I have to be honest: While I love Christmas, I really dislike New Year’s Eve. It seems like a lot of hype for a 10 second countdown. And, we make good-intentioned resolutions that, in reality, we should not have to wait until the beginning of the year to do. Not to mention trying to remember to put the 18 instead of the 17 on every document.
OK, having had that rant, I do think a new year is a great opportunity to pause, plan and implement fresh business ideas.
Let’s start with your website. As a central piece of your communications channel, it is never ‘set and forget’ and your work is never really ‘done’. Your website should be top of the list for your plans to hit the refresh button.
I always find that it is a moving feast and when I look at our business, where it has gone, and the website, we have a lot of work to do to keep up!
The point of a website is not to offer as many products or services as possible. We don’t want to confuse our customers. We look at what sells the best and what doesn’t sell well and we get rid of products that are not selling. Declutter your website, products and make room for replacements and more popular items.
Have you ever checked your site speed? Load speeds have a real impact on your sales and traffic, particularly on mobile. People quickly get impatient with pages or images that take a long time to load, and speed can also impact organic search ranking as well as pay-per-click costs.
You can easily measure your site’s speed and performance using free tools like pingdom.com, think with Google or the tools within your Google Analytics account. If you have a slow site, you need to reconsider elements such as web hosting, optimising image sizes and compressing video/audio files, or consider using a third party service like YouTube. The analytics tools will supply a checklist of more detailed recommendations.
This is a biggie. Over the year you will likely have adjusted prices, added new products, changed your positioning, made the news or completed some great projects. Now is the time to reflect these on your website:
This is always a fun job as we are really lucky to get some great testimonials. It can be difficult to know how to go about collecting testimonials, especially when starting out. If you need a hand check out his article Step by step: how to collect truly powerful customer testimonials which even includes a template.
If you process a lot of sales, there are also plugins available to help collect testimonials, for example this Easy Testimonials plugin, (WordPress). Many shopping cart facilities have a built in testimonial request function too. Whether you choose to automate it or not, be sure to send an auto-request to customers a few days after purchase.
Remember: the best testimonials are ones that include full names, photos, images, or even videos from your customers.
Our business is constantly changing, with our clients requesting new products and with new business ideas coming in thick and fast. We look at the demand and try to prioritise the most requested products to focus on creating and adding to the website. You can even get creative by testing out new products and services that complement your own. Think outside the box and ask friends and family what they would want.
Beyond the website, take a look at the business more broadly. Look through your accounts and get rid of software services, or subscriptions you don’t use and save some money. I was shocked to look through our accounts to see how many services I was paying for that I no longer used! We had tried them for various comparison purposes to improve telephone support, template sharing, video production and similar but had not bothered to cancel them.
When you run your own business, it can be hard to get away so you have to plan your business carefully to ensure you can manage a holiday. Plan, book and block out your next holiday so you have something to look forward to and to ensure you get a break. This is a priority for us and I recommend it to everyone.
Do you make New Year’s resolutions for your business? What’s on your list for the annual overhaul.
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