Author: Michele

Have you noticed your business evolving over time?  I’m in at least my third incarnation of what I offer and on my second website/business name since starting in January of 2009.  Because a solopreneur business is so deeply connected to the person behind it, I think evolution is common over time.  What you are interested in, what you know and even what people want and need changes over time so you business will too.

As you change what you offer, other things about your business change too.  You might change things like your logo or colors, and your 30-second elevator pitch will most certainly change.  Some of your social media usernames and vanity URL’s might change.  If you can avoid it, try not to change your business name or website.  I had to do that at one point, and it was a big hassle and I lost any SEO value I might have had on the old site.  I had to change all my contact information with all of the hundreds of people who had that email address, a task which often requires multiple requests to some people.

I encourage solopreneurs to choose their website and business name wisely, and to pick something that will grow as the business grows.  That way, you won’t have to go through the hassle of a change.  (BTW – this is one of the topics covered in my comprehensive system for setting up your business “The ABC’s of a Successful Solopreneur Business.  Click here to check it out. )

Aside from a business name and website, many solopreneurs use a tagline – a short sentence that describes what they do.  A tagline is a great place to express your new business or current business focus.  If you’ve chosen a business and website name that can grow with you, you can change your tagline more often and more easily than you can change your business and website name.  A tagline shows up almost as often as your actual business name, so it works well to communicate and reinforce what you can do for people.  It’s also easy to test – just try it out when you are out in public introducing yourself, ask for feedback on your social networks, try it in your newsletter, and get feedback from family and friends.  Just don’t print 3,000 business cards with a new tagline until you are pretty sure you’ll be happy with it long enough to use those cards 😉

That brings me to my own new tagline.  I’ve used something like “Use your unique brilliance to better the world and earn a living” for a while and it’s starting to feel too small.  It’s like the mental equivalent of shoes that are now too tight.  Just like tight shoes, a too-small tagline feels more constricting as time passes.  I’ve become so much more, and I’m so much more committed to helping solopreneurs than I was when I first picked this 3 or so years ago.  So, I’m trying a new tagline out – here goes:

Speaker, Strategist and Champion for Solopreneurs

What do you think?  I’d love to get your feedback before I order those 3,000 business cards!

One of the biggest concerns I hear from solopreneurs or would-be solopreneurs is that there is too much to do outside of working for clients that it can’t be done without working 7 days a week.  One new business owner said something to the effect of: “By the time you do all the other stuff there isn’t enough time to sign up and serve new clients.”  Nothing could be further from the truth, and hearing this misconception makes me sad.  It’s sad that a business may not be born because of this misconception and that the world could miss out on what that business might offer.  It’s sad for the individual who may not realize their dream of a solopreneur business.  It’s really sad because it’s not true!

This time myth seems to be true because so many solopreneurs spend a lot of time doing a lot of things.  It also seems true because a lot of people who want bigger business organizations strongly encourage hiring and having a team, which may mean leaving the solopreneur model behind.  Just for clarity, I do believe you can have some outsourced help and still be a solopreneur.

So why does it seem like there is too much to do aside from working with customers in a solopreneur business?

I believe this problem happens when a business owner doesn’t work with a strategy or plan.  They hear some new technique and add it immediately to their work load without first investigating if it is a good idea for that particular business.  The result is that the task list of the business owner grows and grows, but there is no cohesive plan for how the parts fit together and create sales.  Instead of a logical plan, the business promotion strategy becomes a patchwork of random tasks that are only on the business owner’s radar because he or she heard about them.  This is not the way to build success!

What works better than randomly adding tasks?  Have a strategic plan for your business and evaluate anything new against that plan.  Make sure that any new task is either already in your plan or that it complements your plan.  It needs to have a specific purpose which is either creating sales or completing an intermediate step to a sale (e.g. having a potential client request a sample).  Once you know what the new task is supposed to do for your business, make sure to create some measurable goals for the new tasks.  That’s the only way to know if it is doing anything for your business.  Once you measure, test and revise.  Repeat this for each new thing you are thinking of adding to your business activities.

Your time is one of your most precious resources in your solopreneur business.  Make sure every task you do pulls its weight, and make any new task earn a place in your business before you take it on.

In last week’s post, I talked about the warm bodies trap.  In short, this means in your efforts to build a community of people for your business, don’t focus solely on adding warm bodies.  Instead, focus on building  a community of people who are genuinely interested in what you have to offer.

Here’s an example of what I mean:

I was at a training a few months ago, and we were learning various legitimate ways to build a following of interested people for a Facebook fan page.  In the training there was someone there with a very niched, local business who talked about how he skipped all this work and simply purchased fans through a site that brokers freelance gigs between buyers and sellers.

On the surface, this might seem like a big time saver.  After all, why go through the effort of reaching out to people, creating great content and staying active on your page if you can just pay a few bucks for a whole bunch of fans?

Because those fans probably aren’t interested in your business.  They probably aren’t the kind of fans who will love your content, share it and be happy to hear from you.  There’s no shortcut to getting the right kind of people interested in your business.

I know it’s tempting to focus on just raising those numbers, but will it do you any good?  Will building big numbers of disinterested people actually lead to business for you in the long or short run?  Probably not.  In fact, it may hurt you.  It’s difficult to get a handle on ever-changing behind the scenes rules, but it’s likely that Facebook will see big numbers of fans but little interaction as a sign that you haven’t attracted interested people.  As a consumer, when I see someone with big numbers but no apparent interest from fans/followers/connections/etc, it looks a bit odd to me.  I’ve heard people say that even Google views a big bump in fans/followers/connections/etc.  that comes too fast to be natural as ding in your credibility.

In short, building big numbers of disinterested people probably won’t help your business and probably will hurt it.  There’s no real shortcut to attracting the right people to your business community.  Yes, you can work smarter and follow best practices but you still have to do the work and be worth the attention your community has trusted you with.  It’s an honor and a complement when someone joins your community, and you have to continue to earn that person’s interest.  Treat your community like the valuable people they are and don’t ever treat them like numbers.

How do you grow your community of interested people?  How do you continue to demonstrate that you value your community members?  Share it in the comments.

Far too often, solopreneurs and other small business owners fall into what I call the warm bodies trap.  It means that their marketing and promotion efforts are focused on simply accumulating warm bodies and not actually engaging, educating, building loyalty or encouraging sales.  They spend time and effort focusing on building raw numbers, e.g. more followers, friends, fans, connections, etc without any regard as to whether this is a good idea or not.

Just to be clear, bigger numbers are usually good assuming the activity is a good idea in the first place.  For example, if a Facebook fan page is a good strategy for your business then yes, generally having more fans is good assuming you can keep them happy and interacting.  I’ve seen many examples where a business owner assumes that more fans is good period and doesn’t consider the quality or interest level of those fans.

How does this appear in real life?  Here’s one example: I get many invitations from fan page owners to like their page during various online networking events.  These invitations are often accompanied by the instruction that I should do so as my personal profile and not as my fan page.  When I see this, it’s a clue that the page owner may be focused on raising their total number of likes and not the quality of the fans.  As a page owner, I want you to like my page only if it’s relevant to you, and if it is, I want you to like it from wherever it will provide the most value to you.

Let me explain one thing about how I use Facebook – I try to keep my business and personal use separate.  When I’m relaxing with a cup of coffee on a Sunday morning, I don’t want “work” information in my feed.  I only want to see a few businesses that pertain to my personal interests, which means very few business pages are in my personal feed.  On the other hand, when I have my work hat on I WANT quality business content that helps me and that is valuable to my community so I’ve liked a lot of pages from my business page.  I regularly scan this when I’m in work mode looking for content to share or things that might help me.  This is the kind of fan behavior that most page owners should value.  If I honor that request and like a page relevant to my business from my personal page, the page owner will get a fan in me that pretty much never sees their content when it would be valuable and appreciated.

The warm bodies trap is found elsewhere too.  People who spam every person who ever gave them a business card with a newsletter is one example.  Yes, the total count of warm bodies increases but the open rate will drop and people who don’t want to be subscribed or don’t know they have been are more likely to report the newsletter as spam (and yes, this is spam as defined by spam laws).  On LinkedIn, I get the dreaded connection request from someone who says we are “friends” even though I’ve never met them much less heard of them.  Then there are offers to get you huge numbers of fans, followers, connections, etc for a set (usually small) price.

Don’t treat real, thoughtful people like mere numbers or warm bodies.  It feels really yucky to be treated this way, and it lowers my opinion of people who do it.  Yes it’s good to have big numbers but only when you earn them by treating the people represented by those numbers right.

How do you grow your reach in your business and make sure your community members feel values?  Tell me about it in the comments.

One of the biggest challenges of being a solopreneur is staying on top of everything it takes to run your business.  In addition all the tasks and planning you need to do, you somehow need to stay on top of your industry and relevant trends as well.  What’s a busy solopreneur to do?

One of my solutions is to use Google Alerts.  This is a free service from Google that lets you set up a list of words or phrases that Google will watch for and let you know when they pop up in the news, on blogs or in other media.  Google will then send you an email with a link to the article.  You can specify some parameters for when you get the alert emails so that it’s convenient for you.

What can you use this for?  For starters, you can use it to stay on top of what’s being said about and happening in your industry.  You can watch what people who do similar or complementary work are writing about.  You can stay on top of trends that effect your industry, bigger economic trends or regional trends.  Get alerts about your hometown or current city, past schools or former employers.  Learn about new finds in health and medicine, fashion trends or science discoveries.  Follow the latest exploits of your favorite housewife, bachelor, contestant, celebrity rehab guest or big brother.  Keep up with your favorite sports star, sports team, politician, political party or current event.  In short, use Google Alerts to get notified whenever something is written about something important to you.

I recommend that all solopreneurs have at least a few Google Alerts set up so they can stay on top of what’s important to them.  Start with a few keywords about your business or industry and make sure to have an alert for name (including alternate spellings) as well.  Why have an alert for you name?  Obviously it’s important to know whenever something is written about you.  The alert will give you timely notice so you can respond or thank the author, share it with your community and use it to build your credibility.  I’ve had articles of mine picked up by other websites and I would never have known it had it not been for Google Alerts.

Google Alerts is a huge timesaver that lets you stay on top of what’s important in your industry.  You’ll be able to better serve your clients and be more of an expert with this automated tool doing the finding for you.

Do you use Google Alerts?  What do you have the service look for?  How do you use what you find?  Share it in the comments.

Automation is especially important to solopreneurs.  As the business owner of a solopreneur business, you have a lot of different things to do.  Time is always at a premium, and you have to use it wisely and get a lot done in order to be successful.  Automation can help you be more efficient by doing things for you.  When you can set up a tool to do things for you, you save time and money as well as your mental bandwidth.  Here’s a few of my favorite automation tools for solopreneurs.

• Aweber email service.  Aweber is an autoresponder service, meaning people can sign up to your email newsletter, change their email address and unsubscribe without you ever doing anything.  You can also set up emails to go out on a set day or on a schedule based on when the subscriber signs up.  Aside from delivering your newsletter, you can use the service to help you deliver products and services.
• Mint.com bookkeeping software.  This is a free software that connects with your bank account and other financial accounts (credit cards, loans, Paypal, etc) and imports the transactions so you can generate financial reports.  The software will guess at how to categorize things, and at the end of the month you can go in and correct anything the software got wrong and add a category to anything it missed.  Once you’ve categorized everything, you can run a variety of reports to help you manage your business.  You can figure out things like how much revenue are you taking in, how much profit are you making, what are your biggest sources of revenue and what are your biggest expenses.  I like this software because most of what it does is automated.  You only need to intervene when it gets a category wrong or doesn’t apply a category.  Neither of these things happen often.
• Social media automation tools.  There are a variety of tools in this category and many of them have free options.  You definitely should be on social media for your business, and you should be interacting live with your connections but some of what you do can be automated.  I like the idea of having a solid undercurrent of automated posts with a healthy amount of live interaction mixed in.  One of my favorite tools is Hootsuite.  Hootsuite lets you pre-schedule single posts and save drafts of posts so they can be repeatedly posted.  There’s loads of other features, and you can connect multiple social media accounts.

I use a lot of other automation tools, but these are a few of my favorites.  Note that some of the links I share are affiliate links.

What are your favorite automation tools for your solopreneur business?  Share them in the comments.

A few weeks ago, I wrote a post called “Facebook” is not a strategy.  In that post, I described how people often confuse the tool (Facebook) with the strategy (what

you are trying to accomplish using that tool).  In this post, I’m going to explain more about the differences between strategies, tactics and tools.

A strategy is a way of achieving a big, over-arching goal.  Ultimately, all strategies are designed to increase sales and profits but there are numerous steps leading up to sales and profits.  A tactic is a way of getting to that goal.  A tool is something you use to execute that strategy.

For example, suppose a solopreneur business owner has an offer on their site that converts pretty well.  Conversion refers to the number of people who buy vs. the number of people who saw the offer.  One strategy to increase sales is to get more people on the page to view the offer.  The business owner has numerous tactics at his or her disposal to do this.  She could improve her search engine rankings so more people find her through search.  He might use social media to encourage people to click through to see the offer.  She might distribute coupons to get people looking at the offer.  There are many more tactics the business owner could use as well.

Each of these tactics has tools the solopreneur business owner could use to make it happen.  In the  social media example above, the tools are the various sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, etc.  Also included in the tools would be social media management sites such as Hootsuite or Tweetdeck.  In the coupon example above, the business owner could put web coupons on coupon sites the relevant audience visits, have colleagues promote the coupon, hand them out in real life, post them on social media, etc.  There are numerous ways or tools to get coupons in the hands of interested people so they can view the offer.

Of course there is some overlap in these 3 ideas of strategy, tactic and tool.  The important point is not to confuse the tool or tactic with what you are trying to accomplish using that tool or tactic.  You can expend huge amounts of energy doing, doing, doing all sorts of tasks but without a strategy those tasks are unlikely to produce results.  The starting point for any activity in your business should be what you hope that activity does for your business.

How do you use and manage strategy in your business?  Tell me about it in the comments.

As a solopreneur, it is absolutely critical that you work as efficiently as possible.  When you wear all the hats in your business, every minute matters.  One of the challenges is knowing what to be doing and how to prioritize what you will and will not do.  There is an almost infinite number of things you could be doing to grow your business, so there’s no way to do it all.  The only way to be successful is to work smart and selectively and that’s where working strategically can help.

It’s easy to fall into the trap of just adding more and more business-building activities to your solopreneur business.  At every turn, there’s a different expert or even an average person telling you about something you HAVE to be doing or your solopreneur business simply won’t survive.  You can do more, work harder and spend more time up to a point, but after a certain limit something has to change or your business really won’t survive.

Beyond that limit is where strategy becomes critical to your solopreneur business.  Strategy will get you off the frantic treadmill of doing more and more and help you expend your efforts where they have the most impact.  When you are simply doing, you aren’t working in a smart and cohesive manner in a way that maximizes your chances of success.  When you are working strategically, you are focusing first on those activities that have the most chance of bringing you success.

Strategy isn’t that complicated.  Start with an educated guess at what will work.  Don’t just jump into something because somebody said you should.  Have some reasons why you think a particular tactic will be successful for you.  Before beginning any new activity, know what you hope to achieve from it and how you will measure that achievement.  Watch your measurements, and adapt as you go.  Pretty simple, eh?

Unless you are extraordinarily lucky in this respect, just jumping in and doing more and more activities will not lead you to success.  It is highly likely that you will have to try several or even lots of things before you find the recipe for success in your business.  By working strategically, you’ll always be moving toward the optimal use of your time and effort.  Be measuring your results, you’ll be able to tell what the highest priority activities are for your solopreneur business.

How do you use strategy in your business?  What have you learned by measuring your results?  Tell me about it in the comments.