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.
With 2020 in the rear view mirror you may be thinking that 2021 will see a return to in-person networking meetings because there is the hope that the coronavirus pandemic will be behind us and life will return to “normal.” We all hope that! But, if it doesn’t materialize quite as quickly as you’d hoped it would, we have some tips and we hope you don’t make these networking mistakes.
Many business owners have honed their online marketing skills and networking skills through the myriad of Zoom meetings they’ve attended, but we are still seeing some networking mishaps that make us cringe!
I and my team enjoy in-person networking, but obviously didn’t have the luxury of attending in the past ten months. We know that nothing takes the place of in-person networking, talking face-to-face and shaking hands. There are still ways to build business online, but with a few nuances.
As with in-person events, Zoom networking meetings can lend themselves to your believing these networking myths and making mistakes.
Don’t Make These Networking Mistakes
Attend meetings that make sense for your business. Don’t attend a meeting that has no importance to you or your business unless it is for learning purposes. Do your homework and attend meetings that put you in front of ideal clients. Don’t fill your calendar so full with Zoom networking that you don’t provide services to your current clients.
Not everyone you speak with or online chat with during a Zoom networking event is a potential client. Don’t treat them as such. Build relationships. Be authentic and genuine in your interactions. Sure, they may be a potential client, but don’t let desperation show in every interaction with thinking you’re signing them up.
Not every networking meeting means you need to toss out your elevator pitch. If you’re in a meeting and the host says, “tell us your name, your business name and one unique thing about you” do just that. Don’t recite your elevator pitch — you will turn people off and take up valuable time that other attendees deserve to use as much as you do. Follow the rules — you will be remembered for that. You can share an elevator pitch later if you connect with someone who wants to get to know you better and whom you want to get to know.
Search for online networking events that not only seem like they will advance your business but that seem interesting and to which you can make a true contribution. Here’s to in-person meetings in 2021!
What are you waiting for? Entrepreneurs need to write a book as a way to share their experiences, insights and expertise. This is especially true if you want to get more speaking gigs or pick up more clients – and we assume that is the reason for being in business, right?
6 Reasons To Write Your Biz Book In 2021
Here are our top reasons to write a book coupled with how to make it happen.
You need to know why you want to write a book. Do you want to write it to give away? Do you want to write it to lead people into a course? Do you want to be seen as an expert? Do you want to use it as a lead magnet into your coaching programs? Do you have a story to tell and you just want to share it with the world without any idea of monetary gain? Knowing your WHY will help you formulate the content.
If you know you need help, get it. Do your research and hire or work with a book coach about whom you’ve heard good things. Ask friends who have written books how they did if and if they hired someone. If you just need accountability or help with getting started or putting together chapter titles, etc. know that going into a relationship with a book coach.
Make the time for it. We’ll bet you thought about writing a book before, but time just got away from you. The year ends and you still don’t have a book, right? You need to put “write my book” on your calendar and treat it as a true to do, not something you push off to the bottom of the pile. Make it a priority or it won’t happen for another year.
Plan the content. Sit down and ask yourself: who will read your book? Why will they read it? What will they learn from it? How do you want to construct it? As a how-to, a narrative with a workbook? Once you know who will read it and how you want them to consume the content, write a table of contents; that will guide the rest of the content.
Start marketing the book now. Don’t wait until it’s written and published. Build buzz for your book now and start making pre-sale packages. For instance, buy the book on pre-sale and you get XYZ bonuses. The major entrepreneurs who are authors do just that as a way to garner presales and to potentially get new business.
Know where you want to publish your book or talk with a professional to understand the nuances of publishing. Do you want to work with a publisher or do you want to self publish? That is one of the biggest questions you will need to answer.
Pull out your calendar today and plan your book. Write it down as a to do and attach deadlines and word counts to it. Make it happen in 2021.
Reach out to Rex Richard and make a plan for your marketing strategy for your book. He also has resources on his team to help you get your book started and completed!
