Tag: online marketing

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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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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.

 

 

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Home Office Automation Tips

When thinking of automation, you may forget that the work you do in your office is also a place that you can start automating. Yes, you want to automate as much as you can outside the office, too but one of the first places you can streamline your efforts is via office automation. There is more to office automation than going paperless. It’s about removing the human component or at least your need to act to get something done.

 

  • Design Your Workflow – For every project, you do in your office, there is a process that ensures successful completion. Design a workflow for each project so that you know the full process. You cannot automate anything if you don’t know each step that it takes to get to finished properly.

 

  • Notice Anything You Do Repeatedly – If you do it again and again, chances are it can be automated. For example, if you always need to transfer data from one place to another to get started with your work, can that task be automated using IFTTT.com?

 

  • Ensure Your Office is Compatible with Your Real Life – Most people who work for themselves need their office to travel with them. You’ll want to avoid using any system that is not compatible with mobile devices and systems. You should not have to go to your PC to get it done. The more mobile your tools are, the more likely you are to be able to use automation software too.

 

  • Check Compatibility with Your Existing Software and Systems – When you choose new tools to use for your business to enhance automation, it needs to work seamlessly with the software and systems you already use to be worthwhile. Of course, the one exception is if you’ve been stubborn about upgrading and using the best tools due to the cost of investment. If you are using older free tools cobbled together, you will have more issues making automation work than if you bite the bullet and invest.

 

  • Always Test the Results – Each tool that you use has native analytics and reports that you can use to determine if you’re getting the results that you wanted. If you’re not, don’t keep doing the same thing. Use the metrics to inform your next steps. Always make data-centric choices for your business.

 

  • The Small Stuff Does Matter – Even the smallest thing can change your entire workday. For example, what if you automated your office so that when you walk into your office, the light turns on, and so does your computer? Anything you can reasonably do to cut down on the steps will make you more productive and save tons of time, your most valuable resource.

 

Automating your office, whether it’s designed to turn on your computer, make you a pot of coffee, or turn on the lights, or it’s using software to let artificial intelligence do the task for you, will all help to make your days go much more smoothly. You’ll save time and be able to stay on top of the important stuff that needs your personal touch.

 

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The Ultimate Boost in Productivity: Automation and Outsourcing

Being productive is an essential element in any business owner’s life. Business owners are busy and need to use every moment given to them as fruitfully as possible. Most business owners continually research ideas that will boost their productivity. They research organizing so that they can be more productive, but the truth is the ultimate boost in productivity will come from a combination of automation and outsourcing.

 

  • Inexpensive – Automation is very inexpensive, and outsourcing is less expensive than hiring someone in house to do the same thing. Using automation where you can, and outsourcing everywhere else is inexpensive and offers an amazing ROI.

 

  • Easy to Get Started – It’s not as hard as you might think to get started with either automation or outsourcing. Learn how it works by reading the software website and the manuals. For example, if you join Zapier.com, you can learn about applets, or zaps, that other people have already created and simply copy theirs. When you outsource today, you can go to a platform like upwork.com or even Fiverr.com to find qualified people.

 

  • Increases Capabilities – Even if you don’t have a skill, you can find it in software or find it in an individual or company. This means that a one-person business can perform like a larger business due to increased capabilities.

 

  • Better Quality – Believe it or not, the work you produce will be much better when you work with technology and contractors to see your vision come to reality.

 

  • Contributes to Lean Practices – Most businesses these days need to run as lean as possible, whether it’s the busy season or not. Automation and outsourcing give you flexibility when it comes to your budget.

 

  • Get More Done – You’re simply going to get more done when you have more help. If you can automate most things, outsource the few remaining tasks, that means you have that much more time to do more of what matters to you.

 

  • Reduce Mistakes – If you don’t know how to do something, you’re going to make mistakes as you learn. But if you hire an expert, they’re going to make fewer mistakes. If you use technology and set it up right, there will be no mistakes.

 

  • Develop Improvable Business Processes – When you want to outsource or automate something, you will need to write down the process so that you can visualize every single step, including the impact of the steps. This is going to create a situation where you improve every single process you have.

 

  • Make Better Decisions – When you have better facts, you can make better choices and decisions for your business needs. Setting up automatic reports that appear in your Dropbox the moment you need to review them will blow your mind, but it will help you make better decisions since you won’t be fishing for the info at the last minute.

 

  • Creates New Opportunities – When you have more time to judge how your business is performing, and you’ve developed each process to be the most efficient possible, you’re going to have more doors open for you just when you need them.

 

To set up more outsourcing and automation, you’ll need to know what your business goals are, understand your core business, audit your internal processes, and learn how you can integrate what you already own with new technology that can help you with automation and outsourcing.

 

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3 Reasons to Automate and Outsource

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

 

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

 

Remove Bottlenecks

 

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

 

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

 

Reduce Errors and Mistakes

 

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

 

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

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

Spend Time on Higher Value Projects

 

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

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

 

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

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

 

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

 

On any given day, you may be responsible for:

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

 

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What’s Your Customer’s Buying Journey

 

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

 

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

 

  • Awareness
  • Interest
  • Consideration
  • Decision
  • Delight

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

 

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What’s Your Business Type?

 

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

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

3 step plan

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

 

So, consider what your business type is.

 

Online Store

 

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

 

Virtual Services

 

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

 

Virtual Support and Consulting

 

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

 

Virtual Training

 

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

 

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

 

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Information You Need to Know for Your Business Plan

 

There are many reasons to write a business plan. You may need a plan to borrow money, attract investors, or to validate your ideas. Plus, creating a business plan helps work out operating procedures and can put your business at a strategic advantage over other businesses.

 

To create your business plan, work on collecting the following information and documentation.

 

  • A Description of Your Business – This is simply what you do, who you do it for, why you do it, how you do it, and when you do it.

 

  • Describe the Problem(s) Your Customer Has That You Solve – Make a list of each problem you solve for your customer. Describe them fully and why they need to be solved. It can help to attach the product to the problem for reference.

 

  • Describe Your Solution – Explain how this solution solves the problem for your ideal customer. Try to write this from their perspective to ensure that you are putting the customer in a central place.

 

  • Describe Your Target Customer – You may need to describe more than one target depending on your products and services, especially if you have different levels of products, depending on their place in the customer buying journey. This is a good place for customer avatars.

 

  • Describe Your Competitive Advantage – This is all about how you are different from the competition. It may be due to price, service, innovation, operation, or something else. Some people also describe this as a unique selling point or unique selling proposition. It’s all about your place in the market and how you can leverage it to your advantage.

 

  • Describe Your Selling Process – Website, storefront, affiliates, distributors or salespeople, door-to-door, or something else? For example, perhaps you’ll set up a squeeze page with a freebie to build your list then nurture your relationship with them in email. Be specific and thorough.

 

  • Describe Your Business Model – This is a list of your revue streams and how you’re going to make money. If you have no revenue stream potential, you have no business. For example, starting a blog is not a business until you monetize it.

 

  • Describe Your Start-Up Costs – What are the funds you need to get started? List each expense and why you need it.

 

  • Describe Your Goals and Benchmarks – If you don’t set deadlines, it won’t happen, so make sure you match a deadline or benchmark to each of the goals you’ve set for your business. For example, “I will get 100 new customers each week by hosting two-hour long webinars each week.”

 

  • Describe Your Business Setup – For example, if you’re a sole proprietor who outsources to contractors, state that; if you are an employer with a management team, state so. If you plan to buy human resources, as time goes forward, mention those benchmarks so you know when this will happen.

 

  • Describe Resources You Have and Need – Make a list of the resources you have available now and how you’ll use them and a list of resources you need to buy, and when you’ll do so based on benchmarks.

 

As you work on creating your business plan, it can help to understand fully all the information and data that you need to complete a business plan that is useful for you. Use this list of information you need for your business plan to guide you as you create the plan and build your business.

How To Build A Wildly Profitable Income Stream From Home Without Lies, Hype, Manipulation or Pressure…

 

https://flawlessfreedom.com

 

 

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Are You Being Realistic About Your Goals?

People often struggle in both life and business with the process of goal-setting—more than likely, you’ve read a lot about creating SMART goals. SMART is an acronym for: specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and timely. Being realistic is one of the criteria for setting goals that will serve you, but the truth is, the rest of the acronym helps ensure that your goals are realistic.

 

It’s fun to fantasize about starting a business, and it’s not uncommon to imagine becoming a millionaire or making a high six-figure salary while sitting on the beach. The problem with this is that it’s just not that realistic. It’s not to say that no one has ever done it, but more than likely, they already had tons of resources like money and contacts that allowed them to simply delegate while they’re lying on the beach.

 

This is not an uncommon happening. Even the neighborhood dog walker probably had high hopes for how much money they can earn. When you come up with a figure or a measure for your goal to track, you want the number to be realistic and not just pulled out of thin air.

 

For example, let’s say that you are a virtual assistant. You plan to work as a VA full time. At first glance, you may think that means you can bill at least 40 hours a week. We often choose 40 hours because that’s what we’re used to in terms of work. However, it’s not really that realistic. There are other things you need to do for your business aside from the direct and billable work you’re going to do for them.

 

To be super accurate and realistic about how much you can earn, you need to figure out the order of operations at your VA business. What will you do all day? More than likely, once you figure out, you’ll realize you can work four or five hours a day that is billable, and the rest of the time, you’ll need to work on marketing and other aspects of your business.

 

After you’ve organized your day, you accept that you have five hours a day, Monday – Friday, that can be considered billable hours. That means you have that much time to work directly for a client that you can bill them for the time. How much money will you earn with that criteria at the rate you planned to charge? If you only charge $20 per hour, you’ll only make $500 a week before taxes or expenses. Is that enough?

 

You can raise your rates, or you can find other ways to earn more money, such as by going to a flat fee per service and finding people to outsource to or by hiring a full-time employee to help. Perhaps you can automate a lot more than you have so far to free up more billable hours. Maybe you develop an app that does what you would do automatically that you sell to your audience or that you use to serve your audience.

 

The main thing is that you should not leave these numbers to chance. Design your entire day and figure out what is realistic for your goals in each case. Don’t just pull a number out of the air. Think about the number and how it can happen or not happen before you put it in writing.

How To Build A Wildly Profitable Income Stream From Home Without Lies, Hype, Manipulation or Pressure…

 

https://flawlessfreedom.com