Moms Online Business Coach

Evaluate Your Online Business

Operating a home based online business comes with it’s own challenges that many don’t fully understand. The thoughts of being able to work at home when you want, wearing what you want or typing away wherever you want seem like the ultimate “work/life balance”.

However, the fact that you are a one woman show running an online business means not only do you need to wear the hats of mother, wife, daughter, sister, household manager, referee, housekeeper and taxi you know have to run the jobs of website developer, marketer, shipper, financial analyst and customer service to name a few. The trick is making sure you are not killing your online business while trying to be everything to everyone. Here are a few check points to evaluate when it’s time to ask, recruit or hire some help to keep your sanity while growing your business.

Questions To Ask Yourself

1. Am I building quality content? If you spend any time working to increase your website optimization and rankings you’ve heard it a thousand times, “CONTENT IS KING”. You need to be adding regular quality content to your website and blog.

2. Am I tracking my marketing strategies? You should have a clear and concise vision of what marketing tactics are working for you and what you need to weed out. This will save you time and money every month if you focus on what is giving you the best ROI, Return On Investment.

3. Am I wasting time in email and chat rooms? While conversational marketing is one of my favorite methods and I do love connecting with others for a little break from the kids, it is also very easy to get sucked in and have non-productive time. Complete the work that puts money in your bank account first, then use the email, chat and forums.

4. Am I trying to build links with sites that are not giving me “link love” or passing the “Google juice”? There are many ways to create a linking strategy that will be worth while do you know if you are using them? I’ll be sharing more information on this coming up in the next couple days.

5. Am I not tracking my conversion rates? Yes, you should know the numbers! How many sales are you getting for every 100 visitors? What is the purpose of your website or advertising campaign? Do you want your customer to BUY, Sign Up, Download something? You should know what your end goal is and how many visitors you need to get that action.

6. Am I not tracking my online efforts? You should have a spreadsheet that you track your articles, press releases, autoresponder messages, search engine submissions and have the dates and summary of each item. This will not only be a great learning tool to reflect on but will let you know what is working or not.

7. Do I have a clear advertisement budget or plan? Some recommend this be your first step, however, I’ll be honest, I have better luck tweaking and creating my budget last after I created a game plan on paper and then it helps me prioritize and find ways to adjust the plan to what I can afford.

If you find that you are not doing the above action steps on a regular basis, it may be time to evaluate if your ready for a little help even if it’s a virtual assistant for a few hours a month. Acknowledging that you can’t do everything may be your first step to outsourcing smaller mundane actions that allow you to focus on the bigger picture.