Owning a business is hard work – no one could ever say it isn’t! It’s why so many up and coming entrepreneurs experience burnout within the first year of business. They dive in head first and throw in all their time and energy, and get barely anything back and have to take a break before their first hit of real success comes through.
Don’t let the same thing happen to you. In the online world, it’s easy to get overwhelmed by the needs of a brand new website, which are only going to scale as you get bigger and bigger. If you’re already worried about a lack of time in your schedule, the idea that you could have even more to handle is only going to stunt your growth.
That’s why it’s crucial to use tips like these to keep your stress levels at a low. Make your website easy to run and the rest will take care of itself!
Not sure what your website’s code is telling you? You’re not the only one! (Pexels Image – CC0 Licence)
Set Working Hours
How long has it been since you’ve done some form of shift work? Because now’s the time to get back into the mindset! You’re a business owner, and you might think that means you’ve got to be on the clock 24/7. But this is a mistake a lot of people make.
After all, you’ve got the same hours in the day as anyone else. That means you’re also going to need to eat and sleep and spend time with loved ones, outside of the workplace and all the benefits it brings you.
Routinely Create Backups
You don’t want your website to go down and be lost forever, do you? If not, make sure you’ve made a backup recently. You can do this once a week or every single day if you like, depending on the amount of changes you like to make.
Just as long as you have actually made a backup, you can relax. A disaster may happen, but you’re not going to lose everything. You’ll simply have to briefly take your site offline and reupload whatever has gone missing. It’ll only take you a couple hours!
Have a Solid Understanding of Technical SEO
You can create quality content that your readers enjoy. Your product copy is informative and easy to read through, which helps grease the funnel right through to the other side of the checkout. Your use of seo is working out well for you!
However, you also need a good grasp of technical seo and how that can affect your site’s performance. Take issues like your load time and the clutter that can be found in your HTML into account here – optimising in areas like these is going to make it a lot easier to compete alongside your much larger competitors.
As a small business, this understanding of the technical side will set you apart. When you understand that what you’re running is a website, which is a technological innovation and not just a bank of monetised content that could potentially convert a customer, you’re much more likely to come across well.
You’ll be in relevant places, your website will be easy to use, and customers won’t have a problem finding a solution to their problems. Not only does your content reflect correctly, but your use of website code and load has put you in just the right place for them to find you.
Once you take these technical elements into account, you’ll no longer be left wondering why your website won’t climb the search results page. Remember, you’re working in a digital medium where the technical aspect decides exactly what is displayed and when; play into this as much as possible.
Automate Your Email and Social Media Campaigns
You don’t have to write emails or social media captions one by one. You can use tools to automate and schedule them. Most inboxes have scheduling options already prepackaged, but you can use an external software to keep customer data safe and secure and all in one place.
When you do this, you take the most annoying admin task in the whole workplace off your plate. Write up a template for your newsletter or the latest Instagram ad you want to run and the software you use will take care of the rest!
Hire a Moderator
If you’re truly running out of time to both run your business and your life, hire someone to run your website for you. These people are known as moderators, and while they cannot make active business decisions or change the website’s makeup, they can monitor content, incoming traffic, and answer messages and emails when you simply don’t have the opportunity.
Give them rules to put in place and they’ll follow them, and then you can check in at the end of the week for a full report. You also don’t have to worry about handing over control to someone else, as they’re just moderating the website for you. It’s the simplest form of delegation known to man, and it can take a lot of weight off your shoulders!
Take Audience Feedback into Account
When someone leaves a comment on a social media post, or they send through an email with their thoughts about your latest marketing campaign or product styling, make sure you read it through. You want to know what’s going on in your audience’s mind, and receiving feedback like this can let you know what your average customer thinks.
That’s the kind of feedback you can rely on. As a business, it’s not just about you, and what you think would be good to do. It’s about what your customer wants. If you don’t want a website to be overwhelming for any longer, you need to collect this feedback into a big pile and identify common themes, compliments, and concerns.
You’ll start performing a lot better, and a lot easier, when you’re playing to the masses, rather than shooting blindly at the wall to see what sticks.
Don’t Rush Your Content
When you rush content, you’re more likely to head into a downward spiral. When you try to compete against the ever moving clock of online content, you’re not going to be able to keep up! Unless you have a huge team behind you, you’re always going to be on the backfoot, reaching toward an ideal that is simply unsustainable.
It’s why you should focus on creating content that will convert just as strongly in a year’s time as it does right now. This content takes time and expertise to put together; you have both, you just need to believe that you do!
Does Your Website Make You Feel Like Drowning?
Running a website should be hard work. It’s a challenge just like anything else in business, and it’s a core element of building a modern company into a success. However, it should be so overwhelming that you cannot see any progress through your efforts.
Indeed, website tools come in their hundreds these days. Making use of these can make it a lot easier to be a business owner and entrepreneur. You just need some guidance on your side and a healthy approach to the work/life balance we all have to contend with.
Otherwise you could be drowned out by website issues and an audience who doesn’t truly see your vision. That’s a recipe for disaster, but it’s a problem you can put to bed right now.