If you’ve followed along for a while you know that even though I’d like to spend more time here, my full time job is a stationery company that I’ve owned since 2005. It’s seen it’s ups and downs over the years for sure, and even though I’m good at designing and producing quality stationery products, I’m not what I’d consider a great business woman.
After going from having a full time almost business partner to running things solo without any transition, I began to look at things differently and started investing in educating myself. This was something I never really made a priority in my business before because I was always just working away at my business.
When I started taking a step back and putting energy into bettering myself, that’s when things really started to change, but when I first started focusing on educating myself I made one very big mistake. Sure I took some online courses (I have talked about that here) but primarily I sourced hundreds of articles, blog posts, tips and tricks; I studied them and even implemented many of them and nothing happened.
You know what I mean. “That one trick that boosted someone else’s business by 200%, that simple trick that in less than a day increased revenue by $5000 per month, etc. Tips and tricks might work…for a short boost but then things usually settle back down. Tips and tricks might be excellent things to do to boost your business, but what a lot of these people don’t tell you is everything else they did alongside that “thing” that helped make the difference.
Tips and Tricks don’t usually provide long lasting results because they usually work like a “get rich quick” scheme instead of a series of steps with a proven strategy to lasting growth and improvement in your business.
What to Do Instead of Random Tips and Tricks
Here’s the thing, tips and tricks might work if they actually fall into your actual business strategy for marketing and growth. If they don’t, then chances are if you do see any increase in sales or growth, it won’t be long lasting. So what do you do instead?
Instead of trying every random tip and trick you can find to help grow your business you need to have a plan. You need to know where you are right now and then decide what your ultimate dream goal is for your business and then work backwards.
Once you know (truthfully) where you are and where you want to go, now you have a realistic idea of the gap between reality and your dreams and now you can devise a plan to bring those dreams into your real life.
When I did this for my own business, my first major goal milestone is to increase my existing revenue by almost 50% when I did the math. That means that I either need to suddenly increase my audience by A LOT, or find ways to get more people that find my shop to actually stay and buy from my shop instead of moving on to someone else’s shop. Sounds a lot easier than trying to bring two or three times the traffic, right?
Once you have this foundation figured out, then you need to develop a consistent strategy for talking to your audience, cutting out the friction for your potential customers so you are making it easy for them to buy from you and then blowing them away with their experience from customer service all the way through to your amazing product or service.
Leave a Reply