Want to make this YOUR year of SUCCESS?

Here are the five best things you can do for your business:

1. Specify

One of the biggest lessons that I’ve learned building my OWN education business is this: you can’t do everything. To find success, you need to specify exactly what you’re trying to achieve. The more specific you can be, the better.

In a similar way, be specific when you’re thinking about what you’re trying to offer or sell. As the saying goes when it comes to sales messaging: If you’re talking to everyone, you’re talking to no one.

Spend some time specifying the following over the next few weeks:

• What are you offering? What product or service are you selling? If you have more than one, identify one that you’re going to focus on.
• Who are you offering it to? Who is your target market?
• What are your GOALS for selling this offering? What does success like for you? Be as specific as possible. The more specific you are, the more likely you are to achieve those specific goals.
• Why are you selling this offering? This is the most important for the longevity of your business – why does what you’re selling matter to you? What difference will it make in the world? Does it relate to your purpose? (It should!) Having a deeper connection to your business and your “why” will ensure long-term success.

If you want your business to grow, take some time to specify exactly where and how much you want it to grow. It’s like that goldfish metaphor – apparently a goldfish can grow as large as the container which holds it. So specify a BIG fishbowl that your business can grow into!

2. Reflect

One of the best ways to move forward is to look back and to grow from where you came from. Spend some time auditing your work and achievements from this past year. Dig deep into your performance analytics and identify:

• What worked? Whether it was a specific content topic that resonated with your audience, an ad that had a low CPL, an email sequence with high engagement metrics, a copy angle with a high conversion rate, an Instagram post that performed superbly well – What should you do MORE of next year?
• What didn’t work? Were there efforts you spent time on last year that didn’t quite pan out? Maybe your ROI (return on investment) was too low to justify more effort moving forward, or something you spent a lot of time building hasn’t reached the performance level you were hoping for… Take an objective eye to your performance numbers and identify any clear efforts to eliminate.

There’s a great saying used in marketing – instead of reinventing the wheel, let’s “peak our peaks.” Figure out what worked and build on that.

3. Invest

One of the best ways to grow your business this year is to make the decision to INVEST in your success.

If you’re going to invest in anything, invest in your OWN growth. People who invest time and money in their own learning and business growth are the ones who reap both financial and fulfillment-based dividends in the end.

LEARNERS are EARNERS!

When you invest in a program or some sort of course that will expand your knowledge, you’ll be learning more than just tips and tricks. When you make the choice to invest in your business, you will also make invaluable connections, learn from the experts to shortcut your path to success, and gain the opportunity to network with other business-minded entrepreneurs.

This last part is so important – you never know what kind of connections you will make when you invest in a program. And since so much business comes from referrals and personal connections, networking may be the key that your business needs to really take off.

4. Go Evergreen

Another great transition you need to make in your business as you progress forward is to make sure your strategies are built to last. Chances are, you spent a lot of time building and creating. The last thing you would want is for that effort to go unused moving forward.

The best way to make sure you’re really leveraging all your assets and hard work from the past is to make sure your marketing and growth strategies are evergreen – meaning they are not dependent on constantly putting in new work, running a launch, or writing new material. Evergreen marketing and growth strategies can run almost 100% (sometimes completely 100%) on their own. This should be a goal for EVERY business owner.

Here are some of the best evergreen strategies that you need to employ:

• Building evergreen email funnels to help drive sales continuously – Launch-based campaigns are great, but they take a lot of time and effort to execute. Look for ways to turn past launch campaigns into evergreen funnels to automate your sales process.
• Focusing on organic traffic – Paid ads and social media posts are a great way to drive a lot of traffic in the short term. But if you want to set your traffic up for long-term, sustained growth, then you need to focus on organic traffic, specifically from organic search results (SEO), and even Pinterest. Here’s a great in-depth article on how to set your business and content up for SEO success.
• Set up referral reward systems – As mentioned above, referrals are a great way to gain new business without having to do all the legwork of nurturing a new customer on your own. Set up referral rewards programs, or incentives to inspire your existing customers to refer their friends to your products or services.
• Grow your email list – Your email list is going to be one of your most valuable resources as an entrepreneur. It’s a database that you OWN – that no social media algorithm or change in ads costs can take away from you. Plus, emails are proven to have significantly higher engagement rates than social media posts, AND a much higher average intent-to-buy than other channels. Invest your time in growing an email list for the long-haul. Melyssa Griffin has a great blog post on how to grow your email list when you’re first starting out.

5. Set Goals

Finally, one of the most important things that you need to do for your business is set goals. As you can imagine, it’s hard to achieve big business goals if you don’t spend the time to set those goals.

So do the work now: what specific goals do you want to achieve this next year? Be as specific as possible with all the primary KPIs for your business, including:

• Traffic: Unique users per month, unique users per year – whatever matters most to your business.
• Subscribers: Total subscribers on your email list
• Revenue: The big one! But set specific revenue goals by channel or program that you offer
• Sales in Units: A specific number of product or services that you want to sell

You can customize these KPIs as they make sense for your specific business, but the important thing is to set them.

Still building that business?

Maybe you’re still planning your new business, and next year, you’re going to LAUNCH (so exciting!) Don’t worry – I’ve got resources for that too.

If you’re interested in selling products online, specifically via a Shopify site or on Etsy, then download my “Start Your Shopify Biz Blueprint” Google Sheet template, and set up a profitable business in just 2 hours!

If you’re big goal is to QUIT your 9-to-5 job and to go into business full-time for yourself (*yasss*), then download my brand new “Quit Your 9-5” Jumpstart Guide.

Make this YOUR year of success, friend. Let’s do this (together)!

Photos by Adriana Zuniga-Williams