strategy – Page 12 – Michele Christensen

Picking a niche – scary but oh so worth it!

One of the first things I often tackle with a new client is the question of who they serve. For so many reasons, getting clear on this is one of the most crucial factors in whether your business succeeds or fails. For starters, here are just some of the benefits of picking a niche:

It makes it clear to anyone you communicate with whether you’re a good fit for them or not, and makes it easy for people to refer business to you
It allows you to establish yourself as the go-to person for that niche
It helps you find the people you want to market to
It makes writing your marketing copy much easier because you know who you are trying to reach
It narrows your focus for your own training and research

There are loads more benefits, but I think just the points above make a solid case for picking a niche. So why are we solopreneurs so hesitant to do it?

Quite frankly, it can feel really scary. Especially when we are first getting started and clients are scarce, it might feel foolish and risky to declare that you only work with certain people. It feels like you’re cutting off the vast majority of options and leaving only a tiny sliver for yourself.

This thinking isn’t really accurate though…. there’s no law against serving people outside your niche, but if you don’t pick something you might not have a business. In a way, you are cutting off a lot of options in that you will no longer be reaching out to everyone but only to your niche. The thing to look at though is not the huge number of options you are cutting off but in the number left. You don’t need an infinite or even a huge number of people in your niche to build a successful business. You need some, you need enough, but you don’t need everyone in the world.

I invite you to take a look at your business and see if you chosen a niche. If not, think about doing it. If it feels scary or risky, consider the impact that not doing it may have. If you need help in this area, I’d love to work on it with you. Click here to schedule a call with me.

Leave a comment telling me about your niche, how you picked it and how it’s worked out for you.

Do you know what your website is for?

What purpose does your website serve? Do you know?

Thinking strategically is one of the most important things you can do for your business. It means having clearly defined goals, a path to get there and way to measure if your actions are working. Every action you take should be a fit for your strategic plan. Sometimes I’ll hear someone in the early part of their business make a comment like “I have to start tweeting!” This seems to be true since many successful business owners are tweeting, but my response is always “Why?” or “What do you hope to accomplish by tweeting?” If it’s early on in our work together, it sometimes throws the person for a loop or they think I’m being sarcastic (I’m not). Nothing is a given in my business world and everything has to pull it’s weight.

The same is true of your website. You know you need one, but what’s it for and does it perform that function well? A website can serve very different purposes depending on the business. Here are some ideas to get you thinking:

gather leads through a form
build newsletter subscriber list
encourage people to call for an appointment or consultation
sales of product right on website
provide basic information (the online version of a brochure)
give potential customers an easy way to get to know you
provide customer support or help

Which of these functions should your website be serving? Does it? What changes would help your website function better? What other functions does it serve?

Using Facebook for business – a range of options

When I started to write this post, I began with with all the stats and numbers to support the idea that you should be using Facebook for your business. It was turning into a big proof for Facebook rather than a backdrop for what I want to say, so I’m going to start from the assumption that you already know all the benefits of using Facebook for your business. I wanted to write this post because I’m amazed at how often I hear people in heated arguments over the one right way to use Facebook for business. I’ve heard everything from use only a business page (what used to be called a fan page) to use only your profile and everything in between. The truth is, like may business issues, there isn’t one right answer and the best choices depend on the situation, the individual and the desired outcome of using Facebook for your business.

I’ve seen people get great results using only their profile for business. The two broad categories would be people that only use their profile for business and don’t do any personal interacting on Facebook and people whose business is so closely tied to themselves, their lifestyle, values and personality that their business is indistinct from the person.

I’ve also seen great results from people making full use of a business page. This is pretty much what I do. When I first got onto Facebook, it was before it was used much for business so I made all sorts of personal connections there. Since I focus on a small niche, my work isn’t relevant to most of my friends so I don’t post it on my profile. Similarly, my business community probably wouldn’t find the mundane details of my life interesting. Those people are part of my business contacts because they trust me to bring them valuable business information, not because they care about the killer parking spot I just found.

Then of course, there are myriad ways to use both your page and profile to promote your business. Some people are very comfortable mixing both.

The bottom line is, Facebook is a great free resource to get the word out about your solopreneur business in a forum where people already are. The important point here is that there is no one right way to promote your business on Facebook except that which fits you best. I would avoid the extremes though – don’t post too much information about your work to your personal connections if it doesn’t apply to them, and don’t inundate your business community with mundane details of your personal life if it’s not interesting to them. Above all, don’t make your Facebook strategy choice based on someone else’s advice unless that person is a trusted advisor with a proven track record.

Lessons learned from a bad experience with Ikea

Lessons learned from a bad experience at Ikea

I had a blog post planned for today, but yesterday’s experience just was too full of great lessons to ignore. For those of us in the US, yesterday was a holiday and that means some stores are closed or have shorter holiday hours.

Among other things I had planned yesterday, I decided to brave a trip to Ikea to keep some home improvement projects moving ahead. Since it’s quite a trek to get there, I wanted to make sure they were open into the evening. I started with their website and there was no mention of holiday hours. I then entered into phone menu purgatory which was an endless nested maze of options, none of which was “at any time press zero for an operator.” Those phone menu set ups are a horrible way to treat customers. Does any customer feel valued when that’s what they are greeted with? I think by now most people are used to the phone menu hazing they have to go through to get service, and know that if they do choose to speak to a live person they may have to wait. I was surprised though, at how difficult they made it and that there was no obvious way to get to a live person. I finally did get a live person through one of the many combinations of keys I pressed, and of course he couldn’t answer my question but put me back on hold for 7 minutes until someone picked up. Needless to say, this was extremely frustrating and a big waste of over 20 minutes of my time. It made me, an interested customer, way less interested in buying. In fact, if I didn’t need something I could only get there I wouldn’t have gone at all. It certainly made get in and out as fast as possible and thus they lost any other sales they might have had with me. A company like Ikea can get away with this – the one near me is almost always jam packed with a lines of 20 people at each of a dozen registers. They don’t need to change anything about how they treat their customers, but what about the rest of us? What lesson is there for a solopreneur business in this? I came up with 3 things we can take from this experience.

First –

Don’t make it hard to buy, in fact make it as easy as possible. I suspect Ikea would have lost a lot of people in this situation who were less determined and in need than me.

Second –

Don’t make it hard to contact you. Give clients and customers options for how they contact you and make it easy to find that information.

Third –

Anticipate and reply to obvious questions. Think about what big, obvious questions your clients may have and answer them before your clients ask. Don’t make them work for basic information – most won’t and you’ll lose sales. If you get the same question more than a few times, put the answer in your materials.

What are some of the ways you help customers to buy? Share them in the comments.

Today’s Solopreneur News Roundup, Friday 5/27/11

Welcome to your holiday weekend if you’re in the US! If not, then have a great weekend whatever you do! As I wrote the date on this post, I couldn’t believe how much of the year has passed and there’s still so much I want to get to! How are you doing on your goals for the year?

Here’s the news I want to highlight for you this week . If you’d like to see these items right in your Facebook news feed, come on over to my page and click “like.” Remember, you can now like a page as yourself using your personal profile or as your business using your business page.

I’m a time management junkie, so when one of my favorite teachers writes about procrastination, I make sure to read it. Check out this article:

The Death of Procrastination

Here’s another article on the unicorn of time management: work-life balance. It’s a short read with some great tips.

6 Work-Life Balance Blunders to Avoid

So, I must have had time management on the brain this week, because this article is on the same topic. I LOVED this one because it has one simple, rock-solid strategy you can start using today to get more done. Really!

The Only Way to Get Important Things Done

This next one gets away from time management, but offers you 12 spots to meet clients other than over coffee. I really enjoyed reading this and was thinking it would really energize my client meetings to have some other spaces to use.

12 Unexpected Places To Host Great Client Meetings

Finally, today, a promotion opportunity you won’t want to miss! The highly-visible online visibility expert Denise Wakeman is giving you a chance to Flaunt Your Facebook Page over at The Blog Squad Facebook page:

The Blog Squad on Facebook

That’s the news this week! Leave me a comment on something you’re doing this weekend for fun!

Friday Solopreneur news roundup 5/20/11

Hello fellow solopreneurs! Once again, Friday has rolled around very quickly. I hope you’ve had a fantastically productive week. What are you doing to recharge this weekend? I’m planning on going to Worldfest here in LA (a huge solar-powered, animal-friendly Earth Day type of festival). We’re kind of up in the air though, so we’ll see. As I often say on Fridays, one of my favorite ways to have a weekend is to have no schedule so I’m glad it’s open.

Here’s the news for the week:

Here’s an interesting article on the idea of shutting down your main business website in favor of social media sites. I’ve been watching this trend with great interest and have increasingly spotted big brands showing their social media URL’s with equal emphasis or in place of their main URL. There are some cons though, so read the article before even thinking of shutting down.

Is It Time to Shut Down Your Website?

One of my teachers Kathleen Gage is offering an excellent video series on how to make money with teleseminars and it’s FREE! I watched all three videos and got a lot of great ideas. I’m in her VIP club, so I know she delivers!

3 Free Videos on How to Make Money with Teleseminars

Blogging is really important for solopreneur businesses, but so is promoting that blog. Here’s 4 things not to do, although I disagree with #4 which is posting your blog to social media.

4 Ways NOT to Promote Your Blog

Finally, here’s a good rundown of 4 common mistakes you could be making on your website that can cost you busieness!

4 Website Design Mistakes and How to Fix Them

So that’s the news for this week! Leave me a comment with your weekend plans and I’ll see you Monday.

(If you’d like this news delivered right to your Facebook news feed, come on over and like my page – click HERE)

Choose your business confidants carefully

In the last issue of my newsletter (sign up here or in the box to the right) I shared a story about a colleague asking how many hits a day I get on my site. When I told him the somewhat modest number, he could barely contain his disdain. I didn’t really understand his reaction – I had just gotten done telling him how pleased I am with my business growth this year so why the reaction to my traffic? It wasn’t until later that I realized that he was asking the wrong question. In his business strategy, big traffic is really important. In mine, it’s not. That led to a post on how it’s important not only to measure your results but to make sure you’re measuring what really matters.

I’d like to add one more thing I learned from this, which is to be very careful in choosing whom you share business ideas and information with. Had I not had a clear vision of how my business model works, I might have been dismayed by his reaction. I might have run home and gotten right on the “bright, shiny object” of getting big traffic. Fortunately, I do have a mentor I’m following and I trust her greatly. I’m following her business plan for growing your business via the internet and it’s working. It’s easy in the early stages to get lost in following whatever advice and opinions you can get, and right there is the problem – opinions and advice are easy to find, but someone who understands your business and can give appropriate advice is much more rare.

We have a natural, almost unavoidable tendency to view the world through our own point of view and to assess new ideas based on our experience to date. This means that not everyone is suitable to give you feedback on your business. Make sure you choose your confidants with intention and high standards. Of course you can have colleagues and friends who don’t meet the requirements to be a confidant, but choose your inner circle carefully. If you’ve gotten advice or feedback from someone you haven’t vetted for the role of confidant, make sure to take their comments with a grain of salt and run it through the filter of what you know is right for you. Their advice might be good, but then again it might not have any value, so be open to that possibility as well. People are very willing to provide feedback, but make sure it’s someone in a position to give valuable feedback before you take their comments as valuable. I would advise listening to your customers though – they always have valuable feedback which, since they are your customers, is right on the mark.

Easing solopreneur overwhelm

When I talk to solopreneur business owners, one of the themes that emerges is overwhelm. There’s just so much to do and even if you have help there’s a lot to learn and manage. One area where you can ease some of your overwhelm is in how you manage your projects. All too often, we put something like “Re-do website” on our project list, and it never gets started much less done. The problem with that project is that it can’t be “done” because it isn’t clear. Most of us would just look at a project like that and get a sick feeling and skip it today, then tomorrow then the next day. It hangs there and makes us feel bad. To reduce the overwhelm in a project like this, I suggest the following 3 steps:

Start by getting clear on exactly why the project needs to be done and what you hope to accomplish by changing your website. Once you know why you are doing something, much of what else you need to know becomes clear. How much to spend, how high a priority to place, what time frame, etc all become much clearer when you know why you are doing something.
Once you are clear on the why, you can define the scope of what needs to be done. Defining the scope of a project helps you to know when it’s done. It will also help you avoid “feature creep,” or the tendency to add things in along the way.
Once you’ve defined the desired outcomes and scope of the project, make a list of the tasks needed to complete the project. Start with just the first few if that’s as far as you can see. The key here is to keep the steps really small – as small as they need to be to stave off overwhelm. For example, your first step might be to find a web person, but that’s still a big, vague task. I suggest starting with a task such as “Make a list of 5 people I can call for a referral.” Next might be “Spend 1 hour reading up on how to hire a web person” followed by “Call people on list.” In each case, the task is very small and focused and “done” is clearly defined.

When I talk to someone who is feeling overwhelmed, using these three steps can often help. Tell me about how you got out of overwhelm on a recent project in the comments.

Measuring things that actually matter

One of the most important things you can do to continue to build your business is to measure how well your efforts are working. There’s tons of information out there about things you must do, should do, would be foolish not to do, etc. but really the only criteria for deciding whether to do something is if it works for you. I love this analogy: When a plane takes off, it’s almost always pointed in the wrong direction because runways are only built in certain directions. Once the plane is airborne, the pilot looks at his controls and determines how to adjust his direction. At that point, the pilot has just 3 options: continue in the same direction, fire the left thruster to turn right or fire the right thruster to turn left. He or she makes a choice and repeats the process once the new direction is established. The pilot continues to repeat this process until reaching the destination.

It’s much like that in our business. We can take a good guess at what direction in which to start, but we’re unlikely to have the best answer right off the bat. Once we make a business choice, we then have to determine if it’s helping us get to our goals and readjust course if necessary. If you find that you are off-course, don’t give up – instead, make a small adjustment that brings you closer to the right course. This is the basis for building a successful business, not getting everything correct right out of the gate.

However, the critical thing to decide is WHAT to measure. It’s easy to focus on things that can be easily seen in numbers – how many Twitter followers, how many Facebook fans, how many newsletter subscribers, how much website traffic, etc but those figures alone may not give you the information you need to course correct. How will getting that magic number of followers, fans, subscribers or visitors get you where you want to go? What comes after “so that?” For example, “I want 10,000 Facebook fans so that…………….”

If you are looking for single pieces of data that can inform you by themselves, you may want to think about things like:

gross sales
number of customers
number of sales

These are figures that will help you determine if your business is growing. There are also more complex pieces of data that can be helpful such as the percentage of people who buy after visiting a sales page or which products make up your gross sales. I’ll cover these in a later post, but for now I encourage you to not only start doing some measurement but also to make sure you are measuring things that matter.

What do you measure in your business? How is it helpful to you? Leave a comment and tell me about it.

(PS – measurement is one of the skills I cover in my free e-course “5 Essential Skills for Solopreneur Success.” If you’re reading this on my blog, sign up using the box to the right. Otherwise, head to my homepage and sign up there.)

Strategic thinking for the 1-person business

Solopreneurs need strategy as much as big businesses do

One of the skills I use all the time in my business is strategic thinking. This sounds complicated, and in fact it’s one of the skills emphasized in MBA programs but there are certain parts of strategic thinking that scale perfectly for a solopreneur or small business.

You can start your strategic thinking by always asking and establishing why you are doing anything. Ideally, you should be asking this of every single task or activity you are thinking of doing. If you decide you’re going to start Tweeting, then why? What’s the purpose? How will it add to your bottom line?

Why do you have a website? What’s the purpose of your website? Why are you writing that particular blog post? When I first start working with a new client and we begin to ask these questions, it can be unnerving. It’s an entirely new way of thinking and running your business. We’re used to hearing an idea and doing it. That freedom is one of the joys of being a solopreneur, and our natural inclination to take action is one of the hallmarks of solopreneur success.

While I would never want to stifle those tendencies, we need to put the breaks on ever so slightly and establish why we are doing this new thing, how it fits into our plan for success and if in fact it’s worth it for our business. One of the least effective ways to manage your business is to jump from one bright shiny new activity to the next and keep cramming more and more activity into our business without having a plan for how it will help our success. It’s fine to have a few activities that aren’t absolutely pulling their weight in your business if you enjoy them, but having a day full of purposeless activity will lead to exhaustion, discouragement and lack of motivation. Your success will most certainly come from activity, but not just any activity – it has to be a carefully orchestrated mix of actions that work together in a strategic way.