Well, we’ve flipped another page on the calendar and kicked off the year Twenty-Twenty. I remember when I was younger, thinking about the year 2000 and how far away that seemed, and now 2000 is receding in the rearview mirror. Tempus has certainly been fugit-ing (yeah, I know, that’s not a word in English or Latin).
Anyway, on to our topic of the day: resolutions.
If you’re like most people, you’ve made at least one or two resolutions in the past few weeks. Did you go with the traditional “eat better, exercise more, lose weight” line of thinking? According to a quick Google search, those are at the top of the list, along with “stop smoking,” “get out of debt,” “save money,” and “spend more time with family.”
All of these are excellent goals (we’ll ignore the fact that these exact same goals also top the list of “Most Commonly Broken New Year’s Resolutions”), but they also have one thing in common: they’re all personal goals. And as a business owner, I think it’s a shame that we don’t put the same amount of thought into resolving to do some things differently in our businesses as we do in our personal lives.
With that in mind, today I want to offer you a list of twenty possible resolutions you could make to take your business to the next level in 2020 (Twenty…for Twenty-Twenty…see what I did there?).
Some of these won’t be applicable to you, but my guess is you can find at least two or three items on the list that you’ve been meaning to get around to. Well, now’s the time. It’s a new year. Heck, it’s even a new decade. Resolve to make it your business’s best year yet by taking a few of the steps below.
Big Picture Issues/Life Strategies
Let’s start big. The first six items on my list all deal with the big questions: purpose, time, work/life balance, etc. We’ll get to some more specific action steps in the rest of the list, but if you don’t get these big issues nailed down, that will make taking action on any of the more specific steps much harder.
1. Sharpen your Purpose
The biggest question of all for your business is this: what are you trying to accomplish, and for whom? You can think of this as your mission statement, if you like that language. But whatever you call it, if you’ve never sat down and thought this through (or better yet, written it out), do yourself a favor and make time to do so now.
I know so many consultants who went into the business because they had some expertise in an area and they thought they could capitalize on it (and I mean that in the literal, “make some money” way). But generally, I’ve found that those who are in it for the money don’t usually last long in consulting. For one thing, consulting can be a tough business. It’s not too difficult to make a “gets me by” living by consulting, but since it’s so time intensive, it’s hard to scale it up to a “makes me a ton of cash” kind of business, so those in it for the money often quit.
But if you have a purpose that’s bigger than being your own boss and making some money, you’ll be much happier. If you haven’t read Daniel Pink’s book, Drive, I highly recommend it. In the book, Pink talks about the three major motivators: autonomy, mastery, and purpose. Consulting definitely meets our need for autonomy (sometimes it gives us a bit too much autonomy for our own good), and if we hadn’t already mastered some area of expertise, we wouldn’t have gone into consulting in the first place. But it’s the third motivator, purpose, that will keep you going through the ups and downs inherent in the consulting life.
So, if you haven’t done this already, resolve to define your purpose today. You can take the easy approach, which is to just sit down with a pen and a piece of paper and draft a statement of who you want to serve, why, and how. Or you can get much more detailed and systematic by following the process laid out by Simon Sinek in his book, Find Your Why. I went through that process myself for my business, and believe me, it’s an eye-opening experience.
However you do it, think through why you’re in business and get that purpose down on paper. Post it over your computer in your office or somewhere else where you’ll see it every day and use it to guide all your actions in the coming year.
2. Take Work/Life Balance Seriously
One of the great benefits of starting a consulting business is that you become your own boss. You, and only you, decide what needs to be done in your business, when to do it, and how long to work on it. That can be a wonderful, liberating feeling.
The problem is, there’s always so much that needs to be done that many consultants end up driving themselves to exhaustion. Yeah, you’re your own boss now, but you might come to realize that the new boss is worse than the old boss!
This is why you need to find strategies to destress and keep your life in balance, and if you haven’t successfully found this balance to this point, you should make doing so one of your major resolutions for 2020.
There are lots of ways to go about it: mindfulness, yoga, exercise, more time for family. Actually schedule these things, and then schedule your work around them. I read a quote somewhere that I thought was a great reminder, and I take a few seconds every few days to read it again to myself. Here it is: “If you don’t have time to live your life now, when will you?” Kind of puts it all in perspective, right?
3. Use Your Time More Wisely
The biggest challenge faced by all independent consultants is time. There’s always so much to do, and only you to do it. You have to not only do the actual consulting work—presenting, consulting, writing, etc.—but you have to do all of the business stuff, too—billing, depositing checks, paying expenses, keeping the books, marketing. The truth is, I’ve never met an independent consultant who has been able to do all of this well. So, what do you do about it?
First, you can learn the time-tested tricks of master time management experts. There are some excellent books out there on the topic, but I recommend Eat That Frog by Brian Tracy. If you learn the tricks of great time managers and use them consistently for a long enough time, you can develop new habits that can boost your productivity immensely.
And there are efficiencies to be had through technology, as well. It might be that you can arrange to do a presentation via Skype instead of traveling to a distant location and doing it live. It may be that you can develop some webinars on some of your best topics and start marketing those as alternatives to live presentations. There are some drawbacks here. You won’t be able to charge as much for a Skype presentation as you do for a live presentation, and it will cost you some time to develop your webinars in the first place, but once you have some of these alternatives in place, you might gain back a good chunk of time to work on your business from home.
Probably the biggest way to save time is to outsource some aspects of your business. If you can’t do it all, find some way to pay someone else to do some of it. Sure, it will cost you some money, but it’s possible that, by freeing up some extra time, you could get enough extra work to more than make up for the cost of outsourcing.
So, what should you outsource? It depends. My recommendation is to outsource anything that you aren’t very good at and don’t like doing. Hate the billing and accounting part of the job? Outsource it. Your marketing and copywriting skills not what they need to be? Hire a marketer/copywriter to help you out. The key is: as much as possible, do only the stuff you do well and enjoy doing.
4. Learn a New Skill
This is the flip-side of #3 above. If your copywriting skills aren’t where they need to be and you need to revise your website or write a new promotional piece, there are great courses you can take to learn the skills. The same thing goes for marketing. You can find great online courses for learning how to become your own Marketing Manager. How about social media marketing? Just about everyone uses social media these days, but using social media to grow your consulting business is a whole different ballgame. But again, there are great online courses where you can learn these skills.
For any copywriting skills, I recommend American Writers and Artists Incorporated (AWAI). They have courses available for any type of writing you can imagine. For marketing know-how, I recommend Ryan Deiss at Digital Marketer.
Of course, there’s a tradeoff for learning a new skill. The Pros: you can now do more of the tasks required to run your business well and save yourself the money of hiring someone else to do it. The con: you’ll now be spending more time doing tasks that you might not enjoy or that keep you from doing some other tasks you value more (writing your next book?). There’s opportunity cost to everything we do. You just have to decide if you’d rather outsource some aspects of your business (#3) or learn to do more of your business tasks yourself (#4).
5. Reduce and Eliminate Distractions
This one really goes with #3, time management, but I’ve separated it out to call specific attention to it. Yes, distractions have always been the enemy of independent consultants. When you’re working from a home office, it’s so easy to get up and grab a snack…get up and let the dogs outside…get up and watch the mid-day news on TV (“just for a quick break,” you know?). And every time you get up, you’re not getting your work done.
Now, add to what I just described (which has always been true) a whole new layer of distractions caused by technology. Today, people carry around in their pockets a device (it doesn’t do it justice to call it a “cell phone” or even a “smart phone” since it’s so much more—a powerful computer, a research tool, a gaming device, a social media connection, a camera, etc.) that constantly whispers, “Come on, pull me out. You know you want to….”
The truth is, many people, whether they realize it or not, are addicted to their devices. I don’t use that word lightly. I know that addiction is a terrible thing. But how many people have trouble going anywhere without their devices? How many people, if they aren’t doing something that occupies their minds completely, immediately reach for their phones? How many people have the will power to resist pulling their phones out every time they hear it ring, feel it vibrate, or hear the ding of a notification?
Plus, there has been a bevy of research studies in the last few years that show that just having your phone in your pocket—whether you pull it out or not—is distracting, reducing working memory availability (because, in the back of your mind, you’re thinking about what you’re missing on your e-mail or social media feeds), and reducing efficiency by 50% or more.
The answer? Turn your phone off and put it in another room of the house when you’re supposed to be working. Check it only before you start work in the morning, at lunch, and then after you’re done working for the day. Resolve to cut the cord when you’re “on the clock.” Work all the time you’re supposed to be at work.
6. Read
You’ve become a consultant because you’re more knowledgeable than others about some particular niche within your broader field and you’ve made it your goal to share that expertise with others. That’s wonderful.
But to stay on top, you need to constantly work to widen that gap between what you already know about your niche and what your audience knows. To do this, you need to set aside time every day to read in your field. Learn more and use this expanding knowledge to tweak what you already offer and add other topics to your repertoire.
And, in addition to reading every day in your field of expertise, you also need to read to learn more about marketing and business. Too many educational consultants just see themselves as consultants instead of as businessmen and businesswomen whose field just happens to be educational consulting. The more you learn about how to run a business successfully, the better off you’ll be.
So, the next question is, “How much should I read?” The experts who have weighed in on this question offer answers that vary from a low of thirty minutes a day to a high of four hours a day. For me, I set aside forty-five minutes every day to read in my field and to read business books.
As far as when during the day to do your reading, let your body be your guide. I’m a morning person, so when I resolved to make this type of reading a non-negotiable part of every day, I set my alarm clock to get up forty-five minutes earlier in the morning than I already was doing. I take my shower, eat a super-early breakfast, and then do my reading. By the time most people are starting their work day, I’ve already knocked this out and am ready to tackle the more specific tasks I need to get done that day. But you may not be a morning person. You may be, like my wife, a night owl. If that’s the case, you may still have the energy and mental focus to get your reading in before going to bed. Whatever works for your biological clock, go with it.
Specific Business Strategies
OK, those first six options for resolutions hit some of the really big aspects of running your own consulting business: your purpose, how you use your time, learning new skills, becoming an even more knowledgeable expert. Making any one of those changes could massively impact your business for the better in 2020 and beyond.
The remaining fourteen items on our list are more specific aspects of running a successful consulting business. Some of them are necessary (you have to have a website, for example), while others are optional. In some cases, it’s an either-or situation. For example, you can blog or write a newsletter, but it would be very difficult to consistently crank out enough fresh content to do both.
With that in mind, think of the items below as a checklist. If you’re already doing an item, just check it off the list. Once you’ve checked off the ones you’re already doing well, look at the remaining items. Pick one or two that could give you the biggest bang for the buck this year and resolve to start working on those areas.
7. Create/Have Created a Website
As I stated above, you simply must have a website. It’s considered one of the most basic requirements for any serious business today. If you don’t have a site, people won’t take you seriously. Period.
I won’t spend time here going over what content you should have on your website (though I’ll touch on it below), but if you haven’t created your website yet, I will give you one big tip that could save you a great deal of time, aggravation, and money in the long run: hire a copywriter first, then a web designer.
In my work with various consultants, I see the same mistake made over and over. They realize that they need a website, and since most people don’t know how to code or even how to create a website using a platform like WordPress, the first thing they think to do is to hire a web designer. Big mistake!
You see, web designers want to create sites that look good, but while that is important, it’s not nearly as important as the copy on the site. It’s the words that sell you (or not) to your ideal clients, not the colors and images on your site.
So take my advice and hire a copywriter first (unless you’re trained to write good marketing copy yourself), tell him or her about your target audience, your products and services, and what actions you want site visitors to take while on your site, and let him or her create text for your site that will actually work to get you business. Then, and only then, hire a web designer, give him or her the copy you’ve had written, and let them develop a nice-looking site that fits your content.
To read more about this topic, check out our blog post, “The Importance of Doing Things in the Right Order.“
8. Have Your Website Professionally Reviewed
If you already have a website but it’s not working well, a great step is to hire someone to do a professional review of its usability and content.
Everyone knows they need a website, so they often just throw one up there. But it’s not like Field of Dreams; you can’t just “build it and they will come.” And even when people do come to your site, they might just leave without taking the action you want them to take.
There are a lot of moving parts to a website, and most consultants aren’t experts in website construction, content, or usability, so if their sites aren’t working well, they usually have no idea what to do about it.
This is where a professional review of your site comes in. For example, when we at EdConsultantMarketing do a website review for a client, we use a 35-point usability checklist to look at every important aspect of the site and give the site owner feedback on each point.
Once you know where your site can be improved, you take those steps. The result is more traffic and more conversions into business. A website review will cost you a little money, but you’ll more than make up for that cost with a single new client. This makes having your website reviewed a great resolution for 2020.
9. Write Your Site to Speak to Your Ideal Clients
One of the biggest mistakes consultants make with their websites is to write their site content in such a way that it’s all about them (the consultant).
Here’s the plain, hard truth: your website visitors couldn’t care less about you—except for the answer to this one question: “Can you help me solve my problem?” Sure, they need to know that you’re credible, so you do have to say something about yourself. But just realize that the places on your site where you’re talking about yourself are the least important parts of your site.
The best-performing websites are those that…
- Clearly understand the ideal client (audience) and his or her problems
- Use second person (“you”) to speak directly to the prospect
- Position the consultant’s products or services as the solution to the prospect’s problems
- Drive site visitors step-by-step to the site’s call to action (whatever action the consultant wants the site visitor to take—whether it’s to buy a book, schedule a phone consultation, etc.)
Does your website follow the guidelines above? If not, it’s not really written for your audience, and it’s no surprise that it’s not converting traffic into conversions very well.
If you realize that the copy on your site isn’t doing its job, you have two options: (1) you can learn the skills needed to write good web copy or (2) outsource the job and have a professional copywriter revise your site’s content for you. Whichever approach you choose, resolving to make your site’s copy do better work for you in the coming year would be a great resolution.
For more on this topic, see our post, “The Three Big Questions You Need to Answer Before Launching Your Consulting Website.“
10. Learn and Use SEO, or Hire Someone To Do It for You
In #9, above, I talked about writing copy that gets conversions into sales. And that’s obviously important. But you can’t convert site visitors unless you have site visitors.
This leads us to SEO—search engine optimization. Now, if you’ve read much about SEO over the past year, you’re probably confused. You’ll find supposed experts who tell you that you must do SEO to get your site to rank higher in Google and other search engines. And then you’ll find other supposed experts who say that “SEO is dead,” and all you really need to do is to write good, fairly long content on your topic on a regular basis, and the search engines will find it.
Both sides make good points. If you write regular content about your topic, and if your posts are substantive and detailed, you have a decent chance of the search engines showing you some love. On the other hand, if you were just a little more “in the know” about what terms people are actually searching for around your topic, don’t you think it would be fairly easy to work some of that language into your posts in logical places (headlines, page titles, meta-descriptions, alt tags)? Sure. So, doing both is probably the best way to go.
Now, like several of the other items in this list, there’s the DIY approach and the HSTDIFY (hire someone to do it for you) approach. You can decide to learn SEO yourself—and again, there are good courses online—and then you’ll have a skill that you can use from then on. Or you can hire an expert and save yourself the time (doing SEO research can be very time-consuming). If you think your site could benefit from some SEO TLC, pick one approach or the other and resolve to get it done in 2020.
11. Write/Have Written a Lead Generation Magnet to Build Your List
One of the most used sayings in the internet marketing world is, “The money’s in the list.” What people mean by this saying is that, if you have a list of people who like your content so much that they’re willing to give you their e-mail addresses in exchange for that content, you now have an asset that you can use in many ways: you can e-mail them regularly over time to keep building a relationship with them, which may very well lead to them hiring you for some consulting work down the road. You can sell products to them that you develop. You can send out an e-blast when you’re ready to launch your new book and get an instant spike of book sales, etc.
But it’s not quite as easy as it sounds. For one thing, when someone lands on your website and doesn’t know much about you yet, they’re going to be a bit skeptical. Consumers today are wary. They’ve been scammed and spammed to the point where they have significant trust issues.
So, how do you build enough trust with your site visitors to get them to give you their names and e-mail addresses? Offer them something of value for free in exchange for that information, that’s how. This “something” is called a “lead generation magnet” in some circles, and it’s usually an information product of some kind—a special report (in business, it’s called a “white paper”), a checklist, a template, or even a whole e-book. This freebie has to have a large enough perceived value to overcome your visitor’s reluctance to give you his or her contact info.
If you don’t yet offer a lead generation magnet on your site to convert visitors into subscribers, you should resolve to take care of that. Again, you can write something yourself or you can hire someone to ghostwrite it for you. However you need to do it to get it done, start taking those steps today. Remember: the money’s in the list.
For a deeper dive into this topic, read “List Building 101: Or, Fishing (the Right Way) for Dollars.”
12. Write/Have Written an Autoresponder E-mail Sequence
If you take my advice above and write or have written a lead magnet to increase the number of sign-ups you get for your mailing list, an autoresponder sequence could be your next step.
First of all, for those of you who don’t know what an autoresponder sequence is, it’s a series of e-mails that you write (or have written for you) once and that are then automatically set to be delivered at certain intervals over a period of time after someone opts-in to your list.
For example, for EdConsultantMarketing, I have a lead generation magnet (special report) titled 7 “Must Haves” for Becoming a Successful, Financially Stable Educational Consultant. When someone signs up to get my special report, they click the “Get It Free” button and are taken to a “squeeze page” to fill in their name and e-mail address. When they submit the form, they automatically get the first e-mail in my autoresponder series, which welcomes them to the group and gives them a link to the PDF of the special report. Most people who give something away to get opt-ins stop here with this basic welcome message.
An autoresponder sequence takes things to the next level. Twenty-four hours after receiving my welcome message, for example, my opt-ins receive, automatically, the next e-mail in my series, which talks about one thing a consultant might need done for her in her business, with a link to that service on my website. A couple of days later, she will receive the next e-mail in the sequence, which talks about another problem and the solution I have to offer, with a link, etc.
That’s how an autoresponder sequence works. Generally, these sequences are 7-8 e-mails long and, if they’re well done, they do two things for you: (1) they continue to build the relationship you’ve started with your new opt-in and (2) they continue to educate your opt-ins about what services you offer and how those services could benefit them. This combination often relatively quickly turns new opt-ins into paying customers. Autoresponders are powerful sales tools.
While you can certainly write your autoresponder sequence yourself, this is one task that I recommend you hire a professional for. There’s a bit of a “formula” that professional copywriters use for these e-mails that has proven effective over the years, and if you don’t know the formula, your e-mails are likely to be much less effective. Additionally, a professional copywriter knows how and when to vary the formula to match the specifics of your business.
13. Start a Blog
One way to scale up your online presence, boost your website’s ranking in the search engines, and continue to build relationships with your followers is through blogging.
Many consultants have started blogs, and some are doing very well with it. Others have started a blog but have given up for one reason or another. This is not surprising. I often tell clients that having a blog is a lot like having a puppy. You have to take care of it and feed it regularly. If you don’t, bad things will happen.
But if writing is your jam, if you have lots to say about your subject, and if you have the will power to do it consistently, blogging can be a great business development tool for you in 2020. Blogging on your own website feeds new content to Google and the other search engines, and search loves fresh content, so your site will rank better as a result. And if you can score guest blogging spots on other websites, you can link back to your site and drive new eyeballs to your content, as well as to your products and services.
14. Start a Newsletter
A newsletter is like a blog on steroids. It has more content in its issues than your typical blog post (usually one main article and several other sections like reviews, ads, links to resources, and quotations), so newsletters aren’t sent out as often as blog posts. Most newsletters are monthly, some come out twice a month, and a rare few come out weekly. The main strength of a newsletter is that the sheer volume of solid content contained in each issue positions you as a real expert in your space.
On the negative side, a newsletter can only be delivered to people who have opted in to receive it—in other words, only the people on your mailing list are going to see it. So it’s a great tool for growing your relationship with your list, but it’s not going to bring new people in like guest blogging can do.
As I mentioned previously, you probably aren’t going to have the time to both blog and write a regular newsletter, so you’ll probably have to make a choice. Or, if you really want to tap into the benefits of both, you can write one yourself and hire a ghostwriter to do the other one for you.
To learn more, see our blog post, “Why You Need an E-Mail Newsletter for Your Consulting Business.”
15. Start E-mail Marketing
I mentioned earlier in #11 that “the money’s in the list.” One way that statement is true is if you e-mail your list regularly over many months and use those interactions to educate your readers, building yourself up in their minds as a trusted resource. And then, sometime in the future, some of these readers may decide to buy a product from you or hire you to deliver a service. That’s the “long game.”
But there’s a “short game,” too. This happens when you use your e-mails to your list to tell them more directly about your new e-book you’d like them to buy, or ask them to sign up for a webinar or live event you’re hosting, or tell them about the benefits of hiring you to come to their school to do a workshop. This is called e-mail marketing, and it can do wonders for your business’s bottom line.
The key here is to have the right ratio of informational, “non-salesy” e-mails to more in-your-face sales-focused e-mails. That ratio is different for different audiences, but I would suggest sending at least three or four informational e-mails to every one sales e-mail. Your readers will understand that you have to sell products and services to stay in business, so they’re OK with a sales pitch now and then. Just don’t abuse the privilege they’ve bestowed upon you by giving you their e-mail addresses.
So, if you have a list but you haven’t really been talking to them much, maybe 2020 is the year to pump up the connection and start using this channel to boost your business.
16. Turn Your E-mail List into a Tribe
Another great resolution you could make for 2020, if you already have a list, is to find some way to turn this random group of people who happen to have signed up for your mailing list into a “tribe” of like-minded people.
If your list is like the typical list, it’s all one-to-one: you and one list member, you and another list member, etc. When you send something out to your list by e-mail or when you send out a newsletter, each person on your list hears from you, but there’s no mechanism in place for them to talk to each other.
But what if you found a way to change this? What if you started using survey software to find out more about the individuals on your list and started introducing members with common interests to each other via e-mail? What if you started a Facebook group for your list members where they could interact with each other? Or added a forum to your website so they could have conversations there?
The goal here is to make your business more about “us” than about “me.” If people who opt-in to your list can get not only your great material but also can find a posse of like-minded people to interact with regularly, they will be much more likely to stay on your list for a very long time.
One warning, though—marketing guru Seth Godin points out that, if you do find a way to grow your group into a “tribe,” you’d best remember one thing: “It’s not your tribe…. The tribe doesn’t belong to you, so you don’t get to tell the members what to do or to use them for your own aims. If you’re fortunate, there’s a tribe that will listen to you and consider what you say” (Godin, 2018).
If this approach—being just a member of the tribe (though perhaps it’s best-known and most knowledgeable member) rather than the guru a bunch of individuals look up to—appeals to you, you might resolve to make 2020 the year you take the necessary steps to turn your list into a tribe.
17. Write a Case Study
I said in item #9 above that you should write your website to speak to your ideal prospects, but there’s a way to turn that around, too: Let your best clients speak for you to your prospects.
Sure, you can try to show your site visitors that you are credible by telling them all about yourself, your accomplishments, your expertise, your publications, etc., and there’s nothing wrong with that.
But you get a lot more credibility when others say it for you. This is called “social proof”: if other people say this guy is good, he must be good.”
One way many people try to use the power of social proof to their advantage is to have a page of testimonials from former clients on their websites. And if you haven’t done this yet, you should gather up some of your best testimonials and get them up on your site, pronto.
But let’s talk about taking it to the next level: a case study. You might think of a case study as a testimonial on steroids. It’s basically a long-form testimonial where you tell the story of a former client who got great results from following your advice and strategies (or use an interview format and let the former client speak for herself).
The longer format of a case study makes it more persuasive than a short testimonial because it allows you and your former client to go into detail about what you did, how you did it, and what the end results were.
So, if you haven’t written (or had written for you) a case study for your website yet, this is another step you can take to boost your business’s credibility in 2020. You can create a separate page for your case study and put a tab on your navigation bar for “Case Study.” It’s a powerful sales piece and one that most consultants don’t have on their sites, so it can be a real differentiator for you.
18. Write a Book or E-book
It’s been true for a long time, and it will probably be true for years to come: nothing can take your consulting business to the next level quite as quickly as publishing a book. There’s just a certain mystique about authors that causes us to put them on a pedestal. And that can mean a big boost to your business.
So, if you haven’t written your first book yet, why not resolve to make 2020 the year that it happens?
If you’re thinking, “That sounds like a lot of work. When would I ever carve out enough time from my busy schedule to do it?” And you’re right; writing a book is time-consuming.
But here’s an easy way to get it done if you’re already blogging or writing a newsletter: simply write your regular blog (or newsletter article) around a focused topic over a period of time. For each sub-topic within the big topic, try to write a series of blog posts (or articles) that each explore one point of the sub-topic. Continue this process as you work your way systematically through the big topic.
And when you feel that you’ve exhausted the topic, sit back and look at what you’ve done—you’ll have enough content for a full-length book or e-book. All you have to do is string the material together in a logical sequence, delete repetitions, create a table of contents, and you’re good to go.
Author! Author!
19. Help Your Book Publisher Out
If you follow the advice in #18 above and write a book this year and are fortunate enough to have it accepted by a traditional publisher (or if you were already working on a book contract before reading this and your book hasn’t launched yet), one of the best things you can do for your business is to be a full participant in marketing your book.
I know a lot of consultants. Hundreds of them, in fact. And I would say that, of all the published authors in that group, less than 10% of them actually have ever done anything to push their books beyond what the publisher does for them.
I guess I can understand it. When a publisher accepts your book, they always promise that they’ll do the marketing for you. And they will do some marketing for you: they’ll put a blurb about it on their website with a link to buy it; they’ll list it in their catalogs; and they might even do some work to get you speaking gigs to talk about the book if you show interest in that.
But the truth is, unless your book shows early promise of being a big seller or unless you’re already a best-selling author for them, they’re probably going to do the bare minimum of marketing for you. Sure, even that would be helpful to your business.
But just think how much bigger that “author bump” will be to your business if you use all the tools at your disposal to be a willing marketing partner. For example, you could use your e-mail list to push your books by doing a simultaneous launch with the publisher. All this would involve would be to start sending out e-mail messages to your list in the weeks prior to the launch, piquing your opt-ins’ curiosity and getting them excited about the book. Build the excitement right up until launch day, then give them a link to get the book from the publisher as soon as it hits their site. You can get a crazy amount of extra sales by doing this.
And that’s not the only route. You can use your various social media channels to build up the launch, as well. Of course, you’ll also want to put up a “Products” page on your website with a description of the book and a call to action to click a link and purchase it.
So, if you have a book coming out this year, first of all, “Congratulations!” But don’t let this opportunity to really boost your sales by willingly participating in your publisher’s marketing.
20. “Productize” a Service
What does that mean? Well, just what it says. Take a service that you offer, like a workshop you usually do live or an area in which you usually consult and turn that service into a product by creating a live webinar or an online course with that content.
The benefits to your business can be substantial. For example, if you turn a topic into a live webinar, you can do that webinar from home and charge people for attending while you get paid without having any travel expenses.
Even better, if you turn the service into an online course that you can market through your website, you can set it up so that people can take the course anytime, from anywhere, at their own pace. You can literally be making money while you sleep!
So, if the travel inherent in the consulting lifestyle is getting to you (not to mention the expenses), you might want to explore this option for 2020. Being able to deliver your content a number of ways—live, Skype, webinar, online course—means that potential clients are more likely to find a fit with their needs, meaning, ultimately, that you get more paying work. And who’s not up for that?
Conclusion
So there you have it, my (very long–sorry) list of possibilities from which you can choose your 2020 business resolutions. As I said earlier, I’m sure you’ve already nailed down a bunch of items on this list, so just ignore those. But when you look at the remaining items, how many are things you’ve “been meaning to get to”? Five? Ten? More?
Well, the time is now. Make your short list of “to-do” items from this list, choose one, and get started. Take a baby step each day toward making that goal a reality, and soon you’ll be able to check that one off your list and move on to another.
Now, you notice that I said in the paragraph above, “choose one.” And that’s my biggest piece of advice for you. If you decide you want to add a bunch of these items to your business this year, and you jump in and try to do start implementing two or three of these at once, you’re going to get stressed out, you’re not going to do a good job of it, and you’re probably going to give up.
Don’t do that. Don’t be like those fitness wannabes who show up at the gym in early January and are long gone by February. Do it right. Attack one goal at a time. Execute. Then move on. If you follow this approach, I’m confident that 2020 is going to be your best business year yet!
Sources
Godin, S. (2018). This is marketing: You can’t be seen until you learn to see. New York: Penguin Random House.
