If you are anything like me, your dream is to be your own boss and run a successful small business. But what happens to many people is that sometimes we (yes, me too) leave our passions drive our businesses. Following our guts isn’t something bad, but we need to combine it with the power of the mind: analyze and follow a strategy.
It’s easy to get lost between thousands of blog posts or Pinterest pins that explain successful strategies.
– Grow your email list!
– Work on SEO!
– Promote every day on social media!
– Drive traffic from Pinterest!
– Add free downloads to all your blog posts!
– Use Marmalead (if you are on Etsy you know what I mean…)
– Etc…
But anyone tells you the truth: trying everything will not work.
The secret key of any successful small business is none of them. Some will have many traffic coming from Pinterest, others will have a huge email list, others will be always on the first results in Google or Etsy…
But what all successful small businesses have in common is focus.
I’ve started many businesses during the past years, and helped many others with their projects; and I always see that the more you focus, the better results you have.
I love a quote that says:
“The only way to discover our true potential is to clear out the clutter and focus on what matters.”
And when you think about it, it totally makes sense! If you concentrate all your time, passion and energy into something specific you will be a master in it. Like traditional artisans!
I’ve created a free email course in which I’ll guide you and talk a lot about finding your focus. I call it “Find your own success” because it not only helps to discover your strategy, but it also gives you motivation and explains why every project is unique. You can sign in for the course here:
Focus has to be always in our minds, and we need to focus in all the stages of our businesses. Let me give you some examples:
Focus on your dream life
At the end, our business needs to be a part of our way to happiness. If we decide to be our own boss and fight for it, is because it’s something that will makes us happy and be part of our dream life.
By having always in mind what we need to be happy, we can easily apply our values when trying to have a successful small business.
I know that to be happy I need love, freedom to travel and creativity.
With these 3 things in mind, when I feel lost or I don’t know if I’m working on the right direction I question myself: is this gonna give me love, freedom to travel and creativity?
It’s an easy way to not loose my focus 🙂
Focus on your goals
Every now and then you need to set goals. Goals are crucial if you want to see success in your business because are the perfect way to calculate and be sure that you are progressing.
But don’t fool around setting many goals or small objectives that you can get done in a week. You need big goals, things that need work but can be possible if you focus on them during 3 months.
In my free email course “Find your own success” and in my “Productivity Boss” course I explain more about it, but the overall idea is to select a big goal for the next 90 days and concentrate on it.
Once you have your goal, then you can break it down into small goals or milestones, and finally break everything down into small steps that you can do daily or weekly to help you arrive to your final goal.
It’s an amazing way to help you discover what you need to focus.
If you want to automate your business and sell digital services or products, then you probably need to focus on online marketing.
And if you want to have more clients for your creative projects, then you need to focus on having an amazing portfolio.
But if you want to sell your products online, you may consider focusing on contacting media and getting many back links to your website.
Focus on your daily tasks
Finally, I want to remember that focus does not need to be only for big goals.
Focus is also important for daily tasks in any successful small business.
When you draw your strategy, you can easily know what tasks will help you follow the right direction and progress on your goals.
Focusing on those tasks is super important.
You can use some of my favorite productivity techniques from Productivity Boss to concentrate and get things done in less time.
Think about famous bloggers: they focus on writing good content, getting traffic to their blogs and growing their audiences in a way that they can monetize their jobs.
You will not see a successful blogger trying thousands of techniques or talking about something different every week.
No, they know what’s their focus, they know what their ideal clients want to read and they work only on it.
That’s what we need to do too if we want to have a successful small business like them 🙂
So, how do you feel about it?
Are you ready to start seeing your own success?
I invite you to join my free email course here:
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