Especially when marketing online, you need to be on top of your game, because the “game” keeps changing.
Social Media platforms change guidelines and algorithms. Software programs frequently update, and online tools become outdated. (It’s definitely hard to keep up with everything.) But if you want to keep bringing in revenue, you have to ride the waves.
In this article, I’ll share some suggestions for staying at the top of your business game.
1) Ask Questions
First and foremost, you will want to continue to learn about what is working, and what’s not working. Reevaluate and look at the interior of your business regularly.
Ask yourself:
- What is working?
- What is NOT working?
- Why isn’t it working?
Then go deeper with these questions:
- Do you have any missing puzzle pieces in your business?
- Do you need to hire team members?
- Do you need more customer support, tech support, web maintenance?
Most important: Set aside a regular time every week or month to do the following:
- Check out any new business ideas, tools or systems that (a) everyone is talking about, and (b) that interest. For example, if you think you need to improve on your follower count, you can buy Instagram followers and improve your chances of being seen. You must do anything you possibly can to improve.
- Read the latest news from official blogs of any system you use (for example, Facebook Newsroom or, if you use a management tool such as Hootsuite, Hootsuite Social Blog).
- Read reviews of any new software or tool you are interested in.
- Follow and check out top people in your niche (influencers) to find out what they are talking about and what they are promoting.
- Check in with your subscribers on social media and in forums to find out what their most pressing current concerns are.
2) Don’t Set and Forget
We hear about ‘set and forget’ systems, but online, nothing can be truly ‘set and forget’. You can “set it”, but to stay on top, you absolutely need to track business performance, reassess systems, and, from time to time, even re-evaluate your goals.
Periodically click on the links you provide in your website’s ‘Resources’ or ‘Tools’ section. Don’t ever be someone who sends their subscriber to a dead link (or-worse-one that has turned into a gambling website). If you’re going to recommend someone or something, make sure that they are still there doing business.
And, with the systems or tools you use, not investing in the annual upgraded version of a piece of software doesn’t make sense. If a developer has created an upgrade, most likely that’s been done to fix bugs, add better features, or eliminate security weaknesses.
Not regularly engaging in conversation with your followers and subscribers means you won’t know if their needs change.
And not tracking the performance of your blog copy, sales pages, landing pages, incentives and anything else you put out there is to hamper your hard work and keep yourself spinning in conjecture and guessing games.
3) Prioritize Your Daily Tasks
We all have different skills and sweet spots when it comes to the tasks we want and need to do. You might love customer support and hate bookkeeping, while someone else enjoys the numbers game and doesn’t like dealing with the help desk. But regardless of your personal preferences, one thing is certain: money-making tasks should be at the very top of your to-do list.
That might mean product creation, email marketing, client outreach, webinar development, or something entirely different. But you need to identify those money-making tasks in your business and be sure to prioritize them every single day.
In his classic book, “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People”, Stephen Covey recommends prioritizing tasks based on a four-part grid. Every task is assigned to a quadrant of the grid, based on whether it is “Urgent”, “Important”, “Both”, or “Neither”. Once you know where a task falls on the grid, you’ll immediately know what you should be working on.
Examples: Marketing and planning are “important but not urgent”. A ringing phone is “urgent, but not important”. The sales page for your new program, launching tomorrow, is both “urgent AND important”.
So, before you schedule your daily to-do list, think about where each of your tasks falls in the quadrant, and prioritize accordingly.
Will you always be working on the best task for right now? Maybe, maybe not. Nor will you always use your time as wisely as you could. But, by making a conscious effort to organize and prioritize your days, you will find managing your business a lot less stressful and overwhelming.
It’s best to have a repeatable, consistent routine. So, sit down and map out your day.
Just by deciding ahead of time where you will spend your energy each day, you’ll find you have less stress, and a lot less room for the overwhelm that may be burning you out. I know that mapping out your daily routine might go against everything you wanted in a business. But trust me when I say, a routine is the pathway to freedom and shorter workdays.
So those are three things you can do to stay at the top of your game.
4) One more way
But one more way, is to be a part of a professional coaching organization like the International Association of Professional Life Coaches (IAPLC). Members have access to monthly trainings to help with managing and marketing a business, as well as the IAPLC “Coaching Business Training Vault” where in 7 courses, you can go from the first steps of putting together your business, all the way to being able to market it.
It’s like a high-ticket program of everything that you need to do, in order to start, grow, and scale your business—all in a membership that’s only $47 a month.
Find our more here: https://iaplifecoaches.org/membership
