Hi, and welcome to the 1^st of September monthly blog post on AidanBooth.com!

Since the birth of our son almost 11 months ago, I’ve been constantly reminded of the need to be incredibly effective in the ‘work time’ I have available… I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about effectiveness, and business growth for people with very little time available… all that thought lead me to write this blog post.

Below you’ll find ten tips, things you can do right now to help you grow your business. I became more and more aware of the importance of tips #1, #2, #3, #5 and #7 while traveling a couple of months ago, and in today’s bonus report (click here to access it), tips #12, #13 and #15 also very much inline with what BUSY people can do to accelerate results.

Here’s what we’ll cover in the first 10 tips:

• Re-Evaluate Your Goals
• Building A Plan
• Focus On ONE Thing At A Time
• Test Something
• Terminate Distractions
• Talk To Your Customer
• Get Help!
• Measure
• Share Your Goals
• Use Reward/Consequence
• Our Final Thoughts

As with every business, you need to spend a lot of time and effort as you try to generate more leads and customers. That being said, the fact that you conduct your business online does provide you with some advantages.

Just applying one of these 10 things to your business is going to help your business grow, potentially quite significantly.

Let’s dive in and take a closer look…

1. Re-Evaluate Your Goals

If you’ve had a false start and things haven’t worked out for you, perhaps you’ve gone down the wrong track even? Maybe you just need to start again, here’s our advice:

• Hit the reset button…
• Set new goals based on what you think is working today
• Make sure your goals are realistic and ‘S.M.A.R.T’

Here’s what ‘S.M.A.R.T’ stands for:

Simple

Your goal should be simple and well defined. Good: “build a $5,000/month white label income” Bad: “build a successful white label income”.

Measurable

Having a measurable goal is essential. Use concrete numbers… in the last example I used ‘$5,000’. This is measurable.

Attainable

Aim for the stars, but keep one foot on the ground… Not easy… but realistic and attainable in a shorter period of time.

Realistic

Does your goal make sense based on market conditions? If you sell cars in a small village, and half the population is leaving, should you expect to double your sales next year?

Timely

Choose a time frame.

For example; “Build a $3,000/month white label income before the 31st December 2017”.

TIP: Give yourself a second chance as things don’t always work out the first time!

2. (Re)Build Your Plan

It still amazes me how few people actually make a plan, for example on an excel spreadsheet, or even a piece of paper!

I recommend you break every single action item down into a spreadsheet, assign dates to each item, and then break the big tasks into small actions on an accountability sheet.

Not only would we recommend you have an accountability sheet, but you also need to know your numbers. Again, a simple spreadsheet containing the following information is key to building a plan and reaching your goals. Make sure you track ALL your financials, including all incoming and outgoing revenue.

Some things you might include on the spreadsheet:

• Include revenue channels per month
• Expenses
• Incoming / outgoing revenue
• Net profit / loss
• Etc.

Ask yourself “where do you want to be in 12 months’ time?”

My advice? Dive in head first, you need a focussed drive.

ANYONE can get to 100K per year as long as you have the focus and drive.

Check out my blog post ‘Organizational Hacks To Turbo-Charge Productivity’ at: https://www.aidanbooth.com/organizational-hacks

TIP: Define your path on a spreadsheet, plot backwards, for example if you want to build a 100k business stream, what are the steps you need to take to get there? Determine your end goal and work out how to get there

3. Focus On ONE Thing At A Time

One of the most common reasons entrepreneurs fail is because they take on too much, and spread themselves too thin.

It’s best to do just ONE thing, and nail it!

Create a “some day” goal, what we mean by that is what would you like some day in your life? Whatever that may be, such as having a real estate portfolio worth $20,000,000 or having a piece of software with 10,000 users for example.

Your “some day” goal might happen for 10-15 years from now, so you need to work backwards and work out what your goal would be and how you would get there in 5 years, then backwords to 1 year, than backwards to 1 month, 1 week, today etc.

Ask yourself, “What are the 3 things you can do today to move closer to your goals?” Taking bite size chunks will help you move forwards.

Not only does this apply to your business but it can also apply to the following areas of your life:

• Personal life
• Relationships
• Finances
• Job
• Etc.

Below is a photo from one of my all time favorite books, ‘The One Thing’. It shows this ‘work-backwards’ long term goal planning method:

TIP: If in doubt, do less, rather than do more, focus on fewer things…

4. Test Something

Testing is key when running your business, even a 5% increase can have a massive impact, check out the examples below:

• A 5% increase in conversions on a website is a huge deal… that’s 5% more sales without spending a penny more on traffic
• 5% increase in sales on Amazon is also HUGE… That can dramatically improve your sales velocity and overall performance

Here are some of the tools we use for testing:

Landing Pages or Websites

https://vwo.com/ is an easy and cost effective way to split test landing pages or any website, which can be set up in 2-3 minutes.

You can use VWO to tweak, optimize & personalize your website with minimal IT help.

Amazon Pages

If you’re an Amazon seller, you can use http://www.blackbirdsuite.com/ to split test your pages and much more…

BlackBird is a total package of technology and training for growing an Amazon business.

TIP: Testing can be fast and easy with the right tools… There’s NO reason NOT to do it!

5. Terminate Distractions

Terminating distractions is an ongoing challenge, what we see time and time again is that when you’re in a desperate situation, the distractions disappear. If for example you have an upcoming deadline to meet, you’ll have no trouble eliminating distractions.

Remove distractions from your life and stay away from your TV, phone, social media, video games etc., or anything that will distract you from reaching your business goals. In addition, stop chasing the shiny objects that you just don’t need. Get off those peoples mailing lists, and choose 1-2 “mentors” to follow.

Remember, these things are not important compared to your goal… once you’ve got your online business humming along, you’ll have all the time you need to do whatever you want, but first you need to get things moving.

Also, if you’ve got negative people around you who pull you down, get them out of the way. To get insane results, you need to have everything working in your favor, and negative people will only drain your energy and pull you down. Get rid of them if you can (if you can’t, try to minimize the time you spend with them).

It’s time for you to take MASSIVE FOCUSED ACTION!

• Focus, focus, focus
• Eliminate threats and distractions
• Know WHY you’re doing it

TIP: You need to be ruthless in how you eliminate toxic distrations!

6. Talk To Your Customer

Talking to your customer is a great way to improve your performance, the following can help anyone with the business they are working on:

• Create a customer survey
• Send personal customer emails
• Understand WHO your customer is
• Understand their concerns and what they really want

TIP: Thank your customers, unfortunately, not a lot of companies do this. Try to talk with your customers and let them know how much they mean to you, they’ll appreciate it!

7. Get Help!

Every business needs a support system, here’s are advice for getting help.

• Get a partner
• Involve your spouse
• Outsource
• Get a CEO
• Get the hell OUT of the way!

Bear in mind that doing it alone is 10x more difficult… the most successful businesses that you will see are not built by people who are ‘alone’. There’s ALWAYS a partner or some kind of support system in place (which could simply be an amazing team)!

Check out my blog post ‘How To Find The Perfect Business Partner’ @ https://www.aidanbooth.com/business-partners/

TIP: Hire the smartest person you can, it will get results!

8. Measure

If you’re judging yourself on some goal you can’t get to, it’s a pretty useless measure. It’s important to ensure that you’re measures align with your goals.

Goals are used to help your business grow and achieve its objectives. If you’re unsure of how to set your goals check out ‘1. Re-Evaluate Your Goals’ above and always set ‘S.M.A.R.T’ goals, remember having a measurable goal is essential to your business.

Put a system in place to help you measure your goals and keep you on track, and don’t forget to reward yourself when you achieve your business goals (we’ll talk more about this later on)!

TIP: “You can’t manage what you can’t measure” – Quote by Peter Drucker

9. Share Your Goals

Now we know how to set goals, and the crucial key that they need to be measurable, make your goals public, for example share them with your friends. This will put you on the spot to make sure you carry them out.

• Get some kind of accountability partner
• Shared goals are 70% more likely to be reached

TIP: Expose yourself to the possibility of humiliating failure… you won’t fail!

10. Use Reward/Consequence

It’s important to reward yourself, for example if you achieve a certain goal, build rewards into your planning. If you reach an objective, make sure you reward yourself in some way.

It might be a small purchase, a takeaway, or something as simple as watching your favourite TV program.

TIP: Celebrate the small wins on a weekly basis or more often if you wish

Our Final Thoughts

At the end of the day, all of these ideas can help grow your business. Even implementing just one of them TODAY can potentially grow your business quite significantly.

Your ultimate goal is to create and establish a powerful online business. The way you do that is solely up to you, but always try to re-evaluate and improve. Hopefully the tips in this blog post will go a long way into helping you grow your business and take it to the next level 🙂

Make sure you download the additional 5 tips in the bonus report, click the button below for access:

Thanks for reading!

Aidan

P.S. One of my top 5 marketing books of all times are ‘The One Thing: The Surprisingly Simple Truth Behind Extraordinary Results’ by Gary Keller and Jay Papasan. You can pick it up on Amazon for about $9 🙂