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Video Transcript: Question: Being a time-poor small business owner, I’m concerned because there is just this plethora of things that can be done. How do you work out what percentage of your time to spend on these sorts of activities?
Pete: It’s a very good question. I think it comes down to, in my opinion, business owners should be working on their business rather than in it, more and more as your business grows. Particularly, try and get off the tools as quickly as you can. There are a number of ways you can word it but there is a technique called the Pomodoro Technique, (Italian for tomato). Basically, it’s just this theory. Another way of thinking about it is critical focus time.
You set yourself 50 minutes a day to work on your business, marketing it. That’s all you need to do, 50 minutes, 9:00 until 9:50 or even 7:15 until 8:00 before the staff get in. That is you work on the business, uninterrupted, 50 minutes a day. You say, okay, Friday is my PR content and press release day. If you can’t within a couple of weeks, following some of the techniques and resources available, learn how to do a press release and get it out in 50 minutes, there is something seriously wrong.
Then you work on your link building two of those days a week. You write one blog post a week. So you work out a schedule that I’m going to say 50 minutes a day, I’m going to work on my business. That’s how I structure all my staff because I have a number of different companies and a lot of different things pulling away my attention.
I try and schedule it as 50 minutes a day for this particular thing, 50 minutes for this, and I give myself a 10-minute break every hour. So it’s 50 minutes on, 10 minutes off, 50 minutes on, 10 minutes off. And even if it’s just one of those Pomodoro, I call it CFT, critical focus time sessions a day; it’s all you need to do to get this started.
A question Jeff asked early on about some of the Ezine work was how do you start doing the blogging, and the AMA, and the EzineArticles, and the YouTube work? You just do 50 minutes a day, every day. It’s more than your competitors are going to be doing. After six months you are going to be so far ahead. It’s just that ritual CFT time every single day. Monday is my video day, Tuesday is my blog post day, Wednesday is my PR day, Thursday and Friday are my back linking, setting up a network days. You just work out what works best for your business and just do one of those two things.
Once you refine it and you get it working right and you know how to do it for your own business, then you can look at outsourcing it. You can look at some Filipinos or you can look at that sort of thing. You can hire PR firms for this sort of thing for you, but they charge like a wounded bull for internet publicity. Most PR firms have a retainer of $1,000 a month minimum for best press release service, which for some people it works. You can justify it for the exposure you’re going to get if they’re good and that sort of thing.
When you can buy resources for $500 that are going to teach you how you can do this yourself. Why spend $1,000 a month on a retainer, when 50 minutes a week and $500, you’ll know this inside out. It’s that sort of thing which just comes down to working out, work out the things you want to do, prioritize it in your business and 50 minutes a day. That’s all you need. Eight or nine hours a day or seven hours a day, you work exactly in your business as it is going right now, but you spend 50 business working on your business.
If you’re a physiotherapist, I don’t know. But if you take out one client less a day, but then you can do this marketing work to up your prices by 20% because you’re an authority. At the end of the day, you’ll end up having the same amount of money. You’ll be getting more people in the door which means you can hire more staff so they take care of the missing people. That’s my theory, take out one client a week or one client a day, and work on your business and online publicity and then you can use those excess leads to justify hiring more staff.
I would rather have a business that has more leads than paying money for leads that I throw in the bin because I can’t handle them, then have an issue on the other side of the coin. At least you know I’ve got all these potential prospects I can’t sell to. I can justify putting on an employee now. I’d rather have that horse before the cart scenario.
I hope this quick video will encourage you to manage your time wisely so you can begin with your small business PR soon. Want to take it to the next level? Why not produce viral videos for your business as well? We’re just an email and/or phone call away. Click here to contact our video production team.
