Do This and You’ll Never Have an Unproductive Day  

If you want to know one thing that you can do each day to ensure that you’ll never again have an unproductive day, then you want to read this. Doing this one thing is going to make all the difference in your workday. Let’s get started.

As part of your daily routine, take the time to plan for tomorrow. You likely already have a to-do list that you’ve created but you want to ensure that you frontload each day with the most important money-making tasks. That way, each day the first things that you do will be productive in some way. No matter what else happens during the day, your day is productive and profitable.

This is super simple to do. At the end of the day, before you shut down your computer, take 30 minutes to go over your to-do list and choose the three most important things that you need to do first thing when you start your workday. Your guideline to choosing which things to do is: ensure that it’s something that is profitable for you. 

A few examples are:

Send an email with an offer to your list – You can write an email that’s very short to promote either your own product or your affiliate’s offers to your list. Make it easy, write a blurb about the product – how it affected you or how it helped someone else, then link to the sales page.

Promote an offer on social media – Likewise, you can promote the same offer via social media if you have a group where you’re allowed to promote. Write a quick blurb, link to the offer, and then get back to other work. 

Write and publish an informative blog post with a CTA – You can also create a blog post about the product or service using the informative tactic that you’re giving them information with a CTA that leads to the offer. 

Add an email to one of your series – Your email series probably all need additional emails. If you keep track of what is in each series in a spreadsheet, it’ll be easier to figure out what to add to any series at a glance.

Add CTAs to blog posts you’ve already written – Maybe in the past, you wrote blog posts without adding a CTA. Take this time to add CTAs to a couple of those blog posts. 

Set up posting via Missinglettr.com – This software will randomly promote to social media blog posts that you have written in the past. This is a great way to promote evergreen content in a hands-off manner. 

Add an email to your series that promotes an affiliate product – Just like you can add to your series to promote your own product, why not add to the series a complementary product that you promote for someone else?

Add a blog post that promotes an affiliate product – Likewise, blog posts are also a great way to promote affiliate products to your audience. Add a blog post comparing two products with affiliate links to both.

No matter what happens during the day, if you do those three things first, you’ll have had a productive day. 

These should be important / money-making tasks. It doesn’t have to be a huge project. It can be something small like getting an email with an offer out to your list, promoting an offer on social media that you already have, or writing and publishing a blog post that has a great call to action. Do those three things first. Then no matter what else happens during the day, you know you will have made progress. 

Do You Know What Your Bottlenecks Are?

Do you have bottlenecks in your business? A bottleneck is when one part of a process gets stopped or locked up and causes the entire process to fail or not move forward. You may have witnessed this happening with your own business, especially if you often must rely on someone else to do something before you can do the rest.

Let’s look at some ways to identify them, understand them, and eliminate them from happening.

Understand Workflows

One way to identify where bottlenecks can happen is to create workflows. A workflow is a simply a sequence of tasks that need to be done in a specific order (and some even simultaneously) from beginning to end until it’s done. It’s imperative that you understand your workflows.

You can create workflows by using a flowchart system or just listing actions that must happen in the order they need to happen, noting things that can be done without other parts being done and what does have to be done before the next item is started.

Here is an example of a workflow creating a blog post that you want to write, edit, and publish.

1. Outline Original Blog Post – You may do this yourself or you may have someone else doing it, either way, the idea of the post needs to be done before anything else can happen. 
2. Write Blog Post – Now that it’s outlined, and you know the purpose, you can write it or send it to the writers to write. 
3. Optimize Blog Post – After the post is written, optimize it by choosing a keyword title, headers, subleaders, and so forth. Ensure that you’ll rank for a keyword.
4. Send to Editor or Proofreader – Let your editor or proofreader check the post.
5. Find Creative Image or Create Graphic for Blog Post – Once you have the idea of the post created, you can let your graphic designer create the image.
6. Edit Blog Post – Once all proofing has happened, now it’s time to finalize the editing of the post. By now, you should have the image ready.
7. Add Blog Post with Image to System – Now that you have the image, the keywords, and so forth, you can format the post for the system you’re using so it’s ready to publish. 
8. Proof Read – Once the post with an image is scheduled as a draft, someone may want to proofread the post one more time to ensure that all aspects are set including your CTA and other items that you like to include on a blog post.
9. Schedule Blog Post for Publication – Now you can schedule the post for publication. 
10. Promote Blog Post – Once the post is published, you and your affiliates can promote this blog post.
11. Analyze Blog Post Results – After the promotion period is done you can check your analytics to find out how the post is doing.

When you look at these 11 tasks, you can see right where a bottleneck could happen, but you can also identify some things that can be happening at the same time. For example, you can’t post the blog until it’s been written, edited, and an image is finalized. You may find times you have to wait on each of these things. To avoid a bottleneck, give all outsourcers plenty of time to get done with their portion of the task. If you notice that you’re often getting delayed on your timeline, look at where it’s happening and eliminate that problem. For example, if your editor always takes 7 days to edit even if their due date is in 3 days, find out if you can fix that problem by getting a new editor or by planning for the 7 days. Part of avoiding bottlenecks is being realistic about how long a task really takes for the people you want to do it.

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Simple Ways to Deal with Bottlenecks

Once you identify bottlenecks, you can work toward eliminating them. Let’s look at some different ways that you can put a stop to bottlenecks and make your day go much more smoothly with the right processes and systems in place.

Streamline Your Process

Many bottlenecks happen because something is inherently wrong with your process. You may be overscheduled which is causing some of the problems. You may have picked the wrong tools or wrong people to do the tasks that are getting bottlenecked. The more you can work toward streamlining the process, the better. 

Look at the place that’s getting bottlenecked and figure out what the main issue is. Is your timeline too fast for this process? For example, if you have hired a graphic designer to create covers for your product and you find yourself waiting on this cover longer than you planned to, talk to them and find out what their true turn around time is. Maybe you’re expecting too much. Maybe they’re expecting too much from themselves. 

Add in Automation

One way to eliminate some bottlenecks is to automate a process. For example, when it comes to promoting blog posts, you can set up some automation for that using WordPress plugins or other automation that will do it for you. 

You can also automate other types of processes like email marketing, scheduling, and more using the right technology such as Convertkit.com, Acuityscheduling.com and more. Look at IFTTT.com technology too to find out if some of the processes you do now physically can be automated with technology. 

Hire Help

Maybe you need to hire an online business manager or productivity coach? Someone who is good at looking at processes and cutting the fat is a great person to have on your team. They can look at all your processes, streamline them, and eliminate anything that is causing a bottleneck. 

Before you hire someone to help you with this, you need to track your processes so that you can explain to them what’s happening at the bottleneck. This way you’ll spend less time with them, and less money finding the solution to your problem. 

Outsource More

If your bottlenecks are happening because you’re responsible for doing everything and are overscheduled, you need to outsource more. There are plenty of things that other people can do that don’t get in the way of your personal touch. For example, outsourcing graphics, editing, general content, marketing, posting, and so forth are all things that will give you more time to do something else. 

Use Paid Ads for Traffic

One way to eliminate some duties from your plate is to use paid ads to get more traffic to your funnels. Once you’ve built your list, you can focus on other methods. But a great way to get started fast is to use paid traffic before you use organic traffic.

Eliminating bottlenecks requires introspection, honesty, and the willingness to try new things. You can’t keep doing things the old way and expect different results. If you want to stop bottlenecks, you must know where they’re happening and then find solutions that work.  

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