3 Things That Are Working For Me Right Now

bybryonbrewer

10.5K followers

Updated 8 years ago

Hey,

Today I'm going to talk about things that are working well for me right now in every day business. It's not going to be basic SEO tips or advice on getting more conversions, but more general aspects of running a business.

I know that some of the things might be a little over your head if you are quite new and still trying to find your feet and earn your first dollar, but these little bits of advice can be gold to some people, so I feel it's worth sharing them.

WA needs more "Advanced" tips anyway.

The following tips are things that have helped me grow my business and not pull my hair out at the same time. Some of them are actually a result of pulling too much hair out..

1.) Down Time

It goes without saying that down time is important. You don't have to go very far to find people telling you to take breaks. There are some other reasons why down time is important though.

When I first started at WA, I spent every single minute outside of my day job, logged into WA and my websites. I turned down social events, I felt uncomfortable when away from my laptop for too long. I just wanted to get stuff done online, and I did! I was prolific back then and people would ask me how I was able to get so much done. I had no life, shouldn't be hard to figure that one out.

I'm sure some of you are the same. I'm sure like me, you've pulled a few all nighters writing articles.

While this enthusiasm is to be commended, it's not sustainable. Sooner or later you will burn out, and when you do, you'll suddenly stop logging into WA, you'll stop writing articles on your website, and you'll generally just stop.

Another reason is that the quality of your work suffers. If you work from 9am to 9pm, do you think you're going to write a stellar article at 9pm?

I used to save my emails until the end of the day because it was nice to get other stuff done first, but when you work 12 hours and then open an inbox to find over 100 emails (yep, I get that many per day), your replies to people tend to come out a bit grouchy.

Schedule yourself some down-time, or you will only end up taking it anyway.

An added bonus of limiting your "work on the business time" to just a few hours per day is that it forces you to work on the things that matter the most and you get them done more efficiently.

Those 12 hour days I used to do were never 12 hours of solid pedal to the metal business growth. It was mostly 11 hours of procrastination followed by an hour of focus when I panicked that I'd got nothing done all day.

So how do you do it?

Easy, just go out without your cell-phone, turn your wifi off on Sundays, or do something you used to do before you found WA. Look at your schedule and see if there are periods you can take breaks, get up out of your chair and do something else.

Most importantly, give yourself a stop time. If 9:30pm is your stop time, that email you write at 9:31 is going to suck anyway. That article you write is going to take 3 hours when doing it at 8am tomorrow would only take 2. Just drop your tools at the allotted time, and go read a book, spend time with your family, or watch some tv.

What if you really need to get something done?

Well, in all honestly the stuff you REALLY need to get done would have been done earlier if you were better organized, and since 80% of your results come from 20% of your actions, you can probably do that other thing tomorrow.

Action points for tip 1:

Look at your schedule and your workload and see about putting some scheduled breaks and down-time into it. If you are already maxed out with your day-to-day life and only have 1 hour per week to work on your business as it is, then take something else out of your life instead.

2.) Delegation

This is something that a lot of you aren't ready for yet, but it actually relates quite closely to step 1.

When I first started, I did everything myself. The problem is, the average person only has 160 hours a month that they can work on their business. If they have a family, a job, and other commitments, that time is drastically reduced.

Delegating tasks allows you to buy other people's time. What if you could hire 10 other people? Now you've got 1,600 hours a month to work on your business.

Note: I'm not suggesting you go out and hire 10 people, it's just an example.

What is delegating? Essentially it's just hiring someone to do some of the tasks that you don't have time (or desire) for.

How do you choose what to delegate?

If you're not adding value to something yourself, and your time is valuable, then it could be a good task to delegate. For example, when I first started building websites and selling them to others, I did everything myself. I researched the keywords, I got the articles written, I proofread the articles, I uploaded them to the site, I build and designed the site, and then I transferred it to my customer's hosting.

Over time, I couldn't do that anymore. I could only physically do about 4 or 5 of these a week, and I was getting a lot more orders than that. I also had other things to do like run my business, write articles, do guest posting, and work on my own sites.

I now have a team of about 10 who do all of the above for me, and I can now get away with only spending 1 or 2 hours a day on my business if necessary.

What if you can't afford it or don't have the budget?

This is a very good question. When I first went from making 100% of the money building sites to making about 50% of it, there was a lot of fear my end. I was taking a pay cut in order to free up some time...I kind of liked the pay though,.

What I learned is that freeing myself up allowed me to grow the business more. Every time I took on a new staff member to delegate a task to, there was a dip in profit the first month but that was replaced by more revenue. As long as revenue goes up more than expenses, it's all good.

I now probably only receive something like 40% of the profit from selling a site that I used to, but I sell 50 a month where I used to sell 5.

1,600 hours vs 160.

For you, this could mean that you're able to run 3 sites instead of 1, or you're able to produce 10 articles a month instead of 4. In the long run, you'll make more money as a result.

Action Steps: Look at every task you do and see whether they are things that you specifically need to do yourself.

Things like writing articles are probably important to keep yourself, since you have your voice and are building authority (I have a content manager for my main site now but still write most of the content myself). On the other hand, what about keyword research, editing/formatting articles, or promoting your content?

I've hired some incredibly hard-working virtual assistants for my team and some of them only expect $3-4 per hour, since they're from countries with a lower cost of living.

3.) Constant Learning

This is something all of you can do and you're doing it right this second, well done you!

Remember though, learning is done by doing as much as it is by reading.

One of the reasons that people keep growing and make leaps up to the next level (and it does tend to happen in steps like that) is because they keep learning. They don't just sit on their knowledge and take bigger actions, they learn, learn and learn.

Here's something important to know, no matter where you are in your journey.

What got you here, isn't going to get you there.

Read that one again, because I find it very important and repeat it to myself several times a month.

What got you here, isn't going to get you there.

This means that the actions and the knowledge that got you to a certain point, aren't enough to get you to the next point. Getting from $0 to $1k a month was hard work and took me a long time, but to get to $10k per month, I didn't just do the same thing 10x more. I had to change how I worked, operated, and thought.

Moving from $10k to $20k was easier because I was able to leverage my existing authority and I had got the hang of scaling, but this only happened because I kept on learning.

Go through everything here WA has to offer, and then go through everything that your knowledge tells you that you should learn in addition to WA. I never knew when I first joined WA that I would one day be reading books about building and managing teams and learning why Napoleon is a good role-model as a strategic thinker, but always seeking out new knowledge is what got me to this point.

I don't know what will get me to the next step, but I know that it's not the same thing that got me here.

What if you just don't know what you need to learn?

Well, then you need to keep practicing the things that are in front of you and get better at those, and eventually, you'll notice other things you need to learn.

The most important thing is that you apply what you learn, and you try it for yourself. There's a lot of "This doesn't work and that is a waste of time" online, but unless you try it for yourself, you won't know for sure.

Action points: Make a list of everything you want to learn about, and spend a week learning each thing. After that, spend two weeks on each thing, because 1 week isn't going to be enough. By the time you're done, you'll be a master at all those things.

Hey, it worked for Benjamin Franklin. (See the kind of books I've been reading? Who knew).

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I could probably write for another hour but I think I better stop here, or I'll have to delegate the rest of the article to someone..