5 Tips For Greater Small Business Success

But if you’re looking for real tangible actions you can take to move your business forwards, the following tips will help.

1. Commit

Whilst we would all love an easy journey in our businesses, there is no question about the fact that the amount of consistent effort you put in to your business will determine the amount of success you achieve, and how quickly it will happen.

As leader of your business you ultimately get to decide how much time, effort and energy you’ll commit day by day.  The more you can make the decision to absolutely commit, go all in, and give your business 100% every moment you’re working on it – the quicker and greater the results will be.

Business is not for the faint hearted. Nor is it for ladies looking to spend a little bit of time here and there showing up dropping out a few bits of content on social, and then hoping everyone will find your Etsy store or website.

To become more successful you’ll be required to be more hard working, more committed, more determined than anyone you consider a competitor. It’s you or them at the end of the day. If you want the market share of sales – it needs to be you.

Commitment counts for a lot. Letting yourself off the hook on days you just don’t feel like it, thinking you’ll do it tomorrow, spending more time watching TV, scrolling social, procrastinating – all of these take commitment away from you.

It’s simple.The more you commit, go all in, the faster you’ll grow.

2. Have Visions, Goals And Plans

I can’t say this too often. If you want to succeed in business you need to lay out a vision in writing detailing what success will look like to you when you get there. Once you have your vision, you then need to put in place (in writing) the main goals you need to achieve to get to your vision. When you have your main goals in place, you need to set out (in writing) every step required to reach your goals.

Do you know how many business owners I see showing up and winging it? Too many. The magic of business growth and success will never happen with that attitude.

You need clear business strategy that looks something like this:

PLANS (individual steps) laid out in writing that lead to GOALS being achieved, that lead to your VISION being accomplished.

There’s not a successful business owner anywhere who does not have this type of strategy in place for their business. They use their visions, goals and plans EVERY SINGLE DAY, month in month out, year in year out.

Without this type of strategy you’ll find growing a successful business hard. REAL hard.

3. Don’t Be Everywhere At Once

The more places you’re able to be visible to showcase your business the better. However, in the early days of your online journey it’s much wiser to choose a few select places to show up, to make sure you can cope with give your best to those places. If you dilute yourself too much by trying to be everywhere at once – you may fail in all of those places, and that will be detrimental to your business and your success.

Choose one or two platforms where you’ll show up. Learn everything you can about those spaces so that you  maximise the benefits of them for your business.

4. If All You Do Is Sell You’re Going To Find This Hard

I can go to Instagram right now and find account after account after account where the business owner does nothing but sell. “Visit my Etsy store”, “DM me to book a coaching session”, “Find this new product over on our website”. It’s endless, and the platform is saturated with salesy stuff, as are most other social platforms.

Let me say this loud and clear – people get sick of all the salesy stuff – real quick.

When you look at big players in the online space – the likes of Gary V for example – you’ll rarely see him use his social platform to sell.

What he does instead is put out great, engaging content that people want to stop the scroll and read or watch. Gary, and others like him, know the power of building community over selling on social. When you build community, start to have loyal followers who are engaged with you, selling will come much more easily.

I’m not suggesting you should never sell via your social platforms.

But you need to mix things up. Provide some entertainment, tips, tools, funny stuff if that’s your thing, behind the scenes, questions, polls, quizzes, ups and downs, what’s coming up, who you are, why you do what you do, how you do what you do…  

There are so many ways you can create content for your brand that helps to engage people and build community.

So many female entrepreneurs stick to pushing out piece after piece of content that’s all about the sale. 

Overdoing this will cause people to scroll on by, and possibly at some point unfollow you.

Feed your audience something different for a change. Stand out. Be engaging. Your business will benefit as a result.

5. Make The Effort To Become Better

It’ll be one of the wisest moves you make for you and your business if you prioritise learning how to become a better version of you and what you do.

Never stand still.  Never get stale.  Never stop making progress or learning how to do things better.

Nothing in business stays the same for long.

It’s up to you to keep abreast of the times and to invest in learning how to become a better business woman, how to make your business work more effectively, how to serve your customers at an even higher level than you do right now, how to take your commitment, drive, determination to the next level.

When you consistently make the effort to become better in all aspects of your business, inevitably what will follow will be greater success.

This is important. For as long as you think you can learn all the business things for free – you’ll halt your progress. When you understand that as a female business owner it’s necessary to invest financially in your own learning, and you actually dip your hand in your purse and make that commitment – you’ll grow.

You have the capacity to up your investment in your business and in yourself to create more success as you move forwards. 

Laziness and half-hearted efforts won’t cut the cloth. You need to be the sharpest scissors making the deepest cuts – which means that to succeed and to advance and achieve more in your business than any of your competitors, you need to be the absolute best at what you do. Implementing the five tips above in your daily business life will help you take leaps forwards and be the small business that stands out.