If you’re a service provider, you likely have a huge heart for helping people. You also probably wanted to create a dream lifestyle when you started your business. But if you’re not doing daily activities that will get closer to those goals, then you’re just spinning your wheels. So what are the habits for business growth that you need to propel your business forward? It’s a good question, but the first thing to understand is the pitfalls that may keep you from building these daily habits.
Service Provider Problems
There’s no way around it. If you’re a solopreneur or micro business owner who provides services, you have to provide deliverables to your clients. This can often get in the way of you working ON your business rather than working IN your business all the time. Working on your business means doing things like marketing, sales development and operations. Those are the activities that will grow your business. Working in your business includes providing services for your clients.
Many problems arise when you continuously work IN your business rather than working ON it. If you’re constantly handling service delivery – and you’re not also working on daily business growth activities – you may find yourself in uncertain financial times. Sooner or later, your clients will move on and your projects will end, leaving you to wonder where your next clients are going to come from.
This causes you to take projects that aren’t an ideal fit for your skill set or you end up working with clients who are a bad fit. Bad fit clients can drain your energy and your time and really eat into your profit margin. So it’s important to do daily activities that will allow you to bring in enough leads so you can be very selective about who you work and the projects that you take on. If you take the wrong projects, you have to reinvent the wheel and figure out how to best deliver a service that you’re not used to delivering. This takes time out of your regular schedule, diminishes profit margins, and ultimately your clients might not even be happy with the outcome because it’s not your specialty. To avoid these pitfalls, it’s essential to make time in your day for business growth activities that will bring in those leads so you can be selective.
The three key areas to grow your business are:
- Audience growth
- Engagement
- Content
When done consistently over time, these three simple habits will make a tremendous difference for your brand recognition, audience size and engagement. In turn, you will have more leads and sales opportunities. Let’s take a closer look at each of these simple habits.
Audience Growth
To make Audience Growth a habit, I start my workday with a hot cup of coffee and some quality time on Facebook. My goal each morning is to find 25 people, who are in my target audience, to connect with.
If I only friended 25 people a day, 5 days a week, and only 17 people accepted, I would have 85 new friends each month and 255 new friends per quarter. Cool, right? Now imagine that you made it a goal to friend 50 people per day. That’s 510 new connections per quarter!
If you don’t use Facebook to market your business, you might do other Audience Growth activities like posting Reels or engaging with 25 profiles per day.
Engagement
The second business growth activity to tackle each day is engagement. This is where you have conversations with people that you’ve recently friended – or who have just followed you – and you reach out to get to know them a bit. This is not about trying to make sales right away.
Business is a relationships game, so it’s important to further your relationships with regular touch points. Make it a habit to circle back to the people that you’re meeting online. One of the ways you can do that is by keeping a spreadsheet of people you’ve talked to so you can refer back and keep track of what they’re up to. Go read their content, give it a like and leave a thoughtful comment. A world of opportunities will open up to you as a result of cultivating new relationships.
Content
Depending on your schedule, you may choose to make content either a daily or weekly activity. For example, when possible, I like to batch produce my content on Fridays. One of the ways that you can quickly create a lot of content is to repurpose it. That’s why I’m establishing habits to film a weekly video. Next, I’m transcribing the video for blog posts and pulling snippets to create social media posts. Finally, I’m using parts of the written transcript to create newsletter content.
You don’t have to create video content for this batch-production method to work for you. The method I’m using will work beautifully for podcasters. Or, if you prefer to write, take time each week to create an in-depth blog post. Then, pull quotes and ideas from it to create additional content.
It’s easy to get off track so, to stay on top of content creation, choose one day of each month to develop topic ideas for the next four weeks ahead. Selecting the first or last Friday of the month may be a good reminder to help you keep track and stay on schedule.
Take Action
Now that you know the three things that you can do each day, week and month to make progress in your business, what habits will you cultivate? And, how are you going to ensure that you stay on top of it?
If you liked this topic, be sure to take the free Personal Brand Accelerator Quiz. In less than 2 minutes, you will have personalized recommendations to enhance your approach so you get better results from your daily marketing activities.
