Why You Need to Delegate to Succeed in Business

by | Mar 29, 2017 | Blog, Business Development, Delegating, Entrepreneur

If you’re trying to run a small business with little help, then you know how overwhelming things can become. Most of the time financial resources come into play, or people feel they can complete projects quicker themselves. The truth of the matter is if you ever want to succeed in business, you’re going to need to delegate.

When you hire a virtual assisting team to help run your business, you’re hiring a team of professionals that will most likely complete a job quicker and more efficiently. In addition, allowing a team to take over all of your administrative, web marketing, and web development tasks will save you a lot of money in the long run. This allows business owners to get back to what they do best, bringing in new customers and expanding their business.

Here are three tips on how you can delegate successfully:

  1. Figure out what you’re willing to delegate
    When you’re first starting out, you should consider assigning smaller tasks and work up to the larger, more complicated tasks. This will give your virtual assisting team time to learn your procedures, policies, and way of doing things.
  2. Pick the right person for the job
    Find out the strengths and weaknesses of each of your team members and pass along projects to those you believe are the best fit for the job. A couple of things to look for in virtual assistants include; confidence, self-motivation, and able to work without constant supervision.
  3. Make sure you communicate CLEARLY!
    This is probably the most important key to great delegation. No matter what the task, always be upfront about expectations, deadlines, and provide all of the information the team or person will need to complete the goals for the task. Communication should be clear and concise — the more direction you give your team, the better your chances of them coming back with exactly what you wanted.

Delegating in business is critical to your success. Set yourself up for the future by investing in yourself now. Get started with an experienced virtual assistant team like Smart to Finish that can make your business succeed and your life a little easier.

Why Every Internet Marketer Needs At Least One Membership Site

by | Mar 18, 2017 | Blog, Business Development, Entrepreneur, Memberships

Are you looking for other ways to increase profits using the web? Aren’t we all? One thing to consider is starting a membership site. It’s really quite simple… set up a website, charge a monthly fee, offer your customers awesome content, keep it running, aaaaaand profit. Ok – maybe there’s a little bit more to it than that, so that’s why we’ve got this handy list of benefits to owning a membership site.

• Dominate the competition in your niche
If you have a membership site, you’ll stand out amongst the people who have a score of e-books but nothing else to offer their customers.

• Get more money out of your list
You may have heard that “the money is in the list”. And, you’ll want to get as much money from your list members as you can. A membership site is the perfect way to do this.

• Increase customer loyalty
If your site has great content and you respond promptly to all queries, a membership site will increase customer loyalty a lot better than selling individual products. This is because the customer will feel as if you’re more accessible.

• Develops a sense of community
Membership sites that have a forum help encourage a sense of community. So not only do the members interact with you, but they can interact with each other. This is a good selling point and a benefit for the owner of the site because it is another thing that will help increase your customer’s loyalty.

• Great way to build a list
If you want to start a free membership site, or offer portions of your membership site for no cost, it can present an effective way to build a list.

• Develop passive income
Although internet marketing is a great career, the money can be a little unstable. A membership site is a good way to not only make more money, but to make the income you do bring in a lot steadier.

• They don’t need to be complicated
A lot of people assume that a membership site is complicated. Not necessarily. There are plenty of options that are simple, such as exclusive content delivered via autoresponder.

Back to that profit, let’s look at the math… say you have a membership site that offers exclusive content related to your niche. If you charge $19.95 a month and have 100 subscribers, that translates to nearly $2000 profit and all you needed to do was refresh the content and make sure the site is running properly.

Not a web person? Or a writer? We can help you with both. Shoot us a note at Smart to Finish – we can build, maintain, and market your new membership site and really make it a seamless process.

5 Reasons Why You Need Infusionsoft as a Small Business

by | Mar 10, 2017 | Blog, Infusionsoft, Marketing

In all reality, this is a post about email marketing. In the next several years, email marketing is going to make up a big part of your overall online marketing strategy. So much so that it can make or break your business. We all know there are a ton of reputable email marketing programs out there, but what each of these programs lacks is an all-in-one email marketing solution.

And that’s why we would like to talk about Infusionsoft. If you really want your email marketing efforts to take off, you should seriously consider signing up for the software. Why you ask? Well, here are five reasons why… but we could literally go on forever if we wanted.

  1. You need an email provider that can be trusted.

    Email deliverability is HUGE in email marketing today. If you’re using a program that isn’t trusted by ISP’s, then it’s very likely your emails won’t even get delivered in the first place. Since Infusionsoft has a very low tolerance for spam, it keeps the email deliverability rate healthy.

  2. You need an email program that can easily integrate with WordPress.

    Did you know that about 25% of the web is run off WordPress? It’s most likely that your small business is using a CMS such as WordPress. Infusionsoft has the ability to link right up with your WordPress site and even offers some fun enhancement features!

  3. You need an open API program that allows you to scale and grow.

    A small business isn’t going to stay a small business forever (if everything goes our way right?). You need room and flexibility to grow without having to change software as you grow out of it. Luckily for you, Infusionsoft offers an open API which allows its’ users to add custom add-ons.

  4. You need an all-in-one solution.

    Do you really feel like hiring a bunch of people and companies to manage your online shopping cart and credit card processing? No, we didn’t think so… Infusionsoft can do it all for ya.

  5. You need to track your lead sources.

    What good are marketing campaigns if you don’t know where your leads are coming from? Infusionsoft can help you track these leads and give you information on where they came from. Who would have thought all those Facebook Ads you did last year resulted in 75% of your online sales!

Still need more reasons why you need Infusionsoft in your life? Shoot us a note. We would love to talk to you about your business and help you understand just how much Infusionsoft can benefit your marketing efforts.

Want to check out the software some more, hurry on over to Infusionsoft so you can see all of the benefits they have to offer.

Top 10 Mistakes To Avoid In Internet Marketing

by | Feb 24, 2017 | Blog, Marketing

1. Unrealistic Expectations

Internet Marketing (IM) won’t cure AIDs or make you an instant millionaire. Many people get into Internet marketing with unrealistic expectations that they’d never consider entertaining if it were in some other field. Just because you don’t need to go to school for years to get a degree in Internet marketing for you to be able to open an online business doesn’t mean that it won’t take hard work and commitment to succeed within this arena. Like other business endeavors, it’s going to take money and time to get started and the results won’t be instantaneous.

2. Not Enough Research Before Beginning

If people fall prey to any of the unrealistic expectations we’ve discussed, the outcome is that they don’t spend enough time researching and planning their online activities to make them a success. Instead, they’ll think it’s just a matter of slapping a website up and putting a shopping cart on it to get orders. That couldn’t be the furthest thing from the truth. You have to start by knowing what niches are hot online and how you plan on attracting people to your site. Even if you managed to get a huge traffic stream, do you know enough to convert those visitors into leads or customers? This is where people fail miserably when they could have improved the chances of success simply by taking some extra time upfront to research and learn how to implement a successful online business.

3. Unclear Branding

Fuzzy branding can apply to multiple aspects of your online business. It can be as obvious as a bad domain name or it can even be how poorly you’ve designed the site. It’s any fault in your site that is an Internet faux pas that makes it difficult for your visitors to associate your name with the brand of product or service you’re offering. Instead, they’re left scratching their heads trying to figure out what your site is all about.

4. Poor Traffic

The site is now up and you’ve done your research to optimize it for success, but you’ve noticed that it isn’t getting enough traffic. Why is that? Many Internet marketers think that putting up a fantastic website is all that you have to do to attract traffic. There are millions of people on the Internet, so it seems a fair assessment that getting a thousand eyeballs a month is not a big deal. Actually, the most successful Internet marketers adopt promotional strategies to maximize their traffic streams and to make their websites a success.

The main way to increase traffic is to find sites that already have a large audience and to siphon off some of those people back to your site. There may be rules about what types of links you can post and how to do this, but it’s basically the same process.

5. Inability to Convert Traffic to Customers

Even if you manage to attract gobs of traffic, the real goal of any Internet marketer is to sell or make money. You have to monetize that traffic in order to achieve your dreams of success. If you aren’t aware of the strategies to convert traffic to customers, you will let many valuable opportunities pass you by. Worse, you will feel as if you are working your tail off for few rewards. Always keep in mind that it isn’t enough just to have a popular site; that site has to produce income, one way or another.

6. Not Planning Ahead for Sales

The whole point of Internet marketing is to sell online. It may come as a surprise then to find out that many Internet marketers fail to plan their sales funnel ahead of time. Doing things by the seat of your pants may work to make a few sales here and there, but to really exploit the power of the Internet and make a living doing Internet marketing, you must plan ahead for sales using a carefully thought out sales funnel.

7. Lack of Automation Tools and Services

At first, the temptation for most Internet marketers is to do everything manually to save money. This will quickly become unmanageable as your lists get bigger and your product line becomes more varied. Add a few extra sites to manage multiple income streams, and you can quickly become confused or overburdened with the multiple minute details of operating several Internet commerce sites. The solution is to start automating things before your business gets too unwieldy and you lose customers.

8. Failure to Track and Test Results

After a failure to plan ahead for sales, one of the biggest faults that young Internet marketers tend to fall into is a failure of tracking and testing results. They may not even be aware that there are techniques, like split testing, that can help them to define why one sales campaign works better than another. It might even be due to something simple, like a different headline in the sales copy that can generate 50% more sales, but having done no split testing, they will never figure that out. It’s very important to continually track and test the results of different sales campaigns and strategies to see which ones work for you and which ones yield poor results.

9. Failure to Meet and Exceed Customer Expectations

It’s not enough to just give people a good deal these days. It has to be a great deal that is perceived to be of such great value that it would be a shame if they lost out on the opportunity to buy. One of the ways to create value packages like this is to understand your customer’s needs and then exceed their expectations on what they think they can get for their money. This is a strategy that is becoming necessary as the recession wears away people’s discretionary income and people are buying based on perceived value.

10. Poor Backup Systems

If your site goes down, do you have a mirror site or backup strategy to get back up as quickly as possible? If the answer is no, then as Murphy’s Law suggests, this will happen at the worst possible time – mostly when you are rolling out one of your hottest, time-sensitive campaigns for the entire year. The impact will be immediately felt in lost sales. If you continue to have problems like this, you will also lose customers who will judge your online business based on the fact that you offer spotty service.

If you are still having trouble with your online marketing strategies and need someone to take a look at what you got, give us a shout out. We have a team of professional digital marketers who are ready to help you build your business!

5 Ways To Be Available And In Control Of Your Time

by | Feb 14, 2017 | Blog, Business Development, Delegating, Entrepreneur

These days, it seems like the world is moving way too fast for any of us to keep up. If you’re trying to run a small business while trying to keep up with the hustle and bustle of life today, it’s especially difficult. There’s just so much to do and so little time to do it. We’ve all experienced times where you’re so bogged down with stuff to do it seems like you’re never going to get to everything you need to. Where does the time go?

If you feel like you’ve lost track of time and you’re ready to take it back, then read on my friend. We have compiled a list of five ways you can take back your free time and be more in control of your availability. So without further ado…

  1. Where is all of your time going in the first place?

    Before we can figure out how to better manage your time, we need to know where it’s all going in the first place. Track your time for a couple of weeks and see where you’re spending the most of it.

  2. Time to Eliminate

    Now that you’ve figured out where all your time is going, you’re ready to start eliminating those non essential tasks you’re spending way too much time on. Have a virtual assistant or part time employee? Delegate these tasks out!

  3. Avoid Multi-tasking

    I know, I know, this is much easier said than done. But think about it… if you focus on one important thing at a time and just keep busting them out, eventually, you’re going to be through your to-do list and it’s only noon… Time for a lunch time margarita, don’t ya think?

  4. Set Aside Time to Communicate

    Only check email a couple of times a day and set a specific time aside to do it! Continuously checking your email throughout the day is extremely wasteful because you’re focusing on more than one item, and you’re going to get distracted by new items coming in all day long. Just stop. Check first thing in the morning and after lunch, and that’s it!

  5. Learn it’s OK to say NO

    You need to figure out what your limits are. If you’re already stretching your time thin, say NO. It’s really OK to say it if you just can’t manage the work. Your customers will be much happier waiting for products and services if they know you can focus your entire energy making sure they’re getting the best of your products and services. If you’re rushing through too many client orders at once, things can get messed up, mistakes can be made, and customers can get upset.

Still having trouble trying to figure out time management? We would love to help get you back on the road to vacations and free time with the family. Contact us today to get started.