.

Posted on

Tools to Help You Automate Competitor Research

As you start and run your business, one of the most important ways you can improve your offers is to study your competition. But competitor research can be time-consuming. That might not be as big a deal for a giant corporation, but for a mom-and-pop business or a sole proprietor, it’s a lot. You still need to do it because learning about your competition will help you differentiate yourself.

 

  • Google Alerts – This is a free and simple way to start your competitor research. Simply set up your Google Alerts to search for product names, content type, search terms, and type of update. Set up separate alerts for each. You can also use Zapier.com to automatically pull the information from email and put your results in a document for you to review when you’re ready.

 

  • IFTTT.com – This stands for “if this, then that,” which defines the parameters of a task process. First, you do this. Then you do that, and so forth. You can make these as straightforward or as complicated as you desire.

 

  • Zapier.com – This is really just another “if this, then that” option that creates little programs they call zaps to automate a process. For example, you can set up an appellate or a Zap to automatically create documents for you to review later.

 

  • Ubotstudio.com – You can set up UBot Studio to do a lot of tasks for you that will amaze you. For example, you can use Ubot to create and manage blogs, open accounts on social networks, post status updates and blog posts, and more. You can even make it upload videos to every single video site on the web with a touch of a button.

 

  • Rivaliq.com – Use this platform to audit competitive communications, identify trending topics and content, and even study your competition’s data. Compare your competition’s top content against yours so you can find a way to stand out. You can set up automation that causes your account to follow specific hashtags and even create a report about it.

 

  • Sproutsocial.com – Use this platform to perform a social media competitive analysis. They even provide a free template for your use. Truly understanding your numbers is an important part, and Sprout Social helps you do that.

 

  • Semrush.com – This is a fully-featured marketing system more than a platform. You’ll get training and tools to use in all aspects of your marketing, including competition research. Determine what your competition is doing so that you can find gaps in their coverage, which will give you a door to stand out from the competition.

 

  • Screaming Frog SEO Spider – This platform can allow you to observe what competitors are doing, who their customers are, and what resources they are investing in. You can find out a lot of information from this bot crawling a competitor’s site, but you can also use it to crawl yours and get advice.

 

  • Similarweb.com – This is a great platform to use to search your competitor’s website so that you can learn about trends, gain insight into their traffic so you can learn where to distribute content and information. It gives you a 360-degree view of any company you want to study.

 

  • Kompyte.com – This competitor analysis software will capture the changes your competition makes to their website so that you can find out what they’re doing in real-time to attract and please customers. Knowing this gives you insight into what you need to be doing too.

 

  • RPA (Robotic Process Automation) – Much of what we’ve mentioned really is already RPA. All RPA involves is training bots to perform the tasks that you used to do manually, such as saving files, wait for and alert you when a specific email comes in, processes orders within a certain monetary perimeter. If you do it on a computer, the bot can do it when programmed.

 

To choose the right tools to help you research your competitors, figure out what you want to know, and the process involved in determining it. Then you can find the right software to help you make light of the job.

 

 

Posted on

How to Use Automation for Boosting Efficiency

One of the main reasons people like to use automation in their business is because it boosts efficiency. If you can automate any task that is repeatable such as invoicing, creating files, saving files, and so forth, you can save many hours of time in your workday and work year. Those are hours you can use to create even more awesome products and solutions for your ideal audience.

 

  • Sort and Respond to Emails – Your email software has many features that you may not be implementing fully. Apps like Boomerang for Gmail or Sales Handy for Outlook will help you sort and respond to emails using automation features.

 

  • Manage Projects – This is especially important if you are working with a team. Set up a project management software that allows you to know when each part of your team is done because they check it off, make a note, or otherwise use the system to ensure smoother collaboration and avoid bottlenecks.

 

  • Improve Your Sales Funnel – Using software to automate your sales funnels is a no-brainer today. There are numerous options for you to implement, such as Leadpages.net and Instapage.com, but also many email marketing solutions come with sales funnel automation options.

 

  • Enhance Your Workflows – Software like Monday.com, Kissflow.com, and others can help you automate your workflows whether you work alone or with a team. Improving and enhancing your workflows will ensure that when you do automate something, it’s done most efficiently.

 

  • Optimize Your Online Presence – Use an all-in-one platform that enables you to use all your social media in one spot, such as Hootsuite.com or sproutsocial.com. When you use one of these social tools to automate sharing, engagement, and relationship building, you’ll really realize the power of social media marketing.

 

  • Drop the Dead Weight – You don’t need to keep doing tasks that are not working. For that reason, you want to always check your metrics to ensure that when you act, the result is what you’re looking for. If it’s not, stop doing it and move on to something else.

 

  • Automate Every Possible Task – Make a list of any tasks you do each day that are repeated. For example, perhaps each morning, you walk into your office, turn on your computer, and check email. What can you automate? You can automate turning on the light in your office as well as turning on the computer. You can even automate organizing emails using tags and other features so that it’s faster to get to the emails you need to respond to.

 

The best way to determine what you want to automate is to track what you do each day, week, month, and year. Anything that repeats, do a little research about how other people automate that task. You may be shocked to learn how simple automating your business really is. Automation is not nearly as expensive or complicated as you may think before actually finding the right solutions.

 

Posted on

Tools and Tips for Automating Your Sales and Inventory Process

Whether you sell physical products or hours and services, automating as much as you can of your entire sales process and inventory, if needed, will save you tons of time. When you save time, you’re saving your most valuable and irreplaceable resource, but more than likely, automation will also save money.

 

  • Understand Your Buyer’s Journey – Every business type who has a buyer can learn what they do to make a business decision. Most buyers go through a process from awareness to delight, and it’s your job to know what the buyer’s intent is so that you can deliver just the right information at the right time to advance sales.

 

  • Stop Doing Repetitive Work Manually – If it can be automated, stop doing it yourself. There are too many ways you can automate things today that fit any budget for you to keep doing everything like file creation, backups, and inventory tracking. If you continually need to transfer customer information to another system, find a way to automate using Zapier.com or another option.

 

  • Provide the Right Information to Your Stakeholders – Ensure that anyone who is interested receives information that they need to make decisions in a self-serve manner. This can be via internal documentation that you provide access to based on their place, such as Trello.com or Basecamp.com. You can assign access based on who they are. For example, the customer of product A gets access to information, groups, and help about product A.

 

  • Empower Customer Care – If you hire customer service personnel or use a chatbot, empower your customer care to make sales when it seems like the right thing to do, depending on the conversation. You can even set up your chatbots to do it.

 

  • Empower Your Customers – Let your customers care for themselves with self-serve information and AI chatbots so that you don’t have to answer repetitive questions, and they can help themselves.

 

  • Create the Right Email Messages – Every product that you create needs certain email messages set up right away. You’ll need a series for all stages of the buying journey, from awareness to delight.

 

  • Get the Right Software – It depends on the types of products you sell, but many shopping carts have inventory management included in the system. The most crucial factor is to get the right software for your needs and not try to make bad software work for you.

 

Automating your sales process may only involve setting up a landing page, a freebie, and moving them to your email list so that you can teach them information, make offers, and move them through their buying journey faster. But if you sell physical products, you probably want to keep track of how many you have available to buy—the same thing with the hours you sell for your VA business. If you’re a service provider, keeping track of what you’ve sold will ensure you don’t oversell but also ensure that you meet your goals.

 

Posted on

Tools and Tips for Automating Discovery Calls

Many small business owners like virtual assistants, business and life coaches, and others who work one-on-one with customers and clients use discovery calls to help pitch their offers and close sales. Discovery calls are a powerful way to get more customers, but it can be time-consuming if you don’t develop a process that can be automated and replicated.

HBA Funnel Builder…

  • Build a Landing Page with Your Offer – Your first step is to build a page that tells your audience about your discovery calls and what’s included, and why they should set up a call with you. You can do this with your basic website pages, or you can use landing page software like net or Instapage.com.

 

  • Set Up a Questionnaire Via Your Scheduling Software – Using scheduling software like com offers you the ability to force your lead to fill out a questionnaire in order to set up their appointment, all without you helping in person at that moment. Most people will happily fill out a short questionnaire but remember that you are trying to qualify your leads, so don’t be afraid to ask questions that make them leave the form.

 

  • Develop Transactional Emails for Your Autoresponder – Now, set up some information in your autoresponder so that once they submit the questionnaire as well as choose their time for a call, they receive automated emails giving them more information and instructions. You can use your email autoresponder for this, and it doesn’t matter which platform as long as you check to see if the other software you’re using integrates. Aweber.com works with most.

 

  • Let Your Potential Customer Choose Their Time to Call – The scheduling software allows you to put the times you’re free. In fact, you can choose different free times for different types of calls so that you know when you get a call what it’s for due to the time and date.

 

  • Get a Dedicated Phone Line for Calls – Having a dedicated line or at least a unique ring will help alert you to the call. You’ll want to set up your calls so that your customers call you instead of the other way around as it eliminates the need for you to remember anything.

 

  • Read Their Questionnaire Before the Call – You can sign into the scheduling software to read the questionnaire, or you can set up a Zap (Zapier.com) to force the system to put the questionnaire into a special Dropbox or file on Google Docs.

 

  • Set Up Follow Up Information to Go Out Automatically – Once the call is finished, you’ll want other information to go out to your lead automatically so that you can close the deal if you did not already on the call. You can use tags and triggers within your autoresponder using IFTTT.com or Zapier.com to make it happen automatically.

 

Discovery calls help you get more clients and close deals. However, due to the fact they can be time-consuming, it’s best to go in with a plan. Use the customer’s answers to the questionnaire to help guide your meeting in a way that showcases what you can do for them based on their needs.

 

Follow up as soon as possible within 24 hours after each discovery call with an offer giving them a few days to consider your offer but setting a deadline so that you can avoid overbooking yourself. This process works wonders for booking more clients for the one-to-one service provider or coach.

Posted on

Tools and Tips to Help You Automate Social Media Marketing

marketing planThis list of social media marketing automated software and tools that you can use in your small business is not complete. There are so many options today that anyone can find the right tool for themselves at the right budget. There is no reason not to use social media marketing automation because the price is very reasonable for most platforms, and the ROI is outstanding.

 

  • Hootsuite.com – Aside from all the ways you can automate social media marketing using this software, they have an exciting training program through their Hootsuite Academy, where you can learn all things marketing and even get certification. Whether you’re publishing, engaging, or monitoring, Hootsuite can help you keep it all in one place.

 

  • Loomly.com – Manage all your social media content from posts to ads in one place. Not only that, the software will give you ideas about what to post based on trending topics and related events. They also have a great way to keep track of your content assets like photos, videos, notes, links, and templates.

 

  • Activecampaigncom – This marketing and sales automation platform is fully featured and offers almost anything you need to run your small business marketing program. Their solution offers automation with email marketing, customer relationship management, sales, support, and more all in one platform.

 

  • SproutSocial.com – This platform offers features to help you with social media engagement, publishing, listening, and analytics, all from a central hub. Publishing across platforms at one shot easier is essential today, especially for the one-person business.

 

  • Sendinblue.com – This platform offers email marketing, CRM, SMS marketing, engaging chat, and more that you can personalize for your audience. You can also automate your segmenting and make your transactional emails better than ever.

 

  • Sharpspring.com – This is being billed as a revenue growth platform that offers a suite of sales and marketing tools to bring your marketing automation to a whole new level. Build on the funnel idea to help you build your list and get more leads by increasing engagement due to focusing on the entire customer lifecycle. Get chatbots, landing pages, dynamic forms, and more.

 

  • BuzzSumo.com – Every marketer needs to find, produce, and publish as much relevant content as they can for their audience. This platform helps you discover and research your audience. Use this software to find influencers to help you market your products and services.

 

  • Mention.com – An essential component of social media marketing is engagement. It can take a lot of time to find places to engage with your customers but not if you use this platform that allows you to monitor the web to find out what their audience is saying so that you can join the conversation.

 

  • Socialert.net – There is no point in using hashtags if you can’t figure out who else is using them or what is going on with them. This platform enables you to track keywords, hashtags, and your social accounts for activity, making it easier for you to engage with your audience.

 

  • Zapier.com and IFTTT.com – These two platforms allow you to create applets that perform tasks for you automatically. For example, want to create a list of new list members who purchased your book with phone numbers and dropped into your Trello account so you can call them? If you’re asking for the right info, you can use one of the applets or zaps to tell your system what to do.

 

When determining the type of automation to use, first decide what you want automated, know your budget, and then find the right tool. Anything you do on a repetitive basis is game for automation. It might seem like it’s only going to save minutes, but those minutes add up and will improve conversions as well as boost your results from social media marketing.

Posted on

Tools and Tips to Help You Automate Email Marketing

There aren’t many business owners today who aren’t aware of automated email marketing technology that uses autoresponders. If you’re not sure, autoresponder software like Aweber.com will send out messages to your list members based on either your schedule or a behavioral trigger that you set up and define.

email marketing

Two ways to automate your email marketing:

 

  1. Trigger Based Email Messages
  2. Drip-Fed Scheduled Messages

 

A trigger-based email message is set up to be sent to the subscriber based on something they do. For example, if your customer downloads a free report, or clicks through to read a specific blog post, or even if they simply open a particular email, you can set up your autoresponder to automatically deliver specific messages to them based on what they did.

 

A drip-fed email message is simply set up to deliver based on the schedule you choose in a specific order. Usually, the messages are a sequence and often referred to as your “autoresponder sequence.” For example, if you offer a free report about a specific problem that you solve, the customer downloads the report, which puts them on that list, which triggers the system to start the drip schedule.

 

Besides these two ways you can automate, you can also use the automation features inside your software to segment based on new information you obtain from your customer such as demographics data, and product purchased, product not purchased, how they learned about your solutions, and more. Frankly, if you can think it up, you can create a segmentation trigger.

 

When you automate your email marketing in this way, you can create more targeted and personalized messaging, create customized landing pages, and even use split testing for your emails to create better results from your email marketing. You can also use the native software to examine delivery rates, view rates, open rates, click-through rates, conversion rates, and more to make it all work better together – mostly automatically.

 

The trick for getting this right is to choose the right software for your needs. Some small business owners using a combination of Aweber.com and a WordPress site will work fine, but for some others, they may need a more robust platform to work with, such as Ontraport.com or Clickfunnels.com.

 

Write down the functions you’d like to have now and in the future. Choose your software based on longevity, functionality, and growth – but of course, also consider your budget. Fortunately, most email marketing software choices have options that can grow with you based on your usage. You can find solutions for as little as $20 to start and on up to thousands of dollars, depending on how you’re using it. The main thing is to do your due diligence checking out the software you want to use to ensure that it works for your needs. For example, some autoresponder software expressly forbids affiliate marketing – if you want to build an affiliate marketing business, you don’t want to start with that choice.