Spring is the time of plans and projects.
~Leo Tolstoy
Today we continue with part three of our six-part series, 30 Powerful Ways to Spring Clean Your Business. If you missed the first and second installment, you can find them here and here.
This series is inspired by my CEO Fast Track guide, which you can find here, where I lay out the 6 core CEO disciplines required to move beyond the busywork, and find time to work ON not just IN your business.
In this episode, we’re going to be talking about the third discipline – Creation & Optimization.
Enjoy!
Full Transcript
Today we continue with part three of our six-part series, 30 Powerful Ways to Spring Clean Your Business. If you missed the first and second installment, you can find them here and here.
This series is inspired by my CEO Fast Track guide, which you can find here, where I lay out the 6 core CEO disciplines required to move beyond the busywork, and find time to work ON not just IN your business.
In this episode, we’re going to be talking about the third discipline – Creation & Optimization.
Most entrepreneurs want to create multiple revenue streams, leverage their time and increase their results. But finding the time to actually create that new course, or optimize a sales process can be most challenging. In this CEO Discipline, you are either deep in creation mode to bring something new to market or you are looking at how you can optimize what you already have for maximum results.
Creation:
Strategic creation with the intent to sell or leverage is the name of the game here (e.g a book, a course, sales funnel, a free gift, a new service etc). Consider this ‘head down’ time where you’re immersed in creating something that will pay dividends in your business. You must simply prioritize creation time if you want to be able to bring new ideas to fruition.
Optimization:
This is such a golden yet totally overlooked area of most small business owners. Look over the landscape of your business and ask, “How can I make this better?”
Better could mean more profitable, it could mean more efficient, it could mean easier for you to manage or it could mean more impactful.
That might mean dusting off that old product, giving it a fresh coat of paint, updating the sales page and creating a tight, compelling evergreen sales sequence that drives people to it (versus hoping that people might stumble upon it).
So let’s identify five key activities you could do with this third CEO Discipline, to spring clean your business. This list is not exhaustive but will get you headed in the right direction.
Important note: As I said in the last episode, If you’re listening to this in a different season, don’t discount these ideas. While we’re maximizing the energy of spring, these can be accomplished any time of year.
Conduct a website audit and clean-up
When was the last time you took a good, hard look at your website? Spring is a great time to do a full-scale audit and sweep of both the front-facing side of your site and the back-end technical side of your site.
Go through, page by page (or get a buddy to do this for you), and test every link, look at every message for consistency and relevancy and ensure that it’s easy to navigate and creates a pathway for your visitor. It’s easy to think we have this covered because we know our business so well, but I encourage you to review your site through the lens of someone brand new to you and your business. Would they understand what problem you solve? Would they know what to do to engage with you?
And then take the time to clean up the backend of your site. Are your SEO tags clear? Do you have a bunch of pages or links that go nowhere? Are your plugins in need of updating?
Review your offers
This is a great time of year to look at all the offers you have up on your site, or that you offer to your clients and customers, and review which are working, and which need to be optimized, and which need to go.
Take time to look at each offer one-by-one and review it for messaging, pricing, marketing, alignment, format and the sales pathway to determine where you can optimize to help it perform better.
Repurpose or repackage existing content assets
Take 15 minutes and head straight to Google Analytics (assuming you have this setup — which I hope you do). Identify your top 5-10 performing posts or pages and be sure those are optimized for the goals you have. If you notice that you get heavier traffic to a few posts, and one of your goals is to grow your email list, be sure those high performers are optimized to capture the email. That might be creating a lead magnet just for those pages, or by ensuring that there’s an email opt-in form at the bottom of the page.
Then, take the content that you know performs well and identify other ways you could leverage it for greater distribution. Could you take that great blog post and make a podcast from it? Or a video? Could you break it up into three additional posts where you go deeper into the topic? Could you create 25 social media updates or quote cards to share on Facebook or Twitter?
Could you take a series of posts you’ve written or recorded and turn them into a mini-product that you can sell?
Get creative about using valuable content you’ve already created in different ways. This allows you to maximize what you have and provide it in formats that different segments of your audience will like to consume it in.
Streamline and systematize your client onboarding process
Do you have a clear onboarding process for new clients, or are you reinventing the wheel every time?
To create a stellar, and consistent customer experience, consider taking a couple of hours this spring to map out a client journey map to identify every touchpoint you have with a new client from beginning to end.
Once you do this, you can them streamline, systematize or automate various steps along the way to make things easier for you and more professional for your client.
Create some cornerstone content
When people come to your website, are they able to quickly understand what you do, who you do it for and what your business stands for? If not, creating some cornerstone content can go a long way in helping new and existing readers with a clear picture of the value you provide.
Cornerstone content, coined by Copyblogger, is defined as:
Online, cornerstone content is the basic, essential, and indispensable information on your website that answers common questions, solves problems, entertains, educates, or all of the above.
The key is creating compelling content that’s worth linking to and then finding ways to get the word out. A page hosting cornerstone content helps readers by pulling all of your content about a specific topic together in one place.
You’ll often link to your cornerstone pages in your everyday content because they help define common topics you talk about on your website.
Each cornerstone content page is a home for related content. It groups basic, essential, and indispensable information onto one page.
Cornerstone pages let you highlight your most important archived content. They also help you attract links, get subscribers, and increase traffic.
And that’s the goal of every profitable website.
To create this, identify a few topic areas you’d like to be known for and create one to three pieces of supporting content that goes deeper into these topic areas. Use this a promotional tool to orient people to your work and help them extract value through your expertise.
***
These are my five strategies to spring clean in the CEO Discipline of Creation & Optimization. Stay tuned next week when we continue our 6-part series on the 30 Powerful Ways to Spring Clean Your Business. We’ll be talking about the fourth CEO Discipline – Platform Building.
Recommended Resources:
Communicate Like a PRO: Powerful Scripts for Courageous Conversations
30 Powerful Ways to Spring Clean Your Business (Part #1)
30 Powerful Way to Spring Clean Your Business (Part #2)
Cornerstone Content — Copyblogger
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