What Do You Work On To Grow (or Just Run) Your Business?

Inventory:  what do you spend your time on in a typical week when it comes to your business?  Are you like one of my friends, whom I always catch in the 5 or 10 minutes she has free in between back-to-back Zoom meetings on a typical day?  Are you like one of my past clients, who was spending thousands of dollars every month on ads that were getting her business nowhere?

There is a difference between working in your business and working on your business.  Ideally, you spend the majority of your time working in your business, i.e. serving up your classy service or product line to your fantastic customers.  But to keep business rolling in, you might be like one of the two femalepreneurs above:  working on your business all the time just to get business, or paying through the nose to have someone else (supposedly) do that for you.

How Not To Be One Of Them

We all know by now that balance is key, but how do you achieve that as a small business owner?   The simple answer is to spend less time working on your business and more time in it.

Now, how do you do that?  The answer lies in marketing.  But I’m not talking about Google or Facebook ads.  What I mean is targeting your ideal customer base passively so that they come to you of their own accord.

This is accomplished primarily by keywords.  Keywords are words or phrases your would-be customers type into search engines to find services and products they are ready to buy.  Match those phrases and words in your digital collateral materials (i.e. website, social media campaigns, etc.) and you show up at that critical moment, just in time for them to hire you.

The catch is that the vast majority of businesses unwittingly rely on bogus keywords for their marketing.  They use various tools or hire SEO (search engine optimization) companies who use tools which do not properly check keywords and keyphrases for viability.

The result is failed SEO for their businesses.  But you can rise above all these poor entrepreneurs by making sure the keywords you use are actually viable.

Do Less, Make More

Me?  I sit back and let leads come to me.  I never advertise and in 17y years of business have only spend $200 total.  (I once tried Google ads for a month.)  I pay nothing and do nothing, but new prospective clients come to me on a very regular basis.

In another post, I’ll share with you how I handle them once they arrive at my doorstep, their hands already reaching for their wallets.

For now, just remember that most of your competitors in your area of specialty are doing SEO completely wrong, a much smaller percentage are being duped by SEO companies doing SEO wrong, and a small fraction of them are getting results.  Be one of the ones doing that last kind of SEO.

Doing keywords right (a lot more rare than you might think) is the key (ha!) to working less on your business and more in it.