Moms Online Business Coach

When I started my first online business 8 years ago I had no clue what I needed for website support, website infrastructure, and was so clueless on the techie stuff that it wasn’t even on my radar because I didn’t know it existed.

I thought that since my business was ecommerce based it was simple and I didn’t require much for website support:

1. I have a product
2. I put up a website with basic pages that highlight the product
3. I have a shopping cart that allows people to buy
4. I get a confirmation email when someone buys it
5. I pack it and ship it- done

Little did I know that there were two big reasons in the above summary that killed my business.

1. I had no profit funnel- I was lacking the key piece of relationship marketing and leveraging my current customers AND never tried to “capture” those first time visitors even if they didn’t buy
2. Notice the first letter in those 5 steps? They all started with “I”… I always joke by quoting “I Am Woman, Hear Me Roar” – we think we can do it all ourselves, we are the Queens of multi-tasking.

It wasn’t until several years into my business, when I couldn’t keep up with production, customer support, marketing and business building activities because I was sooo busy installing shopping cart updates, adding new webpages, learning how to fix techie things that were broken that I finally had a mentor that taught me a critical moto,

“If What You Are Doing Isn’t Leading To Money In Your Pocket- Stop and Outsource It, Then Get Back To Building Your Business”

My first objection was, “I can’t do that- I can’t afford to pay myself some weeks, how can I pay to outsource it?”

I had to have a serious mind set change and realize that the reason I WASN’T reaching my financial goals was because I was focused on non-business generating activities- adding plugins for the blog, changing graphics, tweaking my search engine optimization code.

Those time wasters do not gain new customers- you need to find those customers and partners and get in front of them, not think that a different logo or color scheme around your product picture is going to call them for you.

After all, if you don’t get the customers to your site, keep them on your site and capture the info of who was at your site.. what good is having a pretty website?

I Hired A Virtual Assistant

My first experience was hiring a Virtual Assistant, someone that like me, works from home and carries out dedicated tasks. This was great, and I started seeing the value in outsourcing- I was spending more time making relationships and gaining new contacts and business builders.

The downside of Virtual Assistants is

1. you have to find someone that you mesh with – both personally and work style
2. it can get expensive FAST- you are generally going to pay a VA $30-50.00 an HOUR and many require a monthly retainer- unless you use website support from overseas and then it is cheaper but you have other challenges that come with that.
3. keeping in touch can be difficult- if they don’t answer their email you have no idea how to get in touch with them, or their status on a project- and if you are on different time zones that makes it more difficult.
4. VA’s are like you and me, and they are only one person, they can’t know it all and they could get caught up in website support challenges if they didn’t have a technical background.

Then I Hired A Team

Until recently, I didn’t really find any other options- then I found a Website Support Team that functions JUST around technical stuff- creating website pages, setting up shopping carts and download pages- creating sales and customer acquisition funnels.

Here is why I think the Website Support Team is a great option for all work at home businesses, especially those on a tight budget or learning how to start outsource

1. UBER AFFORDABLE- You get an unbelievable amount of website support for one low price every month (less then a few hours of a VA)
2. It’s a team- you aren’t dependent on one person- there is an official business built around this service
3. It’s support ticket driven- that means you go to the site and enter a support ticket with your needs and then you can always have easy access updates in your account
4. The service focuses on all things technical-

• installing membership scripts
• installing or updating blogs
• forums
• adding html pages
• creating sales pages
• creating autoresponder code
• check out the full list of website support services here

For the next week, keep a journal of all your activities during the day and the time you spent on them- then go back and see how many of those were business builders generating income then check out http://moms-business-coach.com/doneforyou and let them give you more time to be a business builder.