3 Things I Wish I Had Done At The Start

There were a couple of things I had done correctly from the beginning but now as I look back on my first year as an entrepreneur I see I missed the boat on what are possibly three of the most important things to do and why. 

Building An Email list. 

I totally didn't understand that having an email list is a more reliable way to get in front of people than through social media. As far as list building went, this was something I thought would happen as a result of the sales you made. I had assumed you would correspond with your customers to offer them further products and discounts thereby turning them into someone who would want your newsletter and/ or be on your mailing list.

Not so. You must proactively build your email list if you want to get more than one or two people on it each month.  Because who really needs another newsletter cluttering up their inbox? So you must  give them a good reason to part with their email address and remember the right opt-in freebie is a much better incentive than any amount of asking them if they want to sign up. I found that to follow this up with short and sweet newsletters that have no more than one or two easy to accomplish takeaways or nuggets of information can really help to grow your list.

Audience, Customer, Follower Engagement

While engagement seems equally as  important as building your email list, true engagement is much more difficult to come by. People generally do not engage with us as regularly as we would want. Think about it. How often to do you respond to a post be it on someone's blog or on one of the social media platforms? Me either. Would you call it regularly? No, why? Well, I have the answer or answers because it is a two parter. We are busy. Simple right? And it takes some time to consider a proper response that goes beyond "great post, or I agree". Mostly, what you read doesn't necessarily apply to you at the time. Either you are past its message in your business timeline or you haven't arrived there yet.
 
Still, engagement is very important, this is where you get your raving fans. This is where you know that your audience, customers, followers get you and like you.  So while there is no guarantee of a response to your posts when you ask for comments, you can help your chances by asking for answers to well thought out questions. And you absolutely must respond to the comments you get. So don't forget to spread a little of that engagement around, it can't hurt. 

Getting More Done In Less Time

This absolutely seems to be the bane of everyone's existence. We all want to get more done in less time. Me, I am a list maker, always have been. And it works, but, my list never ends and I have felt as if I am constantly chasing my tail. Somehow I believed as a new business owner that if I worked 10 hours a day 6 days a week I could keep up.

Luckily for me in the last few months, several people have been singing the praises of batching or grouping. If you are not familiar with batching, in simple terms it is nothing more than doing multiples of the same task in blocks of time. You benefit not only from being able to concentrate but by not having your time chopped up. At first, this method seemed to make the most sense with small or quickly done tasks because they are the ones that chop up your time the most. But it didn't take me long to see that even bigger projects are just series of smaller tasks strung together, and so would benefit just as much from being batched.  After batching some of my work now for a couple of months I can say that things seem less hectic lately. So I guess it's time to get on board with the rest. The best part is, I still get to make up my lists, only now when I complete 3 things it truly is a day's worth of work.

Please leave me a comment and let me know what you wish you had known at the beginning of your business journey or maybe something you think I should know for the upcoming year.

Have a lovely week

  ~~Joyce