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Thursday, March 28, 2024

Is Your Business Stuck? 8 Tips to Stimulate Your Small Business

Is your business stuck and in the doldrums? Are sales slow? If your business is stuck, it may be due to several reasons, such as a lack of customers, a decline in sales, intense competition that you can’t seem to move ahead, poor management, or an outdated business model. Being stuck can be very frustrating and challenging, as it can be the start of the end. It is important to take corrective measures now rather than wait to see the business fail.

To overcome this, you need to reassess your strategies, change how to operate the business or seek outside help and expertise. Reinvigorate and stimulate your small business with these tips:

1. Learn from past experiences, including your mistakes.  

Before you can move forward, reviewing the past year and analyzing what worked and what did not work for your business is always helpful. What strategies worked for your business before, and what do you think can work again this time? What were the mistakes you made and needed to avoid? Now ask yourself: what could you do better this time?

2. Look at everything with a fresh new perspective.

Shaking up your business starts by looking at the world in new ways. It is so easy to continue doing what you have been doing for years, because of its familiarity and safety. The downside is that you can gradually lose your focus, take things for granted or assume you know how things are.

A fresh perspective can get you out of your comfort zone, kick-start your thinking, and help you find better solutions to your problems — especially during hard economic times.

To do this, start by examining the assumptions you’ve made. Get fresh ideas by reading new books or magazines about your business. Get out and talk to other business owners. Check out forums or even social networking sites to see what your target customers need, and other business owners are doing. If it will work for you, take time off and visit new places or experience new things. It can help take your mind off your business and infuse you with new ways of looking at things.

3. Set your goals.

Think of what you want to accomplish this time. Make a list of your objectives for your business, and then list the specific activities that can help you achieve the objectives. Keep your objectives as detailed and measurable as possible. Even better, make a note of what you need to achieve every single day. Sometimes, putting a specific deadline on tasks or goals can spur you  more into action.

For a blogger who earns primarily from serving ads, an example of a goal and its activities maybe:

Goal: Increase traffic to the blog by 20 percent before the year ends.

  • Write at least 5 new posts per week, carefully analyzing the traffic statistics of each post to determine the types of posts preferred by the audience.
  • Participate in blog carnivals at least once a month.
  • Submit content to social bookmarking sites (even strive to develop content most likely to get to the front page of Digg, for example).
  • Connect with at least three bloggers per month, whether in terms of commenting on their blogs or requesting blog roll link exchanges

4. Create your calendar of activities.

It is important to break down your goals and activities into smaller and doable lists of tasks you can do. To help you keep track of what you want to accomplish for your business, prepare specific timelines for your goals and activities – and stick to it. Whether you are using a planner, PDA or any other scheduling system, be sure to incorporate your activities into your planning system. Create specific targets for each month – e.g., list what you want to accomplish each month.

And using whatever system works best for you, set up reminders that can help you keep your eye back on your objectives. Reminders can be in the form of popups in your Outlook calendar, a paper listing the activities that need to be done pinned to your corkboard, or a daily entry into your planner.

is your business stuck
Photo by 2H Media on Unsplash

5. Do the work!

What good is all the planning if you are not going to implement any of it? Firm up your plans for the first quarter, then start the work. It feels mighty good to cross off from your list the first thing you need to do.

Using the blogger as an example, you may want to gear up for the work ahead of you by analyzing your blog statistics. What posts get the most traffic? What posts get the most links? And what posts give you a large number of links and clicks from sites such as Digg and other social bookmarking sites?

6. Pump up your networking.

Networking is important for any business. For many things, “who you know” is very important. Having the right contacts can help open doors for you – new opportunities, new customers, new suppliers, new funding sources, new mentors, even someone to talk to and bounce off ideas. If you’re a home-based business owner, just having a meeting to attend and a chance to interact with other people can bring about a beneficial change of scenery and pace.

Check out professional business networking groups in your area, such as BNI http://www.bni.com/, and investigate whether participating in such a network can benefit your business and yourself. Check if using sites such as LinkedIn, Facebook or even MySpace can benefit your business. Or join your local Chamber of Commerce and be active in your local business scene.

7. Try to learn something new.

As they say, the only thing constant is change. Hence it is important to learn to adapt to new ways of doing things, including reaching your target market.

Five years ago, you wouldn’t have thought of promoting your business via online videos, but now the wide reach of online video sites such as YouTube has made it a very appealing way of reaching customers. Consider how having a video can help your business grow and get more buzz. Look at how a presence in social networking sites such as MySpace can grow your business. Or whether direct mail can work wonders for your business.

Be on the lookout for ways you can improve your business, even if that means venturing into unknown territories. Study how others are improving their business processes, doing their marketing and promoting, or creating new revenue streams – and see how these new trends can work for your business.

8. Keep your momentum going.

The difficult part of setting goals to reinvigorate your business is keeping the interest and momentum going. It is so easy to lose track of what you need to accomplish.

To encourage yourself to keep working on the goals you’ve set up, celebrate after every task you have accomplished. Reward yourself, even if that only means taking a day off from work (meaning no Blackberries, no checking of emails, or making phone calls). It may be helpful to put a visible reminder of why you are doing this business. Having a visual reminder can prop you up when you feel you’ve lost interest in the business or start questioning why you are doing all this hard work.

By doing the above tips, having your business stuck can be a thing of the past and you can start growing the business!

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