Business Operations: 4 Steps for De-Stressing Your Business Right Now

What Could You Do with an Extra 5 Hours?

Documented business operations are vital for your business to function. If you don't have documented processes, then your business operations might as well not exist. If you are the only one that knows what to do and when in your business, that's a huge problem.

Think about your Business Operations from an outsider's point of view.

Would it be easy for someone to step in and tackle tasks and systems easily?

On the flip side, what would you do if you can gain an hour a day starting tomorrow? Imagine gaining five hours per week.

For instance, are you able to take a Friday off without worrying about what's getting done? Or would you feel stressed out?

You can do that when you put these four steps in place to de-stress your business in confidence right now.

Business Operations: 4 Steps for De-Stressing Your Business Right Now

1. Proper Project Management

If you’re still managing your team with email and Skype messages, stop it. Things get lost, messages are forgotten (or never received) and balls are dropped. Not to mention all the time you spend sifting through your endless list of emails for that one piece of information you need.

Sign up for Asana, Trello, or Slack today, and start putting all your projects there instead. You’ll have one place to look for tasks that are still outstanding, and be able to tell at a glance what needs your immediate attention.

You and your team will love it!

#2 Proper Documentation

Do you find yourself reinventing the wheel every time you have to record a podcast or upload a video to your blog?

Take a few minutes and document the steps, then next time you have to do it, or better yet, when you hand it off to a VA, you’ll be able to quickly work out what needs to happen.

There will be fewer mistakes, and the work will get done faster. Your team will love it!

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#3 Create a Business Organization Chart

If you have multiple people on your team, this is critical.

Rather than everyone coming to you for questions—or worse, asking the wrong person and getting the wrong answer—take the time to create an organization chart. Add it to your operations manual and make sure your team knows where it is and what it’s for.

Now, rather than your Skype chat blowing up with questions all day long, you’ll have time for the more important tasks.

#4 Use Time Blocking

Get out your calendar and start making appointments with yourself. Decide when you’ll check email and when you’ll work on client projects, then stick to the schedule.

These self-imposed deadlines will not only force you to get the work done, but they’ll help keep you focused. This structuring of your time means no more wasting time on Facebook, since you’ll be working on your business.

All of these systems can be set up in an afternoon—at least initially. But the time they save you when you use them consistently is phenomenal. An hour a day is just the beginning, but you have to take action.

You have to put in the work first before you can earn the rewards, but the benefits are sweet. In the end, you’ll wonder how you ever managed before you did these four things to improve your business.

Every month in the MyNAMS Insiders Club, we focus on a foundational topic all businesses need to create sustainable, long-term income. January is our Business Operations Challenge. If you need to focus on building your business on a solid foundation, join us now for just $1. You'll get access to all of our workshops, challenges, courses, templates, workbooks, monthly PLR, plus our weekly mastermind! It's the best deal for growing your online business.

Need Help With Your Business Operations? Join Us - We Can Help!

This month, the MyNAMS Insider's Club Challenge will focus on Business Operations.

You don't want to miss it - every business needs this.

If you're not in the Insider's Club, you can check it out for only $1!

Come join us and be a part of a supportive community with access to tools, training, and weekly Mastermind calls. Plus the monthly challenges that focus on one topic that your online business needs!

Yes, I want to join the monthly challenge about Business Operations!

David Perdew is the CEO and founder of NAMS - the Novice to Advanced Marketing System. He’s a journalist, consultant, and serial entrepreneur who has built one of the most successful and fastest-growing business training systems online today called the MyNAMS Insiders Club.

The Novice to Advanced Marketing System is a step-by-step system focusing on Team, Training and Tools to help novice to advanced business people build a Simple, Scalable and Sustainable business.

He took a year off in 2003 to personally build a 2200 square foot log cabin in north Alabama where he and his wife and two dogs and a cat live on 95 acres of forest with four streams and 60-foot waterfall.

The NAMS team includes his daughter, Jen, who is an email marketing and automation specialist. Jen runs the day to day business and is one of the primary trainers in our MyNAMS Insiders Club.

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Business Operations: 7 Ways Streamline Your Business by Outsourcing

By David Perdew Leave a Comment

Instead of Guessing, Maybe We Should Just Ask!

The key to serving your clients - and making stacks of cash - is to know a bit about them so you can serve them well and often.

How do most marketers operate today?

They build a list, write an email, and blast it out to the whole list hoping that someone on the list wants what they’re offering. Of course, there’s so many problems with that approach, it’s laughable.

But I’ve been guilty of it too.

As your list grows, staying in touch with everyone to find out who they are and what they need is nearly impossible. But with simple surveys, and a simple analytics tool available to everyone, you can uncover amazing information.

Today’s blog post is about that process.

Let’s start with the survey

After discussing the campaign with Jen, we honed in on our goal with the survey until it made the most sense. We came up with three goals:

Find out what niche(s) most of our community is working to provide the right kind of training.
Understand the kind of marketing tools/techniques that people were using to sell their products and provide training on those and the tools they wanted to know more about.
Offer a $100 coupon to apply against our product catalog to entice more people to take the survey and to make sales as they see other things in the cart they want.

Jen started with 2 questions because we wanted to keep it as simple as possible.

Question 1: What is your primary niche?

Question 2: What are your primary marketing tools (to make sales)?

But because we wanted to know a little more, we dug a little deeper.

Question 1a: What is your secondary niche?

Question 2a: What are the 2 marketing tools (to make sales) you'd like to learn more about to implement in your business?

The survey looked like this:

Then we began analyzing the results

The key was to make it easy and painless with no personal details. And to make sure the coupon was being delivered automatically so they could redeem it immediately.

When completed, it was a simple, multiple-choice survey that automatically fed the answers into a Google Sheet - a free tool everyone has access to.

As of this writing, we had 311 responses.

And we’re learning things we hadn’t expected to learn - as you always do if you monitor your investigative processes from inside and outside the process.

So far, we have enough numbers to give us good trends.

Some of them confirm what we thought; others did not.

For example, the top five marketing tools/techniques were:

Email marketing
Social media
Blogging
Affiliate marketing
Video marketing

I think the surprise to all of us was the interest in Blogging as a selling tool.

Next, we looked at the primary niche

When you’re creating promotional partnerships, the question most often asked is: “Who is your community and what do they like?”

That’s a tough question to answer if you have a large community. So, again, we have to ask.

These percentages did confirm one guess. When asked that question, I always answered that about 20% of our community is interested in the “Make Money Online” niche. And the rest were in other business niches. That was true, but I wasn’t sure at all what businesses the other 80% were trying to build.

Self Improvement was huge with 13%
Health and Medical was 8% and if you added in Diet and Fitness, we would be over 11%
Local Marketing Agency was nearly 8%. That shocked me.
And Finance / Investing was almost 6%. Another shock.

So, what does that tell me?

Business building tools and training fundamentals in the “Make Money Online” niche will apply to nearly everyone in our community. But we can also niche down and offer self-improvement or health to a smaller segment and be really well targeted.

What did the secondary niche tell us?

This question helped us identify future trends.

As people mature in their businesses, the niches become more focused. Often, the secondary niche is the passion niche and business people evolve into that.

The surprising trends here were:

Make Money Online dropped by half from the primary.
Self-Improvement rose to the top with the same percentage numbers holding steady as a major focus of a lot of people.
None with more than 10% told us that a ton of people haven’t thought about it, or they are completely focused on the primary niche.
The big surprise was that Ecommerce doubled from 3 to 6%. So, there’s substantial interest in growing that.

What can we learn from this information?

Now, we have a much better understanding of our audience and should be able to target them much better with tools and techniques that help more.

This information forms a basis for our decisions on:

Training product creation
Affiliate offers
Webinar presentations
Email language
Target market segmentation
And better Message to Market Match

I hope you found this helpful. Let me know in the comments if you’ve done anything like this in your business or if you think it would help you create better segmentation and better customer experience going forward.

**** In the time it took to write this post, our survey responses increased by 1/3. Lesson? Make sure you create your survey with a specific time frame in mind to accept results and don't jump to conclusions. Luckily for us, our percentages stayed the same so we can continue forward with our initial hypothesis.

Avoid-4-Time-Traps-that-rob-your-bank-account

Sticking to a step-by-step plan to achieve a goal

Business Operations: 4 Steps for De-Stressing Your Business Right Now

Finding a Virtual Assistant

Things to Outsource: Customer Service

5 Benefits of Streamlining Business Processes

Percy Miller

NO ONE else is doing things online like you guys are doing it...You guys are building and teaching what I want to learn how to do with my online efforts...Today I saw the future!"

Shelley Merchant

I have wandered around blindly for over 4 years wondering why things weren't working...the things y'all teach are not being taught elsewhere. Instead, the advice is vague and leaves you feeling stupid because you're not figuring it out.

I cannot say enough good things...the only problem is that there's so much good stuff that I don't want to sleep b/c I want to learn it all.

I'm beginning to feel like a plan is forming and that I might actually make things work.

Frank Sousa

With so much JUNK being peddled online it's good to see guys like you out there teaching what's real.

The Novice to Advanced Marketing System is a step-by-step system focusing on Team, Training and Tools to help novice to advanced business people build a Simple, Scalable and Sustainable business.

The NAMS team includes his daughter, Jen, who is an email marketing and automation specialist. Jen runs the day to day business and is one of the primary trainers in our MyNAMS Insiders Club.

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5 Types of Email Marketing

By David Perdew Leave a Comment

5 Types of Email Marketing

There are many types of email marketing. Today, we'll explore five of them.

Engagement is the key to success. But how do you engage the people on your ist? Through excellent communication.

As an email marketer, you have the responsibility to your list to communicate with them consistently. This does not mean you only reach out when you are trying to sell them something. It goes much deeper than that. Check out the types of email marketing you should consider.

Types of Email Marketing

1. Welcome Emails

If you land a customer, a subscriber, or a new client, the best way to leave an impression is to welcome them. Thanks to email automation, you can use welcome emails as an advantage to embrace, engage, and leave your customers coming back for more.

You want to give the best impression of your business as you possibly can, and by welcoming a user the moment they subscribe, buy or deal with your company, shows that you mean business.

2. Newsletters

If you want to show your loyal subscribers and new ones that you mean business, be sure to keep them constantly updated with your business. Whether it is new content or a new product, you need to make the content of your newsletters as vibrant and engaging as possible.

All you need to fulfill engagement is to be consistent with a schedule and innovative in the way you prepare your newsletter content. Using an email automation platform, there is no reason why you can't produce a monthly newsletter filled with something your list can look forward to. Keep the audience anticipating your newsletters. Certainlyyou don't want to make everything about your business look like a sales pitch.

3. Updates

Step into the shoes of a loyal customer and understand their needs and wants. Research and use email metrics to remain on track with your audience.

The basic idea of updates is to keep your customers informed of how your business is doing, what's new, and how you are constantly trying to improve your business. By updating your loyal customer, it leaves a good impression, keeping them motivated and enticed to support your business more.

Business woman are sending email marketing by digital tablet

4. Affiliate Offers

If you want to broaden your marketing avenue with an additional stream of revenue, you might consider becoming an affiliate for a person or business.

Use email marketing by promoting their products and content. Anything you sell with your affiliate link earns you money.

As you build a relationship with another business or person through affiliate offers, you can also help increase the reputation of your business, which is a great marketing strategy in itself. This can help your own business to expand and grow, all while earning at the same time.

5. Surveys

The idea behind building relationships is to engage with your list regularly. How do you do this? Through email marketing. Over a series of emails you send, you are letting your list learn more about you, your business, and earn their trust.

You also can create a 2-way form of communication with your customers by introducing surveys in your email marketing.

As you are letting your list get to know and like you, a survey is how you get to know more about your subscribers. A survey shows you care enough to ask them about their needs and wants.

It puts you in a great position to always to improve, which is the perfect marketing strategy to maintain loyal customers and invite new ones.

To conclude, email marketing has a wide range of different forms of communication and you can utilize the diversity to improve your marketing strategy. All you need is to have a clear concept, idea, and implementation of your email marketing strategy.

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