It is always an exciting experience when you ditch your 9-5 all by yourself or decide to do your own thing altogether. You are ready to sail and you have the world at your feet. but all too quickly, you realize that you are still a long way off from achieving your business dreams.
We will be sharing in this article and the next eight avoidable mistakes to help smoothen your sail.
Allocate time spent on tasks:
Creating a well-lubricated system helps you eliminate unnecessary time spent on non-value-added tasks, helps you to streamline your process over time, and keeps you more focused on value-added tasks. Value-adding tasks are errands that produce an outcome that clients will be willing to pay for while Non-value added or support tasks often times comes in the form of distractions. These tasks appear to be beneficial to the business but more often than not, ties to no action that will boost revenue growth. It could be your poring over data and analytics without the intention to generate actionable steps from gathered data. Such tasks could be hidden under the guise of checking emails every hour or calling your teammates every 30mins in a bid to follow through on revert to the client not due anytime soon. Meanwhile, there are more pressing tasks that should be ticked off.
What should be done instead: Eliminate time wasters, Effective Time Management, Setting up procedures and systems
Unlike a global organization or big businesses that pay salaries consistently even when there are idle times, as an online business owner, you don’t get paid for tasks not resulting in positive outcomes hence be sure to allocate time for each task and stick to it except there are emergency tasks that require prompt attention.
Get your systems in place to run effectively
- If you run events regularly- Create a system and leverage on event tools like Eventbrite
- Time Management: Work with a schedule
- Giving feedback to customers- Unless, in customized solutions, A FAQ works wonders
- Onboarding New Clients and Contracts- Create a document that can be used across
With a well-detailed framework in place, you are able to effectively juggle your time between value-adding and non-value-adding tasks. You may want to work with a ration 0f 80:20 in task allocations.
Learn to repurpose content to free you up for value-adding assignments:
You can use the same content for an instance across your social media platforms with just a slight tweak. No Need to generate fresh content again from the scratch.
Turn a blog post into content for Linked in and Facebook with a little except tweaked for IG and Twitter. The same script can be turned into a podcast and if you so wish tweak into a video script.
Create FAQ from consistent client queries and make the document accessible to your audience. Seeing that you have already invested so much time in producing a result, there is n need to re-create the wheel, just tweaks and continue to add value in excellent ways
Stop building a following for the wrong reason:
You must focus your social media efforts to deliver on returns every time. So some people may have a huge following but get no engagement, Others may have a small following but get more engagement, others may not even get likes on their posts but their DMs and PC are bubbling, which category do you belong to or which category will you rather be in? You decide!
As a matter of fact, you must have the right audience following you, or else all your efforts may just be in vain. You should not be excited when only friends and relatives engage with your content, there is a better conversion that will translate to real results when those outside your immediate network engage with your content. Read here the Secrets of Social Media Experts
Cut out unnecessary expenses:
I made this same mistake at the start of my online business. With a corporate background, I wanted everything to be perfect, structured and paid for from the start without understanding that there was more to setting up an online business than meets the eye. I went on to pay for various apps and tools that were never utilized. This is a mistake you can avoid and cut out costs not needed. You must learn to check back and ensure that there is an ROI on any cost incurred.
Fact: You really do not need that yearly subscription just yet, you could perhaps startup with free trials and monthly subscriptions for you to perfectly understand how the marketing tool paid for works.
So instead of spending money unnecessarily,
- Start by using an excel sheet to document all the costs you think you require.
- Then allocation expected ROI on each cost items
- Strikeout what you know the business does not need
Please read the next article to get full the full value of mistakes to avoid.
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