Organizational Skills

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Are you in the entrepreneurial space? If so, this workshop, related to organizational skills, both online and offline, is just for you. So, the first thing to do is choose a place to take some copious notes, whether on your smartphone or on a notepad. If not, no biggie. You can save and share this article with friends and family later.

My goal here is to help you become as successful as possible. In case you haven’t heard, the Wealthy Affiliate platform has been evolving lately at a rapid pace. One of the most recent changes involves the upgrade of our site content. This new change is mind-blowing!

The site content upgrade is designed to help you maximize your content creation for a better user experience (UX). This will not only increase your productivity but will ultimately revolutionize the way you create your content. This upgrade is a real game-changer!

Also, bear in mind that while you are on the Wealthy Affiliate platform, you will find a treasure trove of helpful information and learning resources – the OEC training, online classes, webinars, and a plethora of success stories straight from the mouths of affiliate marketing experts. Never feel that you have to go it alone. So, without further ado, let’s dive in.

20 Essential Online Business Skills

If you were looking for a new job, would you even bother to apply if you reviewed the job specification and found that you didn’t have the required skills or experience? If you are thinking about starting a business or growing your business online, have you thought about the skills and experience you need?

Would you give yourself the job as a business owner if you were interviewing yourself? Being a solopreneur or small business owner is possibly one of the most challenging roles you will ever have! If you make a success of it, then it will also be one of the most rewarding roles you will ever have.

When thinking about starting a business or growing a business online, we focus on tasks, activities, and what needs to be done, but do we spend enough time thinking about what skills and experience are needed? Do we objectively self-assess our skills before leaping into action?

Here is a list of 20 essential skills needed to run a successful online business:

1. Planning & Research

Research and planning are important in starting a business. This is the part where you should be able to answer two major questions regarding your online business:

  • What is your product or service?
  • Who is your target customer?

These seem like basic questions but require a lot of research to answer correctly. Here you need to make a plan. It doesn’t need to be perfect; you just need a rough draft. You can research by:

  • Learning case studies and watching reports of businesses related to yours
  • Analyzing online business models
  • Studying your potential competitors and their profits and investment needed
  • Communicating with experts in your business field
  • Researching and communicating with your target audience/customer
  • Following social media pages or blogs of top players in your field
  • Looking for online courses or training related to your business category

2. Digital Marketing

Strong marketing skills are important. Effective digital marketing will allow your online business to gain new customers and grow your following. Specifically, in online business, digital marketing involves understanding:

  • Inbound marketing
  • Pay-per-click (PPC)
  • SEO
  • Affiliate marketing
  • Email marketing and PR
  • Social media ads

These may seem like a lot but you can take short courses or outsource these services from agencies.

3. Copywriting

This is the ability to write persuasive, informative, and relevant content about your business. Without content, you can’t communicate with your audience and spread brand awareness. Most importantly, providing good content will allow you to express your desire to provide the best products or services to your customers.

4. Graphic Design

The ability to create beautiful graphic designs will set you apart from and rise above your competitors. Your designs should attract your audience and make them curious about your offerings. There are websites and software you can use to make images, including:

  • Fotor
  • BeFunky
  • Canva

5. Web Design & Development

Your website is the home of your products and services. It will define everything about your business and establish your brand. That’s why the creation and maintenance of your website are essential. There are many ways to create a website. You can read our article “Shopify & WooCommerce: Everything You Need to Know When Setting Up Your eCommerce Store” to understand more.

6. Social Management Skills

As stated earlier, you can grow your following through social media. In this day and age, everyone has social media accounts. You can use social media ads to attract traffic to your website or promote your product. You just need to learn how to manage your social business accounts and pages fully to take advantage of this advertisement type.

7. Networking

Being able to network and grow your connections is one way to grow your online business. You should build good relationships with:

  • Business connections (suppliers, resources)
  • Mentors in your field

Effective communication also includes nurturing the relationships you’ve developed through various channels like joining webinars or conventions related to your business.

8. Commercial

Pricing your products or services can be tough, but this is essential. One of the keys to a successful business is pricing your products properly. It is one way of creating a business that will prosper. Correct pricing will not only build trust and good relationships with your customers but will also ensure your business is making money and getting the opportunity to grow.

9. Financial

Knowledge about your finances and managing them is the backbone of your business. You can’t run a business effectively if your finances are a mess. You should master budgeting your investments, profits, and other expenses like taxes.

Good finance and accounting will allow you to manage the money you’ll spend on advertising, products/services, and employees. You’ll also know your profits and if growing your business through reinvestment is possible.

10. Administration & Leadership

Through excellent administration and leadership, businesses can prosper. You should lead your employees to maximize productivity.

You should:

  • Provide guidance
  • Motivate your employees
  • Initiate action
  • Improve satisfaction and build morale
  • Address employee and organization needs
  • Effectively delegate responsibilities
  • Keep up with everything through proper documentation

11. Business Analysis and Research

Staying current with trends and happenings in your market and how your business is tracking. After launching your business and performing your digital marketing strategies, you should track the results of each campaign.

Analyzing the results ensures your marketing is working. Marketing trends are always changing, so you should keep up with the latest happenings in your industry/field through continuous research and analysis.

12. Adaptability

Being adaptable is a skill that will keep your business alive when challenges arise. Businesses that can’t adapt to market happenings tend to get left behind and die.

13. Business Development

When your business is steady and all your marketing plans are launched, you should consider how to develop your business further. Are there new ways to sell your products? Is there a new business model you can use? Continuously thinking about innovations and improvements will make your business grow.

14. Project & Time Management

Managing your time is especially difficult when starting a new business. You must prioritize each task by importance and urgency. You may think multitasking is a good way to get things done, but it is unwise. It is more productive to manage your time and projects by creating an organizational system like a to-do list. There are various websites and software that can help manage projects smoothly, including:

  • BaseCamp
  • Asana
  • ClickUp
  • Trello

15. Self-Confidence

If you don’t believe in yourself, no one else will. It’s important to have the confidence that your business will succeed. You should always have a positive attitude and drive. Remember that confidence results from proper preparation and correct motivations.

16. Resilience

There will be circumstances that challenge your business. You should bounce back from setbacks. For example, having a contingency plan for crises is helpful.

17. Trade Skills and Products

This is what you’re offering, such as coaching, photography, painting, cooking, products, etc. This will be your online business's foundation. You should understand your offerings' scope and limitations.

18. Customer Service

You should manage effective customer service. This communicates with your customers and manages their feedback. Sometimes, unfortunate circumstances lead to unsatisfied customers. Still, effective customer service will preserve relationships instead of permanently losing customers.

19. Communication

Communicating effectively nurtures customer relationships and retains them. You should use various channels like email campaigns, phone calls, or even in-person meetings. Always ensure you get your points across and build rapport with customers.

20. Risk Management

Every business venture has inherent risks. However, avoiding risks is possible with the right skills. It’s essential to know when to make big decisions and predict their outcomes before committing. Analyze every decision and only consider worthwhile risks.

So does this mean that unless we have all these skills, we shouldn’t start a business? Of course not! It means recognizing skill gaps and working to close them or finding people with the skills to do the work.

How to Close the Skill Gap

Once you identify a skill gap, decide how critical it is to your business and how often you'll need it. You could take a training course, self-learn using good online materials and practice, or learn from skilled people.

We all have strengths and development needs. You may trade skills with someone else - for example, offer to write content for someone in return for great graphics for your website.

What if developing these skills takes a long time? Well, you have to start somewhere. Over time you’ll grow and improve. Many aspiring entrepreneurs fall into the trap of not starting until they feel they have all the skills.

Sometimes entrepreneurs take endless courses, download free eBooks, read extensively, but still don’t feel ready. Avoid this trap - just make a start. Accept you’re not yet perfect and focus on improving over time. As the saying goes, “practice makes perfect”.

In the short term, find someone else skilled to do the work until you're skilled enough yourself. Or, decide to permanently outsource skills you don't want to learn.

When starting a business, finances are often tight. We worry about spending too much before having income. It can be tempting to try doing everything to avoid costs. While this avoids paying someone,

it also means taking much longer to pay yourself because you spend so long on tasks best completed quicker and better by experts. Outsourcing allows you to focus your skills best for your business while leveraging others' skills to save time.

Big organizations have HR, Marketing, IT, and Finance departments. If you work in corporate jobs you wouldn’t consider developing all those skills. Think the same for your business!

Running a business demands being a jack of all trades but trying to do everything inevitably means being a master of none and failing.

What are Organizational Skills in Business?

Organizational skills are your abilities to effectively manage time, prioritize tasks, set goals, and develop systems to achieve those goals. Employees with excellent organizational skills can juggle multiple responsibilities simultaneously, meet deadlines, and handle complex projects efficiently.

Why are Organizational Skills Important in Business?

Organizational skills help you focus your time, effort, and resources on work that matters. They also keep stakeholders on track to meet shared goals without holding team members back. By doing so, you become a dependable high-performer people count on to get things done.

How Do I Describe My Organizational Skills?

Organizational skills are abilities that prove you can:

1. Manage time and deadlines.

2. Prioritize tasks.

3. Structure data.

4. Maintain a clean workspace.

5. File documents and materials.

6. Track process steps.

7. Lead projects to completion.

What are Organizational Skills and Examples?

Organizational skills help you meet deadlines, focus on essential work, stay focused, and help others work well. They include communication, time management, delegation, goal-setting, strategic thinking, and more.

What are Strong Organizational Skills?

Organization is efficiently and systematically planning your time and workload. Strong skills are shown by effectively planning to meet deadlines, proving you're organized.

Why are Organizational Skills Important in the Workplace?

  • Efficiency - organization maximizes efficiency.
  • Team management - organization helps manage teams.
  • Trust and morale - organization builds trust and morale.
  • Stress reduction - organization reduces stress.
  • Time management - organization enables better time management.
  • Planning and scheduling - organization improves planning and scheduling.
  • Resource allocation - organization optimizes resource allocation.

What are the Benefits of Being Organized?

  • Stress relief - organization reduces stress from excessive to-do lists.
  • Better sleep - organization leads to better sleep.
  • More ‘me time’ - organization frees up more personal time.
  • Healthier lifestyle - organization enables healthier habits.
  • Increased productivity - organization boosts productivity at work.

What is the Most Important Organizational Skill?

Time management is crucial to being organized. It involves budgeting enough time to finish tasks, not over-committing time to any one task, and balancing home and work time.

How Do You Describe an Organized Person?

An organized person is naturally neat, punctual, and detailed. Their life and work habits are ordered, planned, and efficient.

Tips for Developing Strong Organizational Skills

1. Design a clean workspace.

2. Set career and personal goals.

3. Make a to-do list.

4. Prioritize each task.

5. Schedule tasks into a timeline.

6. Organize materials.

7. Reward yourself regularly.

8. Maintain work-life balance.

What is an Organizational Strength?

Strengths are things an organization does particularly well that distinguish it from competitors - advantages, specialized processes, motivated staff, access to materials, etc.

What is Lack of Organizational Skills?

Poor skills make people less efficient and effective. Disorganization causes employees to confuse dates, mix up work, miss deadlines, and become unreliable.

Organizational Skills Rock

The job search is grueling with many talented candidates vying for roles. What makes you stand out? Organizational skills! At first, you may think they aren’t that important - keeping documents organized and decluttering is good but not vital. However, strong organizational skills can help you reach your potential.

Workweek Statistics

On average, Americans spend 25% of their workweek looking for things needed to work, and over an hour daily searching for work resources. That's 260 paid hours yearly spent unproductively per employee. Employers need people who organize work, communication, and planning for valuable teamwork.

Organizational skills are even more important for remote teams, large companies, and global workforces collaborating across time zones. You likely depend on others completing their work on time, and vice versa. Whether an individual contributor or manager, your coworkers depend on your communication and timeliness.

Organization translates into productivity, efficiency, and doing more with less. With strong skills, you set yourself up for success.

This article discusses the key organizational skills employers want and how you can use them to shine at work and in your job hunt.

What are Organizational Skills?

Organizational skills are soft skills that help you manage expectations, stay on top of tasks, and deliver results on time.

Let's say you're working on four projects over three months, collaborating with different people for each. Strong skills will help you break down your expected contribution into manageable tasks, set deadlines, and prioritize urgent/important tasks. You may use tools like project software, notebooks, or calendars to stay organized.

Organizational skills help you focus time, effort, and resources on what matters. They keep stakeholders aligned to meet shared goals without blocking progress. By doing so, you avoid holding back teammates from making progress.

Why Effective Organization Matters

Effective organizing helps you:

  • Save company time and money by reducing searching.
  • Produce high-quality work by avoiding rushed, poor last-minute work.
  • Become a high-value employee known for reliability and smarts, getting recommendations and promotions.
  • Build mental fitness since organization enables better use of mental skills.

Organized people appear more reliable, in control, and quickly build trust and professionalism.

Internal Organizational Skills

Internal skills are mental - analyzing complex issues to find solutions and staying calm under pressure. Examples are creative and strategic thinking. Your mental fitness provides a range of skill sets for different situations - keeping these sharp allows you to tap into them when needed.

External Organizational Skills

External skills involve working with others - keeping workspaces tidy, setting goals/timelines, communicating, collaborating, prioritizing, documenting work, and managing workflow and teams. They prove you can work in a team to achieve shared goals.

10 Key Organizational Skills Examples

You need these skills to grow in your career:

1. Physical organization - arranging computer files, desk, and office efficiently.

2. Goal-setting - creating an action plan with targets and deadlines.

3. Prioritization - evaluating tasks by importance and commitment required.

4. Decision-making - weighing outcomes to choose the most beneficial option.

5. Strategic thinking - analyzing situations to solve organizational problems.

6. Collaboration - communicating and working with others to achieve a goal.

7. Communication - conveying thoughts and ideas clearly and unambiguously.

8. Time management - being aware of task duration and scheduling accordingly.

9. Self-motivation - having the internal desire to achieve goals against the odds.

10. Self-management - planning, conducting, and accounting for your work independently.

Whether you work for someone else or is you run your own online business, organizational skills will play a major role in the success of your business.

Final Take Home

Hope you found this workshop about “Organizational Skills” useful. You can always refer back to this post later on. It covers all the essential topics related to the importance of organizational skills including definitions, benefits, strategies, obstacles, and real-life examples. If you have any questions, please leave them in the comment section. Check out Kyle's videos:

https://my.wealthyaffiliate.com/kyle/blog/just-launched-a-new-look-and-new-vision-for-sitecontent

https://my.wealthyaffiliate.com/kyle/blog/sitecontent-walk-through-with-our-ai-article-designer

All success to you as you embark on your affiliate marketing journey.

Why are Organizational Skills so Important in the Business Environment?

TheRachele

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Recent Comments

13

In a perfect world and situation, this would be GREAT. I have three properties jam packed with all sorts of things. That is not feasible for me, so I'll keep moving forward daily like I have always done! Nice post though, Rachele!

Jeff

2

I hear you, Jeff.

I never underestimate the power of rooms with closets and garages.
If you saw my organizational skills you would question why I write about it.

We can ask the cobbler, why he has wholes in his shoes. It is what it is, I reckon. However, I am a lot better after reading Marie Kondo's books and watching her videos.

Her organizational skills borders on insanity (lol). Just kidding,
No worries, Jeff, I am not an expert on anything I write about, I just need stuff to talk about. It might help some, and it may not.

These blogs are more for entertainment.
Happy Sunday, my friend.

Rachele
p.s. I love your input because you always stand on your convictions and I love this about you. 🥰

1

Hello again Rachele, this article brings back remembers of my military career. Logistics and Organizational charts, those are the secrets of running a tight and well greased organization. Charts explaining each level of your business and how they operate. Operational Instruction Booklet (OPB), explaining exactly how each job is done. This is great for new and inexperienced workers. I could go on and on, but you get the idea.

Enjoy 😉 your Sunday, Larry

1

Sorry my friend, this was met for Rachele.

Larry

1

Thanks, Rachele! I think that people are stealing for me all over the place, right now, but at the end of the day, it ALL belongs to God!

Jeff 🙏

1

Hi Larry,

Thanks for sharing memories of your military career. Logistics, Operational charts and the Operational Instruction Booklets as they all play a role in the operation of a business.

You have a lot of organizational skills, my friend. These skills will certainly come in handy in your affiliate marketing career.

We have to manage so many things and it takes a lot of work to keep things rolling. I haven't mastered putting things on a spreadsheet yet, but I have started the ball a rolling.

It seems that I've been connected to the military world all my life, pretty much. My brother ( Airforce) served in the Vietnam war, and first two significant others, Dave and Bill (Airforce & Navy) were both military. Both incredible people to know.

I appreciate your sacrifice and dedication to serve our country.
And keep us in the know about how to stay prepared for whatever life throws at us.

Rachele

2

Exactly. It All belongs to the man upstairs.

That's the thing, Jeff.
Some people think they have a right to other people's stuff and it just isn't right. I wonder if these people were raised by billy goats?

If you don't have things locked down, the thieves break in and rob us blind. This happened to us when we lived in Lake Forest, a lovely town close to the El Toro military base which is closed now.

Anyway, we went away for a weekend get-a-way and when we got back, every room in our house looked like a war zone. Someone had rummaged through everything we had, going through closets, dresser drawers, file cabinets, etc.

They got away with some expensive video equipment and our new Sony TV.

We lost a ton of audio-visual and sound equipment, CDs, jewelry, (my jewelry box was cleaned out) and lots more. My Tourmaline fur, Bill's leather jackets. They were obviously looking for money, I guess.

More than likely, it was the gardeners. We left a side window open. It was a logistical nightmare. When you have a lot of stuff, you become a magnet for thieves. Bill was a huge collector of electrical equipment.

Rachele

1

I'm very sorry to hear about that, Rachele, but i
know exactly what you are talking about!
Have very Happy Sunday!


Jeff

1

I have moved on Jeff.

Life is way much better since the 1989 Lake Forest break-in. Material things can always be replaced.

Happy Sunday!
Rachele

1

Very true, Rachele!

Jeff

1

Touche! Jeff.

1

Rachele, thank you very much for those very kind words. I sure will keep you updated.



Larry

1

Alrighty, my friend!

2

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