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Does your company have a social traffic strategy?

by Devin Day 3 Comments

Having a social traffic strategy is key to building continual awareness in your target market. What is your strategy? If you don’t have one documented that is easily communicated to your staff I encourage you do so.

Let’s look at the social traffic framework we have been working on at JellyBarn can be seen in the flow screenshot below.

We had a few goals when creating this strategy framework:

  1. Provide a steady flow of traffic to our website and blog.
  2. Help us build our brand as market experts and leaders.
  3. Create a process framework that is simple and continually repeatable.
  4. Allow a process that can be delegated and operated by any employee.
  5. Create a foundation that can be continually quantified and improved.

Lets take a look below in a little more detail what the process looks like…

traffic-strategy-flow

traffic-strategy-flow

  1.  This is our website and blog where we create valuable content that is relevant to our target audience.
  2. We are working on a knowledge base that is designed for industry experts and leaders to discuss, share and innovate all ideas relating to social media marketing. (this could be done through a social network software or even a linkedin group. We are preparing to launch our knowledge group at SocialCampfire.com)
  3. We create original content specifically for guest posts on popular blogs that are related to our market focus.
  4. To simplify the process of distributing our content we utilize a syndication service like ping.fm. 
  5. The syndication flow is designed to keep traffic from our content flowing back to our website and blog.
  6. Our guest posting is to drive traffic back our website and blog as well as establish market credibility.

Having a strategy is key to building continual awareness in your target market. What is your strategy? If you don’t have one documented that is easily communicated to your staff I encourage you do so.

There are a lot of strategies out there. Don’t forget to comment and share your thoughts, ideas, and what your working on. Please also share your thoughts on how we might improve our strategy.

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Thanks for stopping by! ~ Devin Day

How to achieve your business plan

by Devin Day 5 Comments

Image of a man holding money

Have you ever wondered where you are with achieving your business plan?

Having a plan (desired outcomes with documented strategies, goals, and tasks) and working that plan is in my opinion the cornerstone of a building a good company. The problem is a “good” plan is often the most overlooked area in a new business. To many Entrepreneurs think a ton of words on a paper satisfies the task of creating a business plan. The plan usually ends up a lengthy (and boring) word document that no one wants to read and ends up lost and buried in a filing cabinet. 

Unless your raising money or communicating to your BOD (board of directors) you should not need to a huge document anyway. What you need is a clear internal strategy plan that covers the basic three elements of a business model.

  1. Value Proposition (Great idea that will help our clients more affordably and effectively do a job they are trying to get done.)
  2. Profit Formula (A formula that allows you to keep costs minimal and margins at a maximum)
  3. Business Systems (Standardization for the our habitual ways of getting things done)

The simplest way to get your business plan started is this:

  1. Summarize in a few paragraphs the overall concept and identify your desired outcome.
  2. Write a series of strategies for each basic category and keep it simple – a short overview paragraph followed by bullet points is perfect. Your general strategy categories are – Sales, Marketing, Operations, Business processes, Staffing, Funding, Target market, etc. (for more on business processes view my post here)
  3. For each strategy category write out the goals needed to achieve each strategy and then write out the tasks needed to achieve each goal.

Let’s recap – you have identified your desired outcome (where you want to be financially in a desired amount of time), and created strategies to achieve that desired outcome and you have your list of your goals and tasks to achieve your strategies. What your left with in it’s simplest form is a checklist of action items to achieve your business plan.

(NOTE: There will always be continual planning and prioritizing as you chew through your list. Be sure you stay on top of prioritization because not knowing where your at at any given moment will breed procrastination.)

A final recommendation is to find an SAAS (software as a service) platform to manage all your action items and strategies in your business plan. This will allow you to share/delegate tasks with other team members. Keep track of who’s where and doing what and it will keep everyone in sync. I use (and highly recommend) a service called PlanHQ

planHQ is structured for the very format that I have outlined above and is so easy to use. It’s quite powerful and has allowed our business plan to be a living breathing entity that again keeps the team in sync. Your plan for world domination will quickly take hold if you can document your plan, communicate your plan and execute your plan. Now go and achieve your business plan!

Photo of planhq.com dashboard

How to stop procrastinating and get all of your great ideas on paper

by Devin Day 7 Comments

If your a visual person like me who lives and breathes ideas and creativity, but often find if difficult to get great ideas down in a way that is organized, you may want to try mind-mapping. (for software I use Mindjet)

mindmap

Mind-mapping is an extremely fun exercise that I use when I have a really big (or small) idea that I want to get out of my head and on paper and don’t want to worry about organization yet. In fact, the beauty of this process is that it’s so freeing and the non-formal structure increases your creativity and the ideas will just flow. As you write down ideas you start to see patterns, and one idea leads to another. By the end of the process you suddenly have all your ideas for a topic loosely organized. 

Now you can take this idea-map and start to break it down into a more organized structure. It will allow you to create goals and tasks and see the relationships between all of the ideas. 

The reason I like this type of exercise is because it’s fun and most of all it does not cause idea paralysis. Have you ever tried to create a list of for a big idea and get frustrated because it seemed hard to organize your thoughts? Mind-mapping (I like idea-mapping better) avoids this type of paralysis and frustration by just letting you write down any idea without worry of formal structure. Once you are done the feeling you have is one of major relief and gratification because you have emptied the holding bin inside your head and allowed room for new thoughts and ideas. Keeping things locked in your head causes frustration and anxiety until you can empty those thoughts. 

Mind-mapping can be done with a number of softwares ( I use http://www.mindjet.com/ ) or even a big whiteboard (my favorite – my office is filled wall to wall with whiteboards) and when you fill up the whiteboard use a digital camera to take a picture and can then wipe the board clean for round 2. 

In the end you will be amazed at how many new ideas this exercise develops and how organized your ideas will actually become as you start mind/idea-mapping. Now go idea-map all those great ideas!!

mindmap1

here’s another good article by Thursday Bram on mind mapp to presentation

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Thanks for stopping by! ~ Devin Day