Tag: Marketing tools

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How And Why You Must Remove Distractions

The key difference between a successful entrepreneur and an unsuccessful entrepreneur is action. In order to take action, you must remove the distractions preventing you from doing the work to achieve your goals.

 

Successful entrepreneurs understand they must remove distractions for three key reasons:

  • For Better Time Management and Productivity

Distractions only take up your time and resources, therefore, reducing your productivity. Removing distractions prevents you from wasting this time on things that ultimately don’t matter.

 

  • For Better Creativity and Quality Work or Products

Zero distractions mean you gain more time to develop a deeper focus and concentration that allows you to work better and produce higher quality work. It fuels creativity and inspiration.

 

  • For Proper Business and Personal Organization

Removing distractions means removing possible frustrations, stress, and constant confusion of wondering where you left off last. Keeping your personal and business life organized. Organization allows you to stay focused and on track to accomplish your goals. When you have a clear path and understanding of what needs to get done, it’s easier to achieve it.

 

Follow these four tips to help remove distractions to achieve your goals faster and easier:

 

Establish Realistic Work Hours

If you can create your own schedule and work hours, take advantage of it and be realistic and honest. If you know you are a night owl, for example, then don’t expect yourself to work by 6 AM.

 

If this isn’t a good time for you, no matter how good you are at getting up on time, you won’t be working at your best or produce your best work. Schedule your work hours during times you know you will be fully rested and ultimately distraction-free.

 

Understand Your Limits and Willpower

In other words, if you know you won’t stop looking at your phone, then you must put your phone in a separate room. Create strategies that work with your weaknesses to ensure you don’t limit your success. If you want it, you will find a way to work around your downfalls.

 

Stop Multitasking

Believe it or not, multitasking is a distraction. Every time you switch between a different task, your brain needs time to reset even if you don’t notice it.

Positive Attitude

Let Others Know Your Goals and Needs

The more you inform people upfront about your intentions, the less likely they will keep you from them. If they do, then they are not there to support you, and best to keep them out of your life.

How to Identify Over the Top Goals to Make Them Reasonable

If you aspire to be a mover or shaker or achieve your dreams at all, you need to be the one creating the distractions, not entertaining them. Implement these tips and tricks into your daily routine to keep distractions from interfering with your dreams.

 

 

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5 Household Management Tips for Parent Business Owners

Battling the household and running an online business at the same time is hard work. A business requires just as much of your time, if not more, as do your children. Both will create more work and stress, but you can manage.

 

The following are five household management tips for parent business owners: 

 

#1: Work in Batches and Block Schedules

Keep similar work together and schedule work time in batches. If you know your kids need to get to school at a certain time, for example, schedule a block of time around that. If you can get two hours of work in before they need to get ready, then find similar activities you know you can do in that time, like checking email or creating your daily to-do lists. Block these times out in your schedule and let your household know when you plan to work. Put the schedule somewhere they can all see it and treat it no differently than you would if you were to clock in for a shift somewhere else.

 

#2: Designate Workspaces and Keep Them Out

Create an area in your house that everyone knows is only for working. Please don’t allow them to come in at any point. It may sound harsh or brutal to do at first, but over time everyone will understand that this area is not for fun, only business.

 

Establishing appropriate boundaries like this is crucial to create a distraction-free workspace. When you are in this space, you work. When you leave this space, you get to take a break or have free time and stop working. Likewise, you won’t need to work when you’re in your other spaces.

 

#3: Schedule Special Time with Your Kids Away from Business

Always add in time with your kids and put it in your schedule. This way, you know you always have time to be with them. Don’t expect yourself to use after work or school hours to do it.

basketball

If you don’t schedule it, you will give yourself permission to be distracted. You don’t have a boss to tell you to stop working. You have to set those boundaries yourself. Scheduling your personal time and time with your family is a way to ensure you stick to your work hours.

 

#4: Create Daily To-Do and Expectation Lists for You and The Household

To ensure you have the time you need to get work done, make daily to-do lists for you and the household. Include chores or fun activities they can do while you need to work. Set up timers and don’t allow them to finish until it’s done. Make sure the tasks you do can be done within these times. Don’t use this time for any critical tasks that require more of your attention.

 Don’t Forget That You Can Automate and Outsource Your Home Management Too

#5: Communicate as Much as Possible and Expect to Make Compromises

Most importantly, you must communicate. You can’t expect others to know what to do just because you work from home. Creating your own home business comes with compromises from you and the entire family. While it provides you the freedom to be a parent and make money, it can also be disrupting. As a carefree space of their home is now for business. Proper communication and not expecting perfection will go a long way to ensuring your success.

 

As you can see, running a business and your household as a parent is possible. However, you must know what it takes to set yourself up for success realistically.

 

 

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Nope: Productivity and Being Busy Are Not the Same

The main idea of productivity is always to work smarter, not harder. Just because you are active, working hard, and doing stuff does not mean you have used your time wisely enough to be productive. Unfortunately, a myth equates being “busy” to being highly productive, while not being “busy” equals laziness.

linkedin laptop

However, the most productive people can easily seem lazy with this mindset when they got all their work done already and get to take the rest of the day off.  Remember, the formula for productivity is your output over your input. If your input significantly outweighs the output, you need to adjust and fix your to-do list.

 

Here are a few tips that many successful entrepreneurs follow to be more productive and less busy throughout their day:

 

They Remove Absolutely Any and All Distractions

When it is time to work, take responsibility and remove the distractions you know will disrupt you. Get rid of distracting music. Don’t work where people are walking around and talking. Keep your workspace clean and organized. When distractions are removed, you can stay focused, concentrate and create momentum to get your work done faster.

 

They Create Many To-Do Lists and Know How To Prioritize

Start each morning with a to-do list to tackle each thing you need to get done. If you need to reach out to a customer and also complete a big assignment for the day, then you need two separate to-do lists. Don’t allow yourself to go with the flow, or you will find yourself doing pointless tasks throughout the day. Successful people prioritize their to-do lists and stay on track by sticking to them.

 Steps to Develop Your Overall Content Marketing Plan

They Take Time To Evaluate Their Work, Efforts, And Company Mission

It’s essential always to schedule time throughout your day to evaluate your actions and compare them to your goals. You could be busy all day yet only wasting your time and resources when that time would be better suited doing something else more important.

 

Take five or ten minutes every now and then to make sure you are still on your to-do list and that the goals you need to get done relate to your company mission or ultimate goals. Simply ask yourself, “Did the tasks I do today chip away at any of my goals or get me closer to where I want to be?” If yes, then keep going. If not, adjust your to-do list.

 

They Work in Batches

Working in batches means putting similar tasks together and get them done at the same time. This means less time is required to go back and forth between different tasks, and to keep the concentration and momentum you need to get done fast.

 

They Automate Repetitive Tasks

Finally, productive people automate repetitive tasks using technology, hiring a virtual assistant, or creating templates to make their work that much faster. Create templates for emails, repetitive tasks, accounting, inventory management, and customer management software to keep track of mundane and tedious tasks.

Don’t put out more effort only to achieve no rewards. Compare your efforts daily to your mission to ensure your productivity matches your intentions to live a more successful life.

 

 

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What is Business Continuity Planning?

To build resilience into your business, you’ll need to understand that your business continuity plan will provide the resilience necessary to overcome setbacks and disruptions in essence. Business continuity planning consists of examining your business for weaknesses based on known threats that may affect your ability to do business on any given day.

 

You’ll have to go through your processes, systems and examine what you do each day along with the resources you use (human and otherwise) to help you mitigate problems and issues. Business continuity planning includes:

 

  • Determining and listing possible types of distributions – You need to set up a plan for every eventuality that you can think up. Illness, lousy weather, destroyed technology, government regulations, and so forth are already known issues. Listing them out will help you figure out what you’re going to do for each of them automatically.

 

  • Studying your workflows – Part of the process includes having standardized workflows to identify bottlenecks and note the software and other resources you regularly use so that you can develop a plan if something within that system and process goes wrong. For example, if you outsource blog writing to one person and uploading the posts to another person, you can eliminate the problem of relying only on one person for everything.

 

  • Establishing key performance indicators – As you study your processes and workflow, you can also establish a few important indicators to track that can signal a problem or lead to a solution.

 

  • Setting up benchmarking – One key to overcoming a setback is to live by your data more than your gut. A combo of the gut with data is always better than just doing things without any idea of the metrics. For example, if you set up an emergency budget for your business that allows you to keep going during hard times, what is the number you need to meet? Do you know what your break-even point is?

 

  • Including redundancies – As you set up your processes and systems and examine your workflows, you can identify areas to create redundancies. For example, instead of using only one server space for your website, you can set up two, which will enable you to switch if one goes down quickly.

 

  • Developing plans – Using all the information you derive from a thorough study of your business and enabling you to keep going during hard times, you can use that information to develop concrete plans that you simply implement during a hard time instead of creating it from scratch.

 

When it comes to crisis management, having a plan in place before anything happens is essential. A proper continuity plan will include actual plans in place for the things you know will occur, such as illness, whether governmental or other issues. While you cannot plan for everything, any of these ideas can be adapted to unknown emergencies when needed. The act of planning and putting in place this plan will make your business more resilient and even eliminate many of the pitfalls that cause more than half of all businesses to fail in their first three years.

 

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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?

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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.

 

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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.

 

 

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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.

 

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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.

 

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Automate Your Community Management

Building community builds brand awareness, provides amazing feedback so you can get more product ideas, and builds stronger relationships. When you can find the people talking about you online and respond, it turns social media and community into a powerful tool for you to build relationships and a better business.

 

Building community for your business will increase brand awareness, teach you more about your customers, and provide amazing value to your customers now and in the future due to all the incredible insight you will derive from the community.

 

  • Invite Your Buyers to A VIP Support Group – Creating a group for your buyers to come to ask questions and get answers, and other support is a fabulous way to encourage the community to help each other.

 

  • Ask List Members to Come to Your Private Facebook Group – Make it a habit to invite anyone who joins your email list to your private free Facebook Group. You can get to know them and they you and move them from interested to delighted faster due to the fact actual customers will back you up.

 

  • Invite Interested Parties to a Product Development Group – Some of your customers may be interested in conversing with you on a deeper level helping you essentially create more products for their needs.

 

Using the tools of the trade help make community-building easier and more effective. These tools will make your job easier, and there are plenty to choose from depending on your needs and budget.

 

NapoleonCat.com

 

Manage your social media through this platform. You’ll be able to see all feeds in one view so that you can deliver the best customer care to them on any platform from one spot. Plus, you’ll get top-notch analytics. After all, you can’t know if what you’re doing is working if you’re not studying the metrics.

 

Some features include the ability to answer repetitive questions automatically with templates, hide spam messages automatically, and even delete offensive material based on your list of insulting words without having to view them yourself.

 

Heyo.com

 

This software is a platform that allows you to run contests. Community and social marketing are all about engagement, and nothing creates more engagement than the ability to have a good old friendly competition. You can use this software on any social media platform, across multiple platforms, and even in SMS via mobile devices.

 

Grow your email list, get more accurate leads, and make your customers happy with this software. Whether you want to run a sweepstake, a photo contest, or send out a quiz to your audience, this platform will do what you need.

 

Taggbox.com

 

User-generated content is the most important type of content you will deal with when building a community. It’s also some of the most powerfully compelling content for any new person to see when buying your products or using your services.

 

Whether you want to build a hashtag campaign, boost virtual events, or even help build a social wall for your in-person events, Taggbox.com can help you get it done and automate most of it.

 

Building and managing the community you create due to your brand allows you to get better user feedback, provide amazing support, increase brand awareness, and build exceptional relationships. If you really want to boost customer interactions and create raving fans that not only want what you have but want to tell others about it, invest in building community through all your social accounts with your like-minded ideal customer base.