productivity – Page 2 – Small Business Odyssey

February 9, 2012

Sometimes You Have to Stop to Move Forward: A Montville Break

Over the weekend, I spent two days in a cabin in Montville, a mountain village on the Blackall Range in Queensland, Australia. It was great to take in the mountain air and the glorious vistas and to stroll through Montville village, an arts and craft centre that I featured in one of my Squidoo lenses.

I had deliberately left my laptop behind on this trip and took a real break from computers, the Internet and work generally. There are times when you need to stop to move forward – to slow the momentum of your body and your mind.

Improve your blogging productivity with a rest

Without rest and relaxation, you can become stale in what you are doing whether it is article writing, social media marketing or writing blog posts.

With a break, you can return to your daily blogging with renewed energy, insight and enthusiasm. A break can also improve your productivity through the energy renewal and new perspectives you gain. Often you will find that the solution to your current issue or problem lies in front of you – you just need time out to see it.

This is particularly true when you are engaged in running a small business offline. The daily demands can mean that you are constantly ‘chasing your tail’. Eventually, you can’t ‘see the wood for the trees’ – you are blind to the bigger picture because of reacting to small things.

Stepping back, taking time out, is essential to develop a new perspective. You could take a weekend away to refresh your mind. The beauty of a place like Montville can be really invigorating.

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Time seems to stand still when you stop – minutes turn into hours and hours become days. This is in stark contrast to when you are busy chasing deadlines.

I was able to take heaps of photos on my Samsung Galaxy S11 Camera (8 Megapixels) on my Montville break and now I have these available for blog posts (see images in this post) and for creating videos via Animoto.

I was also able to identify ways that I could add more content to my personal productivity membership site:

Re-purpose articles I have written for Ezinearticles.com
Create a series on MP3’s on productivity and energy levels
Expand productivity tips from some of my Squidoo lenses
Develop a series of promotional videos for the membership site.

By taking a two day rest at Montville, I am now able to resume my blogging with improved productivity through an increase in energy, resources and ideas.

February 7, 2012February 9, 2012

The Challenge of Daily Blogging and the Need for Improved Personal Productivity

There are many things that work against you when you attempt to achieve daily blogging.

However, the effort to maintain a daily blogging schedule is well worth it. I noticed that since I have missed a few days of publishing Small Business Odyssey, the Alexa ranking has changed from 860,000 to 1,100,000 – in other words, my web traffic has dropped.

Daily blogging enables you to build momentum both with your writing and your blog traffic.

Photo Credit: cambodia4kidsorg

Creating a related blog – How to be productive

Sometimes you may need an infusion of new ideas or a new perspective on your blogging. This can come through creating a related blog and using a drip-feed automated process.

Over the past week I’ve been building another WordPress blog, a productivity membership site:

http://www.how-to-be-productive.com

Whilst the membership site was pre-built in terms of its drip-feed content, I decided to develop audio content for the first 9 lessons via Audacity. Again, once I gained momentum in creating these recordings, I found the task easy and enjoyable. I was able to produce the audios (MP3’s) for the membership site on personal productivity in two sittings – one involving three recordings, the other six.

The associated task of inserting the audios into blog posts was made so easy by the very clever, free software, podPress, discussed in an earlier post.

So while I was not writing and publishing on my Small Business Odyssey blog, I was developing and refining my productivity membership site hosted on a WordPress blog.

Personal productivity and daily blogging

While the creation of the new productivity site may seem like a diversion from this blog, I believe that it actually reinforces the Small Business Odyssey blog. Personal productivity underpins much of what I am writing about on Small Business Odyssey. Fundamentally, if you can’t improve your personal productivity as a small business owner, you will have real difficulty engaging in any form of small business marketing. Worse still, you may end up doing the wrong kind of work (e.g. wasting hours on Twitter, reading and writing Tweets).

One of the core challenges involved in daily blogging is, in fact, finding ways to improve your productivity. To make the time to achieve a daily, published blog post (a minimum of two hours taking into account locating images and editing), you need to find ways to improve your use of time.

There are numerous things that can distract you or consume your time as a small business owner and it is easy to fall into old habits ( e.g. reading emails for hours) – with the net result that you do not make time for blogging.

Over the past three weeks, for example, I have been engaged with others in creating four tender submissions for our human resource consulting business. a mind-numbing task but essential for business survival and growth in the current economic and political climate.

It would have been very easy to give up daily blogging but I had to find a way to schedule my blog writing at a time when my productivity and creativity were at their best – early in the morning.

To engage in daily blogging, takes a huge commitment but it is rewarding both intrinsically (personal satisfaction and sense of achievement) and extrinsically (increased web traffic and income).

February 2, 2012February 9, 2012

How To Be Productive: The Internal Challenges

If you are a small business owner engaged in small business marketing, it is absolutely critical that you learn how to be productive.

There are many demands on your time through email and phone communications, staff management, stock control, product and service development, accounting and taxation, relationship building with clients and strategic planning – to name just a few demands.

On top of these demands, you may be faced with the all-consuming task of developing tenders to generate new work from existing clients or to expand your market to capture new clients. If you are engaged in writing tenders, you will often have to demonstrate nowadays that you have a Business Continuity Plan and a Business Sustainability Plan (as well as policies for every conceivable area of operations).

So just to operate effectively and profitably, it becomes important to learn how to be productive. Improving your productivity becomes even more critical if you are trying to grow your business through your small business marketing online,

However, there are very real internal challenges that you have to face if you are to learn how to be productive for the sake of your business and its development.

The things that block you from learning how to be productive

There are many internal things that get in the road of you increasing your productivity – being able to do more with less. Fundamentally, they come down to your fears. Here are some ways that your fears may be manifested:

Fear of failure – you tell yourself that if you are not successful at your endeavour, then people will think ill of you or you will think poorly of yourself
Fear of success – you are worried that success will bring increased visibility, unwanted attention and major changes to your lifestyle which, though desirable, are themselves very challenging
Procrastination – you put off things that you know you should do to be successful, but there are often more attractive things to do
Being busy on the wrong things – you spend all your time on things that are not important for your small business but you feel productive doing them (e.g. wasting hours on YouTube or Facebook or spending hours talking to your neighbouring business owner)
Perfectionism – this is a hidden form of fear and relates to fear of success or failure as it stops you short of achieving your goals or dreams
Feeling overwhelmed – this can be because you are anxious or fearful and are not prepared to make a commitment to a course of action.

Unless you learn to overcome these internal challenges in the form of your fears, you will not be able to be productive.

The following free course on how to be productive helps you to identify and address these fears:

http://www.how-to-be-productive.com

This e-course on productivity is like dipping your toe in the water to see what it’s like. If you want to make a real commitment to becoming productive and to realizing success, you could wade into the water and try out my productivity membership course:

http://www.how-to-be-productive.com/join

Audio on how to be productive

If you want some idea of what this course on productivity covers and how it will help you, listen to my introduction for subscribers to the membership course (4.56 mins):

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I have added audio to many of the lessons of this how to be productive membership course so that you can download them and listen to them at your leisure (on your morning or evening walk?)

November 2, 2011

7 Benefits of Focus in Small Business Marketing

Focus is a key component for small business success. When we write about focus in the context of small business, we are talking about your focus on a target market, on specific offerings for that market (products and services) and on specific marketing strategies.

Without focus, you are attempting to be all things to everybody, and that is a recipe for failure.

This article is not about how to decide your focus, that’s another issue. What I am exploring here are seven (7) benefits of focus in the hope of assisting you to build and maintain your own focus.

1. Focus builds commitment

When you decide your focus, you are immediately inspired to action. You suddenly see a way ahead and your goal is seen as achievable. The act of choice – deciding what to do and what not to do – frees up your creative capacity and enables you to move forward. The experience of progress builds commitment to your chosen course of action.

2. Focus saves time

Focus stops you from trying to be everything to everybody. Trying to fulfil everyone’s needs is both time consuming and exhausting. Focus saves you time because it enables you to let go of a lot of things and concentrate on the things that are important.

3. Focus overcomes information overload

In this era of endless information, your focus helps you to decide what to look at and what to avoid. It becomes a benchmark for deciding relevance. For example, I used to focus on affiliate marketing and I would read everything I saw about the subject (a massive area). Now that I have re-focused onto small business marketing, I can let all the affiliate marketing information pass me by.

4. Focus attracts others

When you are focused you demonstrate commitment, enthusiasm and energy – all personal qualities that attract others. Think of someone who is really focused and recall the energy they emit and how much easier it is to be attracted to them and their business In contrast, think of someone who is “all over the place” in their activity. This lack of focus makes it really hard to get on board and get energised by what they do. In fact, this kind of person can actually repel you because they tend to “suck up” your own energy because their energy is so dissipated.

5. Focus develops disciplined energy and enhances productivity

You have to have discipline to focus your energy in the first place. Then, as you grow and maintain your focus, you strengthen your discipline and you begin to develop productive habits. Your deepening focus enables you to ward off distractions, to set priorities and to choose activities that will lead more directly to your small business goals. Focus brings into play the power of concentration.

6. Focus develops expertise and Trusted Authority status

Through your focus, you are better able to increase your knowledge and understanding of your target market and their needs. You feel more committed to use your expertise and core competence to help your customers solve their real, everyday problems. Through this assistance with problem resolution you are able to build your status as a Trusted Authority – one who is not just an expert but who has demonstrated the capacity to use their expertise to help customers solve their problems. So you become the Trusted Authority in your marketplace.

7. Focus creates wealth

Focus enables you to direct your energy and creativity to identifying and meeting your customers’ needs – the foundation for real small business growth and personal wealth. As a friend of mine, Jennifer Ledbetter, often states in the context of small business marketing:

If you are willing to do for a year what others won’t, you can spend a lifetime doing what others CAN’T.

Focus brings multiple rewards. It builds your commitment and develops your Trusted Authority status. Through focusing you save time, overcome information overload and attract others. Focus helps you to develop disciplined energy, to improve your productivity and, in the final analysis, to create wealth.