Do you ever find yourself spending hours in your business, and having little (or nothing!) to show for it at the end? This was me a few months ago. I was spending lots of time doing tasks and I didn't have the desired results because I was winging it. So I came up with strategies to boost my productivity, and work smarter rather than harder. Continue reading if you want to learn 5 ways you can work smarter, not harder, in your business. Automate Your Social Media The biggest mistake I made when I started my business was manually posting on my social media. Not only did it mean I had to remember to post every day, but I also had to keep my content well organised to make my page coherent and effective. Using automation software saved me a lot of time and meant I could do all of my social media planning at once Do you struggle with your social media planning? Then check out my resources to help you boss your social media pages here - including my 125 days of social media content planner! Chunk Your Tasks To-do lists are meant to help you organise your tasks, but there needs to be a method to help you complete them! Tasks should be organised in terms of what they will achieve. For example, you should separate your social media tasks from your production tasks. When completing tasks, you want to chunk them together and do similar tasks at the same time. You can waste a lot of time by 'task jumping'. For example, if you go from creating social media graphics to updating your Etsy listings, to completing your bookkeeping, your brain will be in a haze trying to get in the rhythm of your other tasks. However, if you do a bunch of social media tasks in one go - for example, create captions, create graphics and schedule content - you will get in the flow of your social media brain and complete tasks more efficiently and effectively. Think About Passive Income Many Etsy shops focus on physical products. They handcraft beautiful items and ship them to customers. But Etsy is also a fantastic platform for digital downloads. Digital downloads are a great asset to any business because they don't require any shipment, and they can be purchased repeatedly once made. Some examples of digital downloads you can add to your physical product shop are craft planners, PDF patterns, how-to's, checklists, workbooks and beginners guides. For example, if you run a shop that creates knitted garments, you could create a PDF for 'knitting for beginners' with how to get started, a list of necessary tools etc. This kind of income is easy and can generate a lot of extra income for your business. Hire A Virtual Assistant Hiring a VA for Etsy shops is commonly overlooked. They are seen as an asset you should get when business is booming. But that doesn't have to be the case. There is a whole group of VA's out there who are ready to help you grow your business, leaving you time to focus on making your products. Some VA's will require you buy a set of hours in bulk a month, but if you are new and only just starting to make a profit you can hire a VA that has a fee dependent on the job. A VA can help with a variety of jobs, including e-mail marketing management, hashtag research, copywriting, SEO assistance and more. Hiring a VA can give you room to focus on the parts of the business that you love, or can free up time so you have a good work/life balance. Look At Your Profitability We run businesses to make money. Regardless of whether you have a side hustle, full-time biz or a charity - you want revenue. And with revenue, you want profit! You want to sell items that have high profitability. For example, if Product A gains you a profit of £10 compared to Product B's profit of £2, you will want to sell lots of Product A! Because each sale results in more profit. Making sure your business is profitable is very important, and the more profit you make the better! If you are under-pricing, you will be spending more time and resources trying to find more customers to buy. For profitability, look at your pricing structure and push your marketing efforts towards those products that get you high profitability.
Perfect your pricing strategy today with my pricing planner. Click here to get the resources you need to start earning a good profit in your business!
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As an Etsy seller, I used to feel overwhelmed often. I would look at my to-do list, my product planner, my finance spreadsheets and everything else in my inbox and feel like crying. It felt horrible and almost caused me to close up my shop multiple times. And then I decided to stop feeling sorry for myself and actually do something about it. I knew there was a way that would help my productivity. I wanted something different to my usual to-do list, which was just a bunch of words scrawled down in a mess. Don't worry friend, I'm not going to leave you hanging! In today's blog post I will tell you how I organised my to-do list so that I actually get stuff done and beat overwhelm. While I was looking at all the paper I had I knew there was another way. A way that didn't leave me feeling exhausted and incapable. I didn't know what to do, but I was determined to find a way - and I'm happy to say I came up with a great method that got my to-do list organised and made me more productive.
Fresh beginnings The first step is to start a new planner. This isn't essential, but I see a new planner as a fresh start. When you start over, you have room to make a whole new method, or to mix and match your old methods into your new one. Your fresh beginning could be a new notebook, a binder, or even some digital software. A new start is a great way to get rid of your old, unproductive habits and bring in a good routine and motivation. This doesn't mean you have to get rid of the old planner (I kept mine to look back on for a few months), but starting something new can be refreshing and easier to organise. Task chunking Next, I split up my tasks into sections. Most tasks are very similar, so these can be grouped to increase productivity. A common mistake made in task completion is jumping between different tasks, so you never settle and it takes time to get into the rhythm of doing a new type of task. I was finding I would make a new product, add a new listing, make pins, come up with promotion material etc, and each task was so different that it was hard to keep up. By splitting my tasks into sections, I could chunk similar tasks together to complete more. The sections I used were:
Assigning deadlines Due to the nature of my business, I found a lot of my tasks had no time restrictions. If I didn't make pins on a certain day, it wouldn't matter because I could do it at a later date. This was a nice, relaxing way to see my to-do list, but it didn't help for productivity. So I started setting deadlines - which changed my entire perspective. I found that by prioritising certain tasks, I was setting a little pressure on myself to actually get them done rather than watch another episode on Netflix. It's important to note that setting pressure on yourself should NOT result in feeling overwhelmed. If you are feeling overwhelmed, you are setting too many tasks for yourself. Using deadlines is purely a way to help encourage you to work on your business. If you do feel overwhelmed, there is nothing stopping you from pushing that deadline on. Using deadlines is simply a way to make you feel productive and set a schedule of what you have to do that day rather than picking random tasks. Assigning Importance Deadlines are a good way of adding importance of your tasks, but you'll also be setting deadlines that don't have a specific time restriction. For example, promoting in Facebook groups is a task I can do any time. If I don't get around to it, I can decide to push it on. However, posting on my Instagram page is a very important task that has a time restriction. If I don't post on the specified day, I will be behind and it will mess up my whole content strategy! So I also assign importance to tasks. Tasks that have a date that it ABSOLUTELY MUST be completed by get first priority over tasks that can be done at any time. Assigning Order This is a really important part of productivity - and that is the order in which you complete tasks. Everyday, you should be focusing on your very important tasks and they should be the ones you are completing first. No matter what section they are from, you need to do your time restrictive tasks first. Then, you can go on to your other tasks. First thing I look at is the next few days tasks. What very important tasks do you have to do? Is it something you can plan or do early? If there are other important tasks, do those first. I usually look up to 3 days forward and see what tasks I can compete early. Then, I go on to my other tasks. Using the grouping method we started with at the beginning, I pick 3 tasks that are similar. Sometimes, they are exactly the same (e.g. creating pins for three different products) or they can be related, but not the same (e.g. Creating a set of pins for one product, scheduling the pins and repinning old pins). Using these methods, I was able to create a foolproof system to organising everything in my business. It tells me what I need to do, how important my tasks are and gives me a schedule to follow. Got any new ideas? Let me know in the comments below! Start organising your Etsy shop easily with my FREE Etsy shop checklist! With tick boxes for tasks you should be doing on a daily, weekly and monthly basis, you can star to develop your to do list easily! Click here to get your free copy. Let's face it, EVERY Etsy shop has it's slow period. Even the most successful shops have days where orders aren't coming in like they usually do. You can see this slow period in either a glass half full or glass half empty sort of way. The negative thought - My shop is terrible, no one wants to buy anything, why do I even bother having this shop (Trust me, I've been in this mindset many times!). Or, you can be positive - What a wonderful opportunity to catch up on all the little jobs I usually don't have time to do! Usually, there's a little bit of the negative first, which involves me having a sulk, a moan to the boyfriend and then wrapping myself up in my duvet and forgetting the world! But you can't stay in this state forever. Use this opportunity to work on the little things that eventually add up to big things! This is the motivation stage where you realise you may have been a bit dramatic and it wasn't worth throwing in the towel yet. Here are 40 things you can do while orders are slow that will actually benefit your shop in a big way! TIDY UP YOUR SHOP 1. Rearrange your listings order to match products 2. Rewrite your 'About' section 3. Update your Etsy Shop banner 4. Take and edit new photo's for your listings 5. Organise your listings into optimised sections 6. Review your policies 7. Answer some FAQ's 8. Rewrite your 'Thank You' message to buyers 9. Update your announcement 10. Update your behind the scenes pictures PLAN NEW PRODUCTS AND HOLIDAYS 11. Brain dump some new ideas for future products 12. Use a mind map to plan out product ranges 13. Write a lit of upcoming holidays that can be applied to your shop 14. Make new inventory 15. Plan a digital product range 16. Try something new that can be added to your shop 17. Research your niche on Pinterest 18. Look for areas of improvement in your products 19. Make a product launch plan 20. Assign dates to future product launches in a calendar UPDATE YOUR SOCIAL MEDIA AND EMAIL LIST 21. Plan social media content 22. Make social media graphics on Canva 23. Schedule your posts with Later 24. Create some vertical pins for Pinterest 25. Watch YouTube videos on increasing engagement on your social media 26. Join some new Etsy seller Facebook groups 27. Organise your highlights on Instagram 28. Come up with a new opt in freebie 29. Make beautiful e-mail templates with Mailchimp 30. Find some new relevant hashtags CATCH UP ON ADMIN 31. Update or make a small business planner 32. Review your shop's performance 33. Update your accounts 34. Organise your invoices and receipts 35. Clean out your inbox 36. Update or make a to do list 37. Computerise some tasks 38. Plan some business goals 39. Catch up with your e-mails 40. Organise your upcoming projects Have you done any of the above while your shop has been slow? Let me know in the comments!
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