by Angela Taffs | Sep 24, 2017 | Business Success, Running a Business, Starting a Business
Do you suffer Bright Shiny Object syndrome?
You know the feeling. You are in the middle of something, maybe doing some research on a project you are working on. And then you see it. First a little twinkle out the corner of your eye. And then it turns into this wonderful bright shiny object that simply demands your attention.
Sound familiar?
We’ve all been there. And this Bright Shiny Object is the best thing since sliced bread. Until ….. you see another one. Oh, what to do. So many shiny things to chase after!!!!
Now, these distractions can be just for a few minutes. Even in this situation, you are going to lose so much time trying to refocus on what you were originally working on. But the worst case is when this takes you down a new track and you leave your old plans unfinished.
The danger point is that you keep chasing new things and never actually complete anything. Therefore, you never get the results you set out to achieve and so the vicious cycle of chasing another BSO continues.
Here are my three top tips to help deal with the distractions.
Determine your end goal
Firstly, what is your end goal? Keep looking at your plan and make sure that everything you do takes you towards to your goal, not away from it. It is too easy to get side tracked and led astray so by referring to your plan on a regular basis you can make sure you keep on track and focused on what you ultimately want to achieve.
Yes, you are bound to get caught up with other ideas as you grow your business, but if you keep stopping and starting something new, you will never get anything finished. You will end up confusing yourself and ultimately, your clients!!
Commit the bright shiny object to paper
Whenever you have a new idea pop up, write it down. Have an ideas book or board. Pop everything on here. And then sit on it!! Wait for a few days at least and then come back to it. Does it still look so attractive? Are you still fired up by it? Is it going to take you closer to your end goal or is just a distraction?
Make a date in your diary
If you decide you still want to go ahead with it, don’t start until you have finished what you were working on before this new idea came up. Your old idea will have been important enough for you to start on, so make sure you complete that first. You may just find that when you have completed what you were already working on, you have found yet another bright shiny object and so your last idea has lost its attraction.
Focus on one thing at a time, do it, and do it well. Then you can move on to the next.
Do you suffer from BSO syndrome? Share with me in the comments below.
by Angela Taffs | May 9, 2017 | Business Success, Personal and Lifestyle
This month in my business club, I am working with the ladies on getting into the right mindset for business. But why is this so important.
Well, it’s as simple as this. You can have the best product or service out there, you can know everything there is to know about how to market it to your ideal client, but if you don’t have the right mindset, you just won’t have the confidence to go out there and go after those paying clients.
You may well dabble a little here and there but you will get sporadic results. You will stumble when asked for a discount and may well end up giving one! You may start to lose motivation when you get rejected by someone and you find out they buy elsewhere.
Getting in the right mindset is critical and the very first thing you need to before anything else when building a business in my opinion. Forget reading up and watching more webinars on how to grow sales through Facebook until you truly believe in yourself and your product and are prepared to stand up and shout it out from the rooftops how fabulous you are.
And once you have that cracked, as fired up and enthused as you may be about creating your own business, it will take hard work, commitment and personal investment on your own part along with self-responsibility for making things happen.
There is no point sitting and dreaming about what you are going to do. You have to get off your backside and do it!
Putting it quite simply …
Action takers win
The following tip is from one of the wonderful ladies in my business group. We were talking about how it’s ok doing all your planning and getting motivated, but at some point you are simply going to have to take action.
Karen Thomas from Red Oak Coaching showed us an example of what she uses in her workshops. She held a tealight in her hand and asked everyone to close their eyes and really focus on blowing out the candle. The reality of course was that when everyone opened their eyes, the candle was still lit.
It was only when someone took action and used their breath that the candle was able to be blown out. It’s all very well having plans and dreams but basically until you get off your arse and take some action, nothing is going to materialise.
Harsh but fair.
And Karen has allowed me to share her video with you to watch.
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What are you going to take action on today? Leave a comment below and let me know.
by Angela Taffs | Apr 21, 2017 | Business Success, Sales and Marketing
A few years ago I was in a really bad way. Severe illness had decimated my health and career. A disastrous relationship had gutted me emotionally. My life had gone up in flames (literally, my ex set the house on fire). I was living in my mum’s box room, flat broke, in tens of thousands of pounds worth of debt, and utterly devoid of hope.
Starting my own business was a revelation for me. Working on my terms, to my timetable. I could focus on what I love (writing), earn a living, and still have time to work on my health.
Entrepreneurship was a gift from the gods, truly, but it wasn’t half a lot of work…
How I Escaped The Eternal Hamster Wheel…
For the first couple of years I did okay. I paid down my debt. Everything ticked over. But I was nowhere near the income level needed to bust me out of the rut in which I was myred. I craved independence, freedom, an escape from the eternal hamster wheel of marketing (not to mention my mother’s box room). I’d done all the courses, watched all the vlogs, read all the blogs; I’d devoured everything I could find on digital marketing but something wasn’t quite clicking.
It was kind of working.
I had clients, money was coming in, I was steadily raising my profile, it just wasn’t enough…
Enter Angie Taffs: The Woman Who Changed My Business (And Life)…
Hustling my butt off for a couple of years had one tangible benefit: I had a lot of friends and contacts in the entrepreneurial world. One of those was Angie. I was a member of her Facebook group, and had been following her for a while, so when a webinar she was running popped up in my newsfeed, I jumped right on it.
Little did I know…
Angie’s webinar was a revelation. She shared one fairly simple tip for managing clients and it transformed my business. I honestly wouldn’t have believed how powerful it was until it actually happened.
The premise is really simple: give people a free sample of what you can do; leave them craving more.
Yes, free.
Not a freebie, or a download, a cheat sheet, or a blog/vlog, an actual sample of your paid products or services.
I baulked at this to begin with. Badly. I’m a copywriter. Offering a free sample of my work meant a lot of work for me. Writing a whole blog post, in fact. But Angie’s explanation made a great deal of sense, and while I was going great guns building my tribe, I was really struggling to convert them.
Educating them on the benefits of hiring a copywriter to produce regular, awesome content was easy enough. Getting them to take that final leap was considerably harder.
Hiring a freelancer is scary.
Seriously.
What if they’re a bad fit? What if they can’t really write? What if they take your money and don’t deliver? What if, what if, what if…
Allaying Their Fears And Showing My Chops…
Much as it made me flinch, I had faith. I began offering a free blog post. No strings, no catch. An actual, bonafide, free version of a service that would usually set you back (at that time) £25.
Totally free.
This did two things: allayed my tribe’s fears and concerns about making that final leap, and allowed me to really show my writing chops. It’s one thing to say you’re a great copywriter, it’s quite another to hand over a shining, polished, perfect example of exactly what you can do for a person’s business, complete with all the bells and whistles (in my case, royalty free images, memes, and a week’s worth of Tweets…yes, still for free!).
The Results Of Angie’s One Super Powerful Trick…
The response was phenomenal.
In marketing, a 2% conversion rate is reasonably good. 5% is good. 10% is epic. Anything above 10% is magical wildfire of supernatural origin.
The free post I instigated using Angie’s method has…wait for it… a 75% conversion rate.
Not kidding.
75%!
Yes, it’s a lot of work writing them, but it’s so worth it!
Here’s How You (More Than) Double Your Income…
You want serious numbers? I analysed the conversions on my free blog post, here’s what I found…
- Three out of four people who sign up for a free post become paying clients.
- Of those clients, one in three spend an average of £35 on a one-off service.
- One in three spend an average of £300 on either a one off service bundle, or repeat business in lower-ticket items.
- One in three spend an average of £3,500 on monthly blog packages (and that’s just how much they had spent in December 2016 – most are still monthly clients, so that figure gets higher every month!).
- One in three of these new clients recommend me to a friend, who sign up for their own free post, or simply buy a service outright, to the tune of £500 a piece (again, on average, again, growing each month!).
- The financial reward I receive is over £1,000 per free blog post I write (including those that don’t convert) and growing monthly.
The Bottom Line…
Since I started running this offer, my business has thrived. I soon had a gaggle of clients. I put my prices up, expecting to lose a fair few. I didn’t lose any. I kept on hustling, and before the year was out I was debt free, and living in a house of my own. I invested more in the tech needed to action Angie’s epic system, and experienced another big boom in my income.
I had more clients than I could handle.
After rebranding and refocusing entirely on copywriting, I put my prices up again.
The free posts I offer are now worth £55 a piece, and they are still available for free to all new clients. I’ve not done the maths on the offer since the end of 2016, but I can tell you that my monthly income has more than doubled since then. Angie’s offer isn’t the only thing affecting that; I launched a new vlog in January that had a massive impact. But content marketing can only get you so far. It builds you tribe, it grows your list, but you still need that ineffable magic charm that converts your audience into paying clients.
That gives them the final shove.
Of all the coaches I’ve worked with, watched, read and listened to, Angie is the only one who showed me exactly how to do this. For that reason alone, I refer to her as The Woman Who Changed My Business.
But she didn’t just change my business, she also transformed my life.
If you want your business to be the mechanism that enables you to live a happy, fulfilling life of freedom, doing what you love best, this girl can show you how…
Thanks, Angie, you’re an absolute superstar!
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Many thanks to Hazel Butler from The Write Copy Girl for this wonderful guest post. Having feedback like this fills me with joy and makes all my work worthwhile.
Angie x
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by Angela Taffs | Sep 12, 2016 | Business Success
Why it is important to keep your knowledge up to date
There is one sure-fire way to lose credibility with prospects and clients and that is when you fail to keep your knowledge up to date with industry trends and give outdated advice. And if you are posting outdated advice on social media, there is the knock-on effect of so many others seeing what we have written and their loss of interest in listening to anything we have to say in the future.
If you are an employee you need to keep your knowledge up to date along with relevant skills and will be regularly assessed (or at least should be) by your employer. Training is provided when any gaps in knowledge are identified and it is the employer’s responsibility to ensure you continually keep learning and improve your knowledge.
But as a self-employed business person, it is up to you to ensure you keep your knowledge up to date on a continual basis. You need to put a plan in place for your own continuous professional development (CPD) and be aware of the ever-changing industry trends that are bound to happen.
‘Experts’ who give outdated advice
Just recently I have seen a few occasions where ‘experts’ in their field have given outdated advice which has instantly affected their credibility in my opinion, and undoubtedly by others who spotted their mistakes.
The first case was someone who was advising another on a social media forum to use Blab as part of their marketing campaign. What this expert had failed to realise was that Blab no longer exists. This would have caused frustration for the person being advised whilst searching for something no longer available and then a complete lack of trust and respect in the advisor.
Secondly, I saw someone ask an expert for their advice on the use of Snapchat for business. The expert responded that Snapchat was purely for social use but something similar may come to the market for businesses in the future. What the expert failed to realise was that Snapchat is growing daily for business use and their knowledge is very much out of date. Again, a loss of credibility and respect with the person asking the question and anyone else who saw the post and knew the information given was wrong.
Finally, I saw someone advise another to create a number of web pages all with the same content. This is in direct contradiction to Google’s best practice which penalises sites with duplicate content.
Invest the time to keep up to date with industry trends
The most successful business people are those who invest the time to keep up to date with industry trends. Ways to keep your knowledge up to date include:
- Networking with others in your industry
- Reading current books and articles
- Subscribing to online forums and being proactive in asking questions
- Investing in relevant training or signing up for a new course
- Following experts in your field on social media
Try and get creative and think of new ways to keep your knowledge up to date and continue to build credibility with your prospects and clients. If you have any creative ways of keeping your knowledge updated, share them in the comments below.
