You dream of having a successful business that you manage from home, but you don’t understand how much time starting and running a new business takes. We only have so much capacity every day. Allocating more time than you mentally have to business unbalances your life and leads to stress, burnout, and business failure. Learn how to define your goals and create a plan with the amount of time you need to achieve them and do it without sacrificing your life, family, and friends.

In my interview with Windy Lawson, owner, and publisher of The 90-Day Slay. We discuss working with home-based business owners to define goals and the time to achieve them. Windy provides great stories to help listeners to understand that you can have everything you want just not all at the same time.

Marketing your business well leads to awareness and leads. If you have a great sales process, you close those leads. Getting really busy and getting more clients can be overwhelming if you don’t have processes for business growth in place.

In my interview today with Jessical Millhiser, we talk about how to create processes for business growth and teams to help with the expansion so that you can continue to grow your business while serving all your new and existing clients.

To have a successful eCommerce website you need people coming to your site and browsing your merchandise. Awareness in search is the number one way to get people to find your site. SEO for eCommerce starts with onsite SEO for your website. You can also increase the SEO of your product listings with a Google Merchant Center account. The Google Merchant Center account provides SEO for eCommerce stores.

Benefits of using Google Merchant Center

-It’s Free
-Integrates with Shopify
-Displays in search, google shopping, and Youtube Shopping
-Add your promotion codes to your listings
-Links with Google Shopping Ads for digital advertising of specific products
-Product listing insights to see impressions and clicks and conversions

If you are a retail business, tracking where your sales come from is important. Knowing where your products are selling tells you where to increase or decrease your marketing spend. In this episode, I walk you through a system for tracking sales leads, using the process that we created for retail sales data analytics capture. This system works whether you are an online retailer, a physical brick-and-mortar store, or a combination of both.

Here is a list of sources we are tracking for referrals.

-Instore sales POS system
-Telephone Orders
-Email
-e-Commerce store front – Shopify
-Digital Ads
-Secondary selling platforms – Etsy, Amazon, Walmart, etc…
-Google Shopping/ Google Merchant Account

In order to grow, you have to have a professional business. Part of looking professional is answering the phone the right way. Small businesses struggle with when and how to add an assistant or office manager because they either lack the funds to pay someone or don’t want to hire a person to do the work.

Virtual Assistant Services like Grasshopper can solve all of these problems. You can look and be professional without having to pay the expense of a full or part-time employee and the paperwork that comes with it. You have all your phone calls answered and tracked for a low monthly cost and see it all on your phone. Today I’m going to talk with you about using Grasshopper and its many benefits.

Tracking Sales Leads is important to know if your business is growing but tracking where your leads are coming from is important to know which marketing campaigns are effective. Tracking Sales leads sources for campaign purposes for services-based businesses is extremely difficult because a person must actually make the sale. Today we share our process of what and how to track sales leads for service-based businesses.

In order to know if your marketing is working or not you need to track contact points first then you can pull that information through to closed sales. The points of contact that you need to track for all your marketing campaigns are

-Contact Forms – websites and landing pages
-Newsletters sign-ups
-Chat Bot
-Phone Calls
-Appointment scheduling systems.

Every company has a brand; part of your brand is how you speak to your customers in written form and in person. Your brand can get diluted if you and your team are not using the same tone and style of writing when communicating with your customers. This also can be the case in your marketing messages. If the copy you create on your website, blog, social posts, and ads don’t match your brand’s well-thought-out tone, these assets can feel out of sync with your brand. This can cause your potential customers to be confused and not buy from you.

In Today’s podcast episode, we are doing a Grammarly For Business Review where we walk you through all the great free features of Grammarly and the Business Features that can make sure all the copy you and your team create stays on brand. Some of the features we review are:

-Brand Voice
-Style Guide
-Chrome Extension and Apps

Former employees, especially those of larger corporations, struggle with becoming entrepreneurs when they finally decide to transition from employee to entrepreneur. The struggle usually isn’t about money, it’s about mindset.

The mindset of an entrepreneur is very different from an employee and learning how to take your transferable skills and trash the corporate skills that won’t serve you as an Entrepreneur is what this episode is about.

I talk about my journey from employee to entrepreneur as a person who was raised by employees and seen as “going rogue” when I became an entrepreneur.

Many small business owners need to do their own graphic design work until they can afford to higher someone and even then for quick small designs, it’s faster and easier to do it yourself. You need a tool that can create and store unique designs for all of your marketing needs.

That tool is Canva. It’s an ever-growing tool for non-graphic designers to create designs for all parts of their marketing Just some of the things it can create are:

-Social posts – images and video
-Presentations
-Print materials – BC, Flyers, Table Top Signs
-Reports
-Menus for your restaurant
-Website graphics and GIFs

It also has an extensive stock library of images and videos you can use as part of your software license

Client resentment and burnout are not supposed to be a part of owning a business. Many business owners think it’s just part of being an entrepreneur but it’s actually an indication that you have not set the right boundaries for yourself or your business. Learn the value of setting boundaries for business owners and for yourself to help your business