Who doesn’t love automation? Shopping carts and membership sites automate your sales and content delivery. Email autoresponders automate relationship building. And calendar apps automate your schedule, putting an end to the frustrating back and forth of setting appointments.

Not only does automation save you time, but it helps ensure quality and consistency as well. Just imagine how confusing it would be to your customers if you didn’t have a shopping cart, but instead sent them an invoice for every purchase, and each invoice was a different cost. Or what if your 16-week group coaching course sometimes arrived by email, and sometimes in your Facebook group, and sometimes not at all?

Now these might seem like silly, over-the-top examples, but this is why automation tools exist—to keep everything running smoothly and as expected.

Can you automate everything? No. But you can implement this same level of efficiency and consistency by creating systems and workflows.

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Overwhelm is a real thing in online businesses. There is always more that could be done. More products to create, more blogs to write, more opt-in pages to build, more clients to connect with, more, more, more.

And one of the biggest contributors? Shiny object syndrome.

Every time you’re tempted to buy that new, must-have tool, or to test out a new marketing method, or even to switch business models entirely, you’re falling victim to this business killer.

Here’s the problem with shiny object syndrome. It prevents you from achieving success by shifting your focus away just when you’re about to hit your sweet spot. It’s true. I’ve seen it happen time and time again. A promising startup just begins to make sales and gain a following, and then out of the blue, the owner does a pivot into a completely unrelated niche or business.

All that work… just gone.

Don’t let this happen to you.

Set Clear Goals

The first step toward the clarity and...

It’s inevitable. As a small business owner, you will wear many, many hats.

Marketing manager.

Bookkeeper.

Content developer.

Coach.

Technical support staff.

But while this type of task juggling is to be expected, you have to be aware that not all of your hats are created equal. Marketing outweighs bookkeeping, for example, because without marketing, there will be no cash to manage.

Not only that, but you have to consider how much time you’re spending in each area as well. If you spend all day tweaking the design on your website and put off sending an email to your list, what have you gained?

Sure, you might have a prettier website, but you lost an opportunity to drive traffic to your offer.

In an ideal world, you’d simply put on your CEO hat and delegate the rest, but here in the real world, we don’t always have that option. Instead, we have to work smarter, and take care how we’re spending our time.

Prioritize Your Daily Tasks

We all have different...

There comes a time in every entrepreneurial venture where you realize you simply cannot do it all yourself.

Sure, when you’re just getting started you really are the “chief, cook and bottle washer.” But as your business grows, it becomes painfully obvious that trying to do everything is only going to lead to:

• Frustration (when critical tasks don’t get done and deadlines are missed)
• Burn out (when you’re working yet another 12-hour day)
• Overwhelm (when your to-do list is longer at the end of the day than it was at the beginning)

There are many ways to combat this business-growth hurdle, but one of the best is automation. Imagine a completely hands-off system that works for you even when you’re hiking on a remote mountain or lounging at a luxury spa.

But here’s an even better reason to automate: it lets you scale your business. Think about it, the less manual work you have to do, them more time you have to do the money-making tasks such as...

Inaction is the death of any business. Without taking regular action every single day to grow your business, inaction will cause your business to become stagnant. Clients will disappear, your sales funnel will be empty, and your revenue will dip to zero in a heartbeat.

Let’s avoid this scenario!  Here are five action tasks that will lead to increased income and business growth.

1. Email Your Customers Regularly.

Contrary to popular belief, email marketing is NOT dead. Email is the easiest way to stay in touch with customers and prospects to let them know about your new offerings or to recommend an affiliate product which pays you a commission.

2. Focus on Customer Service.

You will never please everyone but you may as well try your best. Inevitably customers will contact you with questions or refund requests so be prepared to answer these requests in a timely manner. Stick to your rules about refunds but never disregard or disrespect a customer. Negative online reviews are...

Implement These 3 Productivity Hacks Today

Productivity and efficiency are the popular buzz words lately as more and more business owners try to make the most of their time during a busy day. No matter how hard you try, you simply cannot do everything yourself when it comes to running your business. Investing in your business not only decreases stress but it makes your business run more smoothly, therefore increasing profits.

If you need to improve your productivity, try these three tips:

Outsource It

Rather than being saddled with monotonous tasks and expensive software they may have to learn, many smart business owners are accepting their limitations and finding expert service providers to take over these tasks. What takes one expert an hour to do can easily take a non-savvy business owner 5 hours to complete. Is that really a good use of your time?

Start off by asking your business associates for referrals and conduct regular interviews, as though you were hiring an employee....

A common piece of advice from business coaches to those who want to grow their business is to hire team members who can do the support work so you can focus your efforts on money-making tasks. In other words, don’t waste your time doing bookkeeping or answering emails because you’ll make more money selling your signature program or coaching clients.

So how’s a business supposed to run smoothly when you’re not doing those necessary support tasks? Simple…you hire people to do those tasks for you. There are expert Virtual Assistants who can create an organized inbox with filters, folders and labels in mere minutes. There are expert Bookkeepers who find joy in numbers and live for balancing your books each month. And there are still others who adore creating online content and helping customers with their questions and problems. This is the team you need to create.

There’s Not Enough Time in Your Day

If this is your excuse for not getting tasks done,...

Businesses of every type, including coaches, need a business plan. Don’t think you can skip by on this important step because you offer a service instead of a physical product. Every business can benefit from a business plan.

First Step, Focus.

When you create a business plan you need to focus on the reasons for the business: Who do you want to serve? What do you want to provide? When do you want to start? Where will you set up shop? Why do you want to start such an endeavor? How will you meld all these things together to create a prosperous business?

These are the primary reasons why you’re going into business and they should always be at the forefront of your mind when making decisions.

Something else to focus on is your big dream. How much money do you want to make over the next 5 years? Do you want to sell multiple products or have several locations? Everyone’s big dream will be different but you should write it down as part of the plan.

Second Step, A Plan.

...

We’re coming to the end of our seven-blog posts challenge to use business planning to create explosive growth in traffic, customers, and most importantly income. Much of what we’ve discussed so far has been actionable steps like writing down your goals as well as mindset pieces like the one about stepping out of your comfort zone. Today is all about putting everything we’ve discussed so far and combining it into something that can give you that explosive growth you want.

You see when you use the basic concept of exponential growth to your advantage, it doesn’t take very much progress in any one area to see big results. We briefly touched on this idea back on day three when we talked about increasing traffic, subscribers, and customers to add to our bottom line. Today we expand on this whole idea in a few different ways and tie it all back into setting goals and business planning in general.

The idea is to make progress on your goals and stack them in a...

Can you think back on a time of real growth, be it in business, in your personal life, or anywhere else? More than likely, you had to step out of your comfort zone for that growth to happen. Yes, we can make progress by doing what we’ve always done. But it will be slow and more importantly, by staying within your comfort zone, you are limiting your potential growth. It’s when we step out of that zone, try something new, take a bit of a risk, and allow for personal and professional growth that we start to see big changes for the better.

Let’s say you goal is to grow your reach and get out in front of a larger audience. What you’ve done so far, and what feels comfortable is writing a blog post a week and then sharing it on social media. Yes, some readers will find you. Yes, if you double or triple your efforts, publishing more posts per week and sharing more often across all your social media accounts, you will see some growth and engagement. But you’re...