I worked with some clients in 2020 who saw their businesses boom! I worked with others who saw their businesses bust. There were still others who were treading water and are still in business but they know they need to do something, anything – everything! – to stay that way.
How To Get More Out Of Your Workday
I have put together some tips and advice for you to make your workday as productive and effective as it can be. It is easy to get distracted and to go down a social media rabbit hole, but to grow your business you need to stop those practices, and implement some of these.
Reward yourself with social media time. Do your social media tasks, then sign out. Turn off notifications. Once you have completed what you had on your to-dos for the day – hop online and have fun! It is so easy to say, “I’ll just get online for ten minutes… then an hour later, you are still there.”
Get up early. Rise early and take care of marketing, planning the day and week. Get work done before the phones start ringing.
Don’t check your email first thing in the morning. “Train” your clients to understand that you don’t answer emails until… say, 10 am… unless it’s an emergency. Once you get into email, you are giving up control of your day.
Get up and get away from your desk. Take a couple of mental vacations a day to clear your head and boost productivity. You need to get up and get moving for mental and physical well-being.
Work on your most difficult tasks when you are at your peak. Some people thrive at 5 am, others at 5 pm. Know when you do your best work and concentrate on it then. Use your non-peak emotionally productive times to do marketing or admin tasks.
Look to automation and move your tasks to be on autopilot. If you can batch schedule your social media, for example, you can get it all out of the way on a Monday and then you only need to spend minutes a day interacting with followers.
Write. It. Down. If you don’t write down what you want to accomplish – from small tasks to large goals – they won’t get done. Days, weeks, months will slip past and some of your goals will remain unrealized.
Set deadlines for tasks and projects. A vague, “write a white paper” will likely get moved from day to day and remain unfinished because you didn’t give it a deadline for completion. Without a deadline, a task takes on the role of seeming unimportant.
Delegate and outsource what doesn’t make you money. Also, know what your hourly rate is and decide whether you, at your hourly rate, need to be on Twitter and writing blog posts. If you can delegate and outsource at a lower rate so you can concentrate on your core values – do that.
Don’t waste pockets of time. Imagine what you can get done in several fifteen-minute pockets of time a day. Four fifteen minute pockets equal an hour. Don’t waste that hour.
In a perfect world, every client you work with would be a dream client. In the real world, that isn’t the case. We have tips for how to deal with difficult clients, because there may come a time when you simply don’t want to “fire” them and we understand that.
If you are working with a client who is – shall we say – a challenge, you need to have coping mechanisms for those interactions. You also need to ask yourself, “why am I working with this person?” That is truly one of the first questions to be answered.
How To Deal With Difficult Clients
Think about some of these questions when interacting with your difficult client.
Are you working with a couple? A partnership or more than two people in the business? What are their underlying issues – is it truly a disagreement about business principles or is it their own personality conflicts that are driving the challenges? You cannot “fix” their personality issues, but you may be able to read the room and determine how to pose your questions and comments to address all concerns without making them butt heads.
What if you have a client who isn’t angry, but who just can’t make up his or her mind? In this case you feel like you’re running around in circles. Your client decides on Monday to do A but on Tuesday he decides he now wants to focus on B. How do you keep up? Make sure you keep detailed notes. In many cases this type of client will wake up and think that you aren’t doing your job because they aren’t moving forward – in reality it is their indecision that is keeping them stuck.
They cross boundaries. It is easy when you’re coaching or working with someone to have them think they are now your “best friend” and will take advantage of that imagined relationship. They will call at off hours, or drag out conversations or email and text with questions outside of coaching sessions – they’re getting free help and that isn’t fair to you. You need to set boundaries. You need to set expectations. You need to not answer the calls and remind the client of your contract with her and offer to sell her more time if she feels she needs it.
Until you decide to cut ties with a difficult client, you may need to step back, take a deep breath and start over.
As we are into the second week of 2021, we want to talk about how to write a business plan. Many of the clients with whom we work, either don’t have a business plan, have it “in their heads” or truly have written it on napkins or sticky notes.
Don’t let the intimidation of a business plan and its compilation stop you from writing one. When you set a manageable goal and give yourself deadlines and seek guidance in its preparation you will find it’s easier than you thought. More importantly, your business plan is a roadmap toward your success and who doesn’t want that?
How To Write A Business Plan
As a business owner you NEED to have a business plan. No matter if you’re a solopreneur, working in a partnership or have a large company – a business plan is a must-have document. As a business coach I know that the clients with whom I work have said having a business plan helped them grow, launch and sustain their businesses – and that is the goal, right?
Here are my thoughts on business plans
It’s not about the name on the top of the document – it’s about the discovery you find when you create it. You will be asking yourself, or working with a coach who will ask, questions that delve deeper into your financial and growth goals.
Don’t think you have to write the business plan all in one day. You don’t set aside an hour, or so, a day until it’s done.
Make sure you set up an appointment with yourself on your calendar and make the business plan completion a priority.
Look online for business plan templates and outlines. Work with a business coach to complete your plan.
Ask for feedback and input from trusted colleagues or your coach.
Don’t let the preparation of your business plan become what seems like an insurmountable task – it’s not. Look at your business plan as your roadmap for success – it is!
If you’ve been in business and online marketing for any length of time you will hear about how to effectively repurpose blog posts and some of them are great ideas, others aren’t worth the effort you will put into them. Your blog posts are your greatest source of marketing strategy inspiration. Your blog posts should be looked at as the hub of all your marketing.
A blog is the content from which all other content flows and grows. Create a great blog post and you will have an ideal tool for your entire marketing plan. Yes, your blog means that much.
How To Effectively Repurpose Blog Posts
When we say “repurpose” we don’t mean you go in and copy and paste the content and change the headline. You need to truly “repurpose” to make it effective. Here are our best strategies. When repurposing, check your Google Analytics and repurpose the posts that had the most traffic.
Turn the blog post into a different medium. The blog could be a video with you sharing bullet points. It could be short audio. Turn the bullet points into images or memes. Take two posts that have similar content and put them into a long post — compounding — the high ranking posts with similar content makes that content seem more valuable to a reader.
Look at your highest performers and turn them into a lead magnet. Building your email newsletter list should be a priority for 2021. A newsletter list is a business’s most valuable asset.
Turn a post into an infographic. If you have a high performing post that has great bullet points that would lend themselves to an infographic, make one and share that out as new content or use as a lead magnet.
Look at content and see if it lends itself to a guide or tutorial. If you have enough content that can build upon one another and be a valuable resource for potential or current clients, turn it into a video, audio or written tutorial or guide book.
Post a snippet or a rewritten piece of your content onto other sites like EZine articles or Medium, to name two.
