How To Generate Ideas For Your Business

Need ideas to help you grow your business?

Podcast: Download (Duration: 7:34 — 6.9MB)

In today’s business news:

00:20 – How do you focus on building the business?
00:49 – A minimum viable website can be simple
01:47 – Automate your business
02:41 – How can you deliver the perfect customer experience for free
03:16 – Improve your process using customer feedback
04:30 – Your best customers are a source of news topics
05:09 – Learn our news process from OwnTheRacecourse.com
05:18 – Let us publish news for you at SuperFastBusiness Traffic Services
05:37 – Check out Facebook marketing podcast
06:16 – Increase productivity by journaling what you do

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Transcription:

James Schramko here with a business news update.

In this episode I’m going to talk about where the ideas for these updates come from. I’m going to reveal the difference between working on your website and on your business. Plus I’ll give you a tip on how to find extra productivity that you probably didn’t even know exists.

How you can get on with your business
I got a listener question this week about how do you stop spending time fussing around about the website and just start building a business. Well I think when people are spending too much time on the website, that’s usually a delaying tactic. It actually means that they have to put off the actual work part of the business. I much prefer you start with customer demand, solve a problem for somebody and then have the minimum viable website. In many cases I just have a very simple website with a quick explanation of what a product or service is and then a way that people can order. Then we go back and flesh it out with FAQ pages and glossaries and contact details and phone numbers and then extra posts explaining the product or service.

Get started with your minimum viable website. You can go and get a website from SuperFastBusiness web services from $199. There’s absolutely no reason that you should be spending any more than a day or two on your website. If you’ve been having this big business dream and you’ve been pedantically fussing about business cards and websites and brochures and signage and T-shirts, if that’s taking you any more than a few days, you are simply delaying and wasting time. So you get on to it.

Get more done with Automation
On a related note, let’s talk about how you can automate a lot of things. Somebody asked me how do I come up with things like the website idea. Well it’s simply doing something that Dean Jackson teaches and that is imagining the dream scenario of your customer. If they come along to your business, what would they love to have happen? In my case I have a SEO business, SuperFastBusiness Traffic Services, and we setup a website check. The dream scenario for our customers is they could come to us, they can simply have us look at their website and then decide if their website is suitable for SEO or not. If it is suitable, we’d tell them which package is the most appropriate package. Of all of our services not even just SuperFastBusiness Traffic Services. We might, and often we do recommend services like the Short Video Pack.

Create the perfect experience for your customers
Going back to your business, think about the perfect experience that someone might have when they come to your website and then think about how you can give that to them for FREE in the beginning to let them get a taste for what you can offer to get them moving in the right direction. Here’s the best part, using a service like Office Autopilot, which is soon to be called OntraPort, you can actually automate the follow-ups.

In my system, if someone doesn’t order then it will actually follow them up with a follow-up one week later asking how it went. I take the information that I get from the follow up and I put that back into the system. Some people say we weren’t clear about what to do so we increase our action step. Some people say they’re ready to go but not yet so we find out why and see if we can actually improve that part of the process. We can actually have sequential auto responders for a long time but an absolute necessity is to put somebody onto your news program. I send out videos like this every single week. This is a way for us to stay in touch. I am using Office Autopilot for the news broadcasts and I think that a system like this is going to be helpful for you too. You can actually track the interest level both on the open rates and click through rates of the emails but also from the social response, the YouTube views, the Facebook shares and it’s a great way for you to build your business just by informing.

Gathering ideas
When I was at an Office Autopilot conference this week, Landon Ray the founder of OntraPort asked me, “James, where do you get the ideas for these news reviews? Do you have to sit down and brain-storm it?” The answer is simple. I actually get the ideas from my SilverCircle mastermind group. Every week, we get on the phone with around 40 business owners and they ask the biggest challenges and questions and we work together to solve them. From that, I get detailed notes, and from the notes there are always 1 or 2 things that I know other business owners would like to share. It’s a great way for me to share some of the highlights from our SilverCircle mastermind each week at the same time as recapping for members the top topics that we discussed. Using this system I’ve been able to build this up to a very strong business this year and this works for any other business.

An online business group is a good source of ideas

The two ways you can take advantage of it. One is you can get the product called OwnTheRacecourse.com and that will teach you this exact process or two is let us do it for you using our SuperFastBusiness Traffic Services Short Video Pack. That service simply works by you giving us an audio or a video and we do the rest. Everything you see from SuperFastBusiness.com is the same thing we can do for you and that’s been wildly successful.

Use Facebook
Be sure to catch up with the Facebook marketing podcast I put out this week on InternetMarketingSpeed. I interviewed one of my SilverCircle members Victoria Gibson from Marveo and she had some fantastic tips to share. In fact what we talked about is the exact Facebook campaign that she setup for me and we talk about the results that I’m getting from it. It’s something that you can easily repeat and I strongly recommend that you take advantage of Facebook for your business.

When you combine Facebook + your own powerhouse news blog like we’ve been talking about, your business will prosper.

Finally a tip for you to get extra productivity
One thing I’ve been doing for SilverCircle members in the last week is a new section called Fly on the Wall. It’s simply me journaling what I do each day. I talk about the things that I’m doing and why I’m doing it. Interestingly, I’m actually discovering a little bit about my own work practices and routines. Members are enjoying finding out why I do things but I’m also thinking about why I’m doing things and it makes me wonder, can I do them better? Can I repeat or maximize or leverage the things that I’m doing really well? Once I know what I’m doing differently to other people, I should definitely do more of that because whatever I’m doing is working and it can actually work for you too.
In your case, journal what you do. Think about not just what you’re doing but why are you doing it? And as my old mentor said, “Question everything!”

I’ll catch up with you next week.

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