Tips for Better Time Management

As your business grows, your time seems to shrink. Here are some tips that can help you manage your time better.

Create a Plan

Creating a plan will always lead to a successful day. Organization will allow you to have a much more balanced day and better quality of life while running your business. Be sure to write down all the tasks you need to get done. Having them written down will give you a better idea of how much you have to do and what needs to get done.

Have a Calendar

Along with a list of all of your tasks, a calendar will help you figure out what else is happening throughout the day. Do you have meetings to go to, people to talk? A calendar will be your best friend for better time management. It will also help you block out time to get your to-do list done.

Prioritize

Now that you have your list and your list, it is time you prioritize and figure out what needs to get done first. A common mistake is to go down your to-do list as you wrote it and that is not efficient. Figure out your “Must’s”; “Should’s” and “can wait’s” so you can get the best out of your day. You will realize that many tasks are not as important for your productivity as you might think.

Delegate

Now that you see what you must do first, do you need to do it yourself? Perhaps some tasks do not require all of your attention. That is when delegating will be your greatest ally for time management. That run to the store for supplies can be done by your employee or family (if you run your business from home).

Learn to say no

Along with running and managing a business, there will be things that, while you would love to do, are not necessary for you to do. Learn to say no in a polite way and you will find yourself more organized and meeting deadlines faster. Sure, you might have a few disappointed people at first, but they will realize that you are working on being efficient for them and you and it will add value to your service.

Track your time spent

Do you feel you are spending way too much time on a task or job? Perhaps it is time you start tracking your time. This is an excellent tool for freelancers who find themselves working day and night. Tools like TopTracker can keep you accountable and give you perspective on how much time you are truly working. It will help you learn and adjust if necessary.

Eliminate Time Wasters

There are plenty of time wasters at the office! That e-mail didn’t need to be checked so many times, and that note could have waited for later. No, you do not need to check Facebook before work. Setting boundaries will allow you to become much more productive and have more time to do tasks like this after you have completed your list.

Always plan to be early

When it comes to meetings, calls or events, always plan to arrive early, this will help you prepare for unseen events like traffic jams or car problems. Practicing this habit will help you be on time and have less stress.

Take Small Breaks

To get all of your tasks done, you must take breaks. Taking breaks will allow your mind to rest for a few minutes and can help you become a lot more productive. Be sure to use your calendar so you can schedule some break time every day.

Focus

Lastly, focus. Know that the tasks needed need to get done in a timely matter. Be sure you focus and avoid any distractions while getting it all done. Focusing will help you be done with all tasks sooner than you think.

We hope these steps can help you get more out of your day and you can be in control of your time better.

Posted in Small Business Improvement Tagged with: business, business goals, calendar, data, delegate, efficiency, entrepreneur, entrepreneurship, freelancer, leaderhip, manage, plan, planner, planning, professionalism, smartphone, technique, time management, tools, track time

The e-commerce Goals Waterfall

For Ecommerce Testing, Clarify Conversion Goals

Before you can start any testing on your ecommerce site, you need to clarify your goals. Setting the right goals is the first step to making any improvements. There’s a saying, “Whatever you measure grows.” So, make sure you measure the right thing.

Goals may seem like the obvious part. After all, you already know you want more sales, right? But there’s more to goal setting than just deciding to try and increase your sales.

The Goals Waterfall

Your goals for your conversion-optimization tests should flow from your marketing goals, which ultimately flow from the organization’s overall goals and strategy.

Business Goals – Marketing Goals – Conversation Optimization Goals.

The goals from optimization testing should follow from a company’s overall goals and strategy

Your business goals should determine your website goals, which should be prioritized to determine your leading conversion optimization goal.

The conversion optimization goal for any test should be selected based on how well it supports the website’s goals. This is often an area where there’s confusion about what are the priority metrics to improve. Don’t get off track by following website goals that don’t support marketing goals.

 

Prioritize Goals

Most sites will have several key goals, so you’ll need to prioritize them. You can do this in three steps.

Rank your goals in terms of their relative value to your business:

Assigning values to goals. The values don’t have to be absolutely accurate revenue-producing numbers to begin. Pick a median goal on your list, and assign it an arbitrary amount, and then estimate the relative value of goals above and below it.

Estimating actual goal values. Now, to get even better results, you can refine these relative numbers with whatever hard data you have, such as average order value, lifetime value of a customer, or the close rate and value your sales team sees when following up on quote requests. Don’t worry about 100 percent accuracy. It’s better to start testing with relatively firm numbers than to delay until everything’s perfect.

 Priority          Goal

1                 Product Sale

2                 Quote Request

3                 Whitepaper Download

4                 Blog Comment

5                 Social-Media Profile Activity

 Tracking Your Goals

Once you’ve identified your most important conversion goal for your experiment, make sure you track it. Goals are a crucial part of your web analytics setup. If you don’t have keys goals in place, you’re missing out on half the value of your various reports.

That means translating your testing goal into a technical goal trigger that will be tracked by the analytics and testing tools you’re using. The goal you track must be represented by a specific action the visitor takes on the website, like a button click or a visit to a page. Think about an action on the site that the visitors will do only once they have completed the goal.

The key is that it should be an action as close to revenue as possible. So, if your goal is to sell a product, you should track a post-sale thank you page as the goal trigger. (If you also accept phone orders, you may need to tackle some advanced tracking techniques to get reliable test results.)

Goals with values attached to them, as explained above, are the only way to find your most valuable visitors, they’re crucial for effective conversion optimization testing.

Be sure to set up ecommerce revenue tracking as well. Increasing average order value can be just as effective as boosting your sales conversion rate, and you’ll want to be able to include that in your results analysis.

A Single Goal

Web analytics tools can provide a ton of information, and it’s not uncommon for e-commerce sites to have a handful of key performance indicators. Example, you may track time on page and the add-to-cart rate, but when it comes to conversion optimization A/B testing, it’s important to focus on only the revenue-producing goals or goals for each test. Always make sure you are tracking revenue for each test variation. Otherwise, you could pick a conversion rate winner that inadvertently sells lower-value products.

Track revenue-producing goals for your A/B tests, but those other goals are still useful too. While not all web analytics goals are the best for A/B testing, they still may be helpful to generate hypotheses and explore new testing opportunities.

By paying attention to secondary goals, you can discover new testing avenues that help you get even more value from your ecommerce website.

Track as many goals and actions as you can with your web analytics tools so you can be free to explore your visitors’ behavior. Within web analytics is where you can do freeform exploration to generate ideas or hypotheses for your A/B tests. Then, validate those ideas through revenue-tracking controlled tests.

Posted in Best Practices for Merchants, Credit card Processing, Small Business Improvement Tagged with: a/b testing, accuracy, advanced tracking techniques, analytics, business goals, conversion, conversion rate, conversion-optimization, e-commerce, ecommerce, goal trigger, goals, hard data, increase your sales, marketing goals, optimization, post-sale, prioritize, revenue, revenue-producing goals, sell a product, strategy, website