What are your five tips for small business success?
I’ve been asked by Fundera for my top five tips for small business success so I thought I’d share them! If you don’t know my story, I started out here at Business Plus Baby back in 2009 when my second baby arrived and after a slow few years (that’s business-wise, my home life with two kids born 15 months apart was manic!) I eventually began making video courses. These days I make done-for-you courses at TotallyCourses.com and also record voiceovers.
Here are my five top tips:
- Start building an email list from the beginning. This is SO important because a list is where you’ll make your online sales. You can sell on social media, but a list is far, far more effective. It’s not quite as simple as I’ve made that sound, of course. You need to nurture your list and build relationships with your subscribers by sending them useful information – it can’t all be sales messages. But start your list now, email regularly and the rest you can learn as you go along.
- Start selling to your list right from the beginning. Otherwise your susbcribers come to expect only free information and many will unsubscribe further down the line when you start selling. If you don’t have a product yet, review products that you use and love, then include an affiliate link.
- Sell what people want to buy. I see so many small businesses trying to sell what they love to make. If you’re lucky you’ll find people who want to buy what you make, but there are no guarantees there will be a connection between the two. You can save a lot of heartache by doing some research and then experimenting by buying or making a small amount of stock and seeing if that sells before committing yourself to your business idea.
- All my tips have been about selling, which is a little different to much of the advice out there which seems to be all about finding your passion, doing what you love and releasing your money blocks! But I’ve found that selling is at the heart of a successful business and you have to get over any nervousness or ickniness you have about it as early as you can. No sales = no business. I’m not a natural sales person AT ALL, I had to work on this a lot and I still have a long way to go. But selling your product is really all about finding a solution to clients’ problems, or showing them something they are going to fall in love with. If you do it well it shouldn’t feel pushy or icky because you’ll have found a good fit before you even begin.
- Enjoy it! Yes there will be times when you wonder why you got yourself into all of this and you will have to work hard. But if you enjoy it most of the time then you’ll go that extra mile, new clients will want to seek you out and you’ll spot the new ideas that keep things fresh and you ahead of the competition. If you do find your mojo disappearing, look at why that might be – are you isolated? Do you need more support? Then fix it.
Do you have any of your own to add? Please tell me below…