Tag: office organization

Categories
Entrepreneurs

5 Ways to Effectively Manage Your Business for Successful Business Growth

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Let me share a secret with you that many successful online solopreneurs already know – you have to manage your business before you can market your business, and if you’ve been with me for a while you’ve no doubt heard me say this many times!

So, if you can answer YES to at least ONE of these questions then you know you are not effectively managing your business:

* Do you feel overwhelmed at the start of each day – you don’t know what to do first?
* At the end of each day do you feel like you’ve achieved nothing, yet you’ve been ‘busy’ all day?
* Do you find projects/clients are falling through the cracks?

These are some of the classic signs of a LACK of systems – you’re not effectively managing you business so how can you effectively market your business? You don’t have your core systems in place and your business is running you when it should be you running your business!

Let me share with you now five ways you can start to manage your business so that you can effectively market and grow your business:

1. Review your current systems. The first thing you need to do is look at the systems you currently have in place. What is it that constantly frustrates you, or that you feel you are spending too much time on? Are you continually searching around looking for an email address? Or cannot tell at a glance if your project is on track? Make a list of where you feel the problems are – these are your time drains. This is where you need to make improvements in your systems so that they work for you and not against you.

2. Set about creating your core office organization systems. Now that you know where the problems are you can begin to take steps to improve them – in other words you can now start creating your core systems! A system is simply a description of HOW you do something. For example, how do you create a new client file? How do you handle new client enquiries? Look at those areas you’ve already identified as your time drains and decide how these time drains can be turned into a system. List all of the steps you take in a process from start to completion – these steps will form your system.

3. Systemize repetitive tasks. If you find yourself doing the same task over and over again then you need to create a system for it. One example could be you’re answering the same client enquiries again and again. The easy way to resolve this is to put all those questions together in one place and create an email template. The next time a client asks you a question you simply open the email template, put their email address in the ‘To’ field, and hit send! Or, an alternative option would be to create a FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) page on your website and direct enquiries there.

4. Create a calendar template. Now that you have your core systems in place, start and look at how your work week is structured. Create a calendar template that blocks out time for certain activities, i.e. you might decide that Friday is your business development day, Monday is for marketing, and Tuesday through Thursday are for clients/revenue-generating activities. Once you create a structure around your work week you will find that you become much more focused and productive.

5. Create a long-term plan. I’m a huge fan of spreadsheets – they can be used for so much more than just sums! And I use them to plan out my whole year. I have created an annual marketing plan that shows me month-by-month what programs I’m going to be running, what promotional activities I’ll be doing, and which list building strategies I’ll be implementing. This takes a lot of the guess-work out of running my business because it means I always know where I’m going!

I guarantee that you too will start to see an increase in your business, your income, and your productivity if you start to implement some of the steps I’ve suggested above. You’ll wonder why you left it so long.

Categories
Online Business

Top 5 Automation Tools for Your Online Solo Service Business

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Part of running an efficient and organized business is making full use of the technology and resources available to you. It’s great to set up systems and processes and have them work for you, but in order to fully automate your business you also need to know which technologies are going to work best to support you in that.

Over the years I have worked with many different automation tools (either in my own business or for my clients) that have helped to support an online solo business owner, and today I’d like to share my top five favorite ones with you. All of these tools I use in my own business today – and they’re a huge timesaver as well as creating a more streamlined and automated business for me.

1. 1ShoppingCart – this is my shopping cart, autoresponder, broadcast, and database management systems all rolled into ONE system. I especially like this service because everything is done in one place which really does make for a more streamlined business. It is possible to use one service for your shopping cart activities (i.e. product sales) and another service for your autoresponder/broadcast (i.e. sending out your newsletter) but the danger with this is that you are running two different databases and at some point it will become cumbersome and may even start to become unmanageable.

2. TimeDriver – this is probably my favorite find and is such a huge timesaver for me; I’m so grateful to one of my clients for putting me onto this service. It’s a system whereby you can get your clients to self-schedule their appointments with you, avoiding the back and forth of emails that happens when you’re trying to arrangement appointments and, of course, the time spent doing this. You simply give your clients/colleagues the special link that’s generated by TimeDriver and they are able to see your availability (which you have pre-determined) and therefore schedule accordingly with you. It works with both Outlook and Google calendars.

3. Submit Your Article – this service is an article submission service (notice I said ‘service’ not ‘software’) that submits your articles to hundreds of different article directories and ezine publishers on your behalf. You simply upload your article to your account and they do the rest. It’s a really great way of getting your articles out to a lot of places in the shortest amount of time possible, and again is another huge timesaver.

4. BYOAudio – as well as using this service to record and host all my teleclass audios, I make full use of their Podcast feature. You can record your podcast episode directly into your podcast, and they will share and syndicate it with the top podcast directories – even iTunes – immediately it’s published! Those directories, in turn, come and get your podcast, index it, and make it available to their visitors. All this takes is about 10/15 minutes of my time to record my podcast episode and publish it to my podcast. Another great strategy for building my list that really takes no time at all to implement!

5. OnlyWire – this is the service I use to create social bookmarks for my blog entries – they even post to Twitter and Facebook. Social bookmarking is a method for Internet users to store, organize, search, and manage bookmarks of web pages. It works in two ways: i) When someone stores a bookmark to one of your blog posts they have an easy way to access your information again; and ii) because these bookmarks are stored on the website’s of the social bookmarking sites, i.e. Technorati, Digg, etc. etc. they provide backlinks to your blog/website. If you wanted your bookmarks to appear on each of these social bookmarking sites you could do it all manually, i.e. create an account, log in to your account, post your bookmark, and repeat this process for every social bookmarking site you have an account at. Where OnlyWire comes in is that you provide your account login details at the various social bookmarking sites, submit your blog post URL for bookmarking, and OnlyWire will do the publishing for you! One or two clicks and you’re done!

Categories
Home-Based Business

Office Organization: 5 Steps to Setting Up Your Core Systems

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For many solopreneurs they think that once they’ve set themselves up in business it’s all about marketing, marketing, marketing. But there’s one very important piece of the puzzle you need to have in place before you start your marketing … and that’s your managing.
Building a successful long-term profitable business isn’t about “marketing” your business, it’s about “managing” your business – the marketing comes once you have your management systems in place… this is a really important concept, and once you’ve got to grips with this, marketing becomes a whole lot easier!

You cannot begin to market your business if you can’t find the information you need, don’t know who you are marketing to, and don’t know where you are in your business.

So what I’d like to share with you today are my top 5 steps to setting up your core office organization systems.

1. CREATE your paper-based filing system. Having an efficient filing system in place will enable you to find the information you need, when you need it! First of all invest in your filing storage, whether that’s a dedicated filing cabinet or plastic filing crates. Keep in mind you will need TWICE as much storage space as you think you’ll need. When setting up your filing system it’s important that you design a system that fits YOUR style.

2. TACKLE the Paper Pile using my super-simple Two-Step System. This is a really quick and simple way of tackling your piles of paper. The goal is to get all the papers off your desk and floor and either have them filed away for when you need them again; in a special ‘action’ folder that you work on during your allotted ‘action focus’ time; or quite simply tossed! You would be surprised at how many papers you are holding on to that when you look back at them you find are either out-of-date or simply not relevant to your business needs anymore.

3. CREATE your PC filing system. Once you’ve got the first two steps completed, this third step actually becomes quite easy. Your PC is also a large filing cabinet, so it makes sense to replicate your paper-based system for the PC. If you have created main category files, then create a main category folder in your ‘My Documents’ folder on your PC, and create sub-files in this main folder as necessary. Repeat this process for all your main filing categories.

4. ORGANIZE your Inbox. Emails! Another huge time drain if not organized properly. Use the same system again to store and manage all your emails. Instead of them all going into one huge Inbox that’s totally unorganized, break your Inbox down into different folders and move the relevant email into that folder. Follow the same system as for your paper and PC-based filing systems. In Outlook you can create Email Rules so that emails are automatically moved into the appropriate folder as they come into your Inbox. Consistency is the key to an efficient filing system. Keeping to the same system will make it much easier for you to manage.

5. CREATE a PC and file back up system. Now that you’ve spent time creating all these systems it’s vital that you also have a PC back-up system in place. You simply cannot afford to lose any of your vital documents when you run a solo service business. In fact I highly advise having two back up systems in place – one onsite and one offsite. The onsite back up can be through an external hard drive, and the offsite back up service can be through an automatic backup service.

Make a plan today to get these core systems in place and your business will start to become effortless and fun – isn’t that an exciting thought!