Most people who dream of starting an online business only have a limited amount of time that they can dedicate to actually building it. In this post, we’re going to look at how you can build and grow your blog even if you only have about half an hour to spare each day.
We’ll look at seven high-impact tasks that you can do to keep moving toward your business goals every day.
There are a thousand and one things that need to be done, and if your time is limited then it’s very important that you only focus on the main things that’ll get you the biggest results.
But what are the things that you can spend your time on that’ll really move the needle for your blogging business?
- Is it just blogging?
- Is it building your traffic?
- Is it promoting your content on social media?
- Or is it working on your website and SEO?
Before you decide on which blog tasks will have the most impact on the growth of your business, the first thing you need to do is shift your mindset and change the way you currently do things.
First, Stop Being a Perfectionist
There simply isn’t time to spend chasing perfection if you want to get a lot of things done quickly.
The quest for perfection is something that a lot of people struggle with. But the thing is, if you were to ask those people exactly how ‘perfection’ looks, they couldn’t answer you.
That is because perfection is never attainable.
It’s merely a kind of concealed standard that people make up in their heads and set up to be unattainable. This basically means that a quest for perfection is usually just an individual’s excuse to do nothing.
It’s based on irrational fears. But no one will ever know about the things you don’t think are perfect. It won’t cross their minds, so you need to stop worrying about it. But, just because you’re not chasing perfection doesn’t mean it’s time to start putting out nonsense.
It simply means that you won’t place unreal and undefined goal posts that are literally impossible to hit. Instead, you need to be willing just to be able to declare something DONE so you can move on.
Secondly, Realize that Money can Buy You Time
If you’re always short on time (as most online business owners tend to be), you can literally pay to get more of it.
If you’re not working on your business because you think you don’t have the time, then you need to just buy more of it so you can get things moving.
What am I talking about? If you really want to build a successful business online, then there are really only two ways to go about it.
Either you put in some real hard work into it, or you pay to get convenient shortcuts.
Here are some examples of how you can buy more time as a blogger:
Invest in Paid Traffic
This not only solves the universal ‘traffic’ problem but also allows you to quickly test your offers and lead magnets. When set up the right way, you can be printing your own money in no time at all.
Buy Tools for Speeding Up Your Workflow
A good example is buying a Thrive Themes membership so you can use the Thrive Architect to make amazing landing pages in just a few minutes with no coding as opposed to spending countless hours reinventing the wheel and trying to build and tweak a landing page on your own.
Outsource Blog Tasks
Hiring a service provider to complete some of the harder or time-consuming tasks related to your business is a smart move.
Often, it takes you a lot longer to do the job, and it never turns out as well as if you’d just paid a skilled person to do it instead.
So, those are the kinds of mindset changes that you need to make if you want to become a successful online entrepreneur.
Now, on to the tasks you can complete in just 30 minutes every day to have a massive impact on the growth of your blog.
7 High-Impact Tasks to Grow Your Blog
1. Come up With a Solid Game Plan
Creating a plan and executing are two different things. If you’re executing without a clear plan, then you’re basically just wasting your time.
Such aimless actions will get you nowhere. But then again, planning without execution is just as bad. You need to have both for any progress to happen.
With the right plan, your half-hour productivity periods are going to be on point and efficient. They will be aimed squarely at your goals and that gives you better odds of being successful.
Ask yourself:
- What does the goal (or goals) that you are shooting for look like?
- What’s the big plan to get you to your goal(s)? This is the strategy.
- What are the smaller projects that make up the plan to get this done? These are your tactics.
- What small steps can you take to complete each project? These are the processes.
And the all-important question:
What does ‘DONE’ look like in each of these steps?
In other words, have concrete measurements of when you can mark a certain project complete so you can move on to the next task.
A very important aspect of planning involves anticipating the decisions you may need to make – and then make them!
As confusing as that may sound, our actions are often stalled because of decisions not made.
It’s like coming to a fork on the road and just stopping there, paralyzed and not knowing which direction to go.
But if you know beforehand the direction you intend to go, it makes everything a whole lot simpler. When it comes to your online business, now is the time you make such decisions.
This means that by the time your plan is underway, there aren’t any decisions left to make. It’s now time to DO.
So, whether you’re just getting started or if you’ve been feeling that your blog is ‘aimless’, use the first few half-hour session to work out what your game plan will be.
2. Create a Content Upgrade or Lead Magnet
This is something you absolutely need if you want your efforts to have any real impact to the growth of your online business.
Your email list is the most valuable asset you’ll own, and any actions you do that directly contribute to its growth can be considered to be high-impact, and a very effective use of your time.
So, if you don’t already have one, spend a half-hour session working on your lead magnet. This is still an effective use of your time even if you already have a lead magnet but it’s not performing as well as it should.
This is the time to create a new one.
Remember, it’s not about creating some epic 200-page ebook or a fancy video, 7-week email challenge, or anything like that.
On the contrary, a simple checklist targeted toward your ideal audience will do.
Short, one-page lead magnets are among the highest converting ones, and this is something that you could easily complete in one session.
3. Create a Short Video for a Post Update
This is something that most people dread since so few of us are comfortable in front of the camera.
However, it’s vital to understand that creating video isn’t nearly as hard as most people think. For starters, you don’t need a whole lot of fancy equipment to get it done. Your smartphone will do.
Just make sure that you have decent audio as this is important.
Also, video is very effective for building your brand and strengthening relationships with your audience. It also helps to make your content more digestible for those who don’t like to read long blog posts.
Creating a video is one of the most effective things you can use a half-hour session for.
All you need to do is to record a simple video version of one of your more popular blog posts talking about some aspect of it, and then embed the video.
Alternatively, you could record yourself answering a subscriber’s question, and then turn that into public content.
Some bloggers actually prefer to ‘write’ their blog posts using video and then turn them into written content using transcription services.
Remember the rule about not being a perfectionist when creating videos – it’s not a Hollywood production. Just get it done!
4. Boost Posts on Facebook
Boosting a post on Facebook is a quick and easy process that will definitely take you less than 30 minutes.
By doing this, you expose your content to a lot more people, thereby making it significantly more effective for your content promotion efforts. And, as previously stated, money can buy you time, and this is a great way of leveraging one of your half-hour sessions.
Primarily, boosted posts used to be a way of magnifying a post to the fans you already had on Facebook.
But it has evolved a lot and it’s now used as a quick and efficient way of setting up a Facebook Ad based on your own posts.
This means that your target audience doesn’t just have to consist of your own fans.
You can include various other audiences giving your post a chance to get in front of more of the right people.
5. Create a Facebook Ad Campaign
The next step after boosting your post is to create a full ad campaign.
These two are basically the same thing except that an ad campaign works better with longer term marketing activities that you may continue to conduct in an evergreen way.
A boosted post, on the other hand, is something specific that you may be willing to spend a quick ten or twenty bucks to see how the blog post performs when presented to various audiences.
If you’re happy with the results, only then will you evolve into a complete ad campaign and then proceed to test different ads, audience groups, etc.
You will also have much more control.
The time you spend perfecting your online paid ads game (like Facebook Ads) is time very well spent as it will increase the only two parts that really matter in growing your business: your traffic and conversions.
6. Add One Email to Your Autoresponder Sequence
Yet another great use of your daily 30-minute sessions is by adding one email to your autoresponder series.
When faced with the task of creating an entire series, it seems like too much work, and most people won’t even attempt it since they know they won’t be able to complete it in that period of time.
But what if you only create one email? That’s definitely doable in half an hour.
Besides, when it comes to building relationships with your audience, you’re better off spending your time emailing them than blogging.
But, to leverage that effort even more, make sure that you add the email to your autoresponder rather than sending it out to your subscribers as a broadcast.
That way, all your future subscribers will also benefit from the effort you put into creating that email. There’s no better way of leveraging such a short session to grow your business.
7. Create a New Landing Page
A landing page has one purpose and that is to get anyone who lands on it to take some sort of action.
This could be anything from getting them to comment on your blog, like your Facebook page, watch a video, share your content, opt in for your lead magnet, or buy your products or services.
Whatever you want your readers to do, there’s no better way of convincing them than using a landing page.
Some people try to use pages on their blogs, but that is nowhere near as effective. If you want to get the best results from your marketing activities, a landing page is the way to go.
This is particularly true if you use tools like Thrive Architect which is part of the suite of tools you get when you sign up for a Thrive Membership.
In Conclusion
These are just a few of the tasks that you can do every day to move toward your business goals even if you don’t have much time to work on your blogging business.
It’s all about leveraging whatever time you have to get the most impact, and as long as you do that on a consistent basis, you will meet with success before long.
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PlanetBizOp.com
->Steven
Updated: Originally published April 24th 2019