A business purpose helps you stand out.

Photo courtesy of pasotraspaso

Your business purpose provides focus on your ideal customers so you give them what they want or need. What difference do you want your business to make?

Your Business Needs a Blog

The purpose of your business blog is to attract customers with quality content which starts them on the path to solving their problems with your help. Your content also establishes you as an expert and helps your readers get to know, like and trust you. If you engage your readers so they click this or answer that, they become participants, then customers or clients.

A Blog Is a Traffic Magnet

Each page attracts search engines. Each blog post is a web page, easily made, so you can provide fresh content at least three times a week. Static web pages aren’t so easily made, nor do search engines slurp them up so readily.

More and more content, with fresh content weekly, feeds search engines who then provide your customers with information they look for, using keywords.

A Blog Changes the Chase

A blog turns old-time sales efforts upside-down. Businesses sent salesmen out to seek out and chase down customers. Those days are gone. Your business blog provides information that attracts your ideal customers like bait. They chase you.

Target Your Ideal Customer With Your Purpose

1. Why do you do what you do?

If you have a passion many other people also dig, you can build a business with it. If your friends ask you for help with a problem that’s no problem for you, consider creating a business for your service. If you want money for your real passion, find or create a product people buy already and sell that.

2. Why is it important to your customers?

Can your service provide them with a far better life? Does it help them make money, save money, save time, motivate or organize them? The more frequently and urgently they think about their problem, the better for you.

3. Why does your business matter?

This strikes me as the biggest question. Will your business change the world? It could change your customer’s world. If you can do one thing better than anyone else, you’re golden.

Whether you’re just starting a new business or have one established, a nailed-down purpose can help you focus your efforts like a laser. Knowing your business purpose helps you avoid all those shiny distractions that will pull you off-course.

Best,

Karen

P.S.

Help your blog represent yourself and your business professionally on the web with this free video course.

A business purpose gives yourself better direction.

Photo courtesy of Dano

What’s your business purpose? Even before making money, the most basic business purpose is to create a customer. Let’s find yours.

It’s a given (with me, anyway) that your business enriches the customer as it enriches you. Win-win beats any other model any day.

To create a customer, you must find out what your customer needs. Then supply it. If you supply it better than anyone else can, your business will thrive and your customers will be raving fans.

What’s Your Passion?

So often we’re told to build a business based on one of our passions. That’s great advice if you’re into golf, as that’s a rich area full of delicious niches. If, like me, you’re into all kinds of nerdy things few people give a hoot about, your business will go nowhere.

Far Better to Find Your Purpose

Your purpose can be something entirely unrelated to whatever you do in your business. Whether you sell drapes or cruise ships, your purpose might be like Paul Newman’s. He wanted to help make the world a better place with his philanthropic endeavors. Did he do it acting? No. He sold salad dressing, popcorn and such.

Did it matter what he sold? No, he made sure he sold what people buy, so his business provides money for his philanthropy. He maybe had a passion for salad dressing, but I’m positive his purpose gave direction and oomph to his business every day.

Or your purpose could be part of your business.

What’s Your Niche?

I’m in the business of ______ and my core purpose is ______. Can you fill in the blanks? Your purpose is related to your USP but doesn’t explain how you’re different from your competition.

Write down your ideas and refine them. Make your purpose:

• Something you can achieve. A park or world peace? You decide.
• Simple and easy to remember. Disney is “Keeping alive the magic of childhood.”
• Customer-focused. What’s uppermost in their minds? Solving their problems.
• Expandable with new technologies. When you “conquer” your niche, can you extend your reach?

Purpose, Purpose! Get Your Purpose Right Here!

If only a vendor sold great purposes like hot dogs, eh? A good business purpose helps every employee know how best to use time and resources for achieving company goals. This works even if you are the only employee. If you’re not focused, your business flounders.

Best,

Karen

P.S.

I want a business purpose that thrills me. Don’t you? Present yourself and your business professionally on the web with this free video course.

Overcoming procrastination may be an even bigger challenge than overcoming perfectionism. Together, they’re a double-whammy. Are you a supposedly recovered perfectionist like me? You think you have perfectionism licked, only to discover it pops back up. A key symptom is procrastination, but non-perfectionists can make excellent procrastinators.

The key companions of procrastination are stress, overwhelm, missed opportunities, guilt, resentment and deadline frenzy. Raise your hand if you suffer any of these. Procrastination is the culprit.

What causes procrastination?

Let’s look at overwhelming stress. This seems a little like a chicken or egg question. Which comes first? It’s hard to tell. When you’re stressed out, you can’t work effectively. When you can’t get some–or any–work done, you get stressed out.

How a timer helps beat stress.

Here’s where we play whack-a-mole. Set one work goal you can reasonably do in 15 or 30 or 45 minutes. No more than that. Focus on your mini-task for this set time with the intensity of a dog on point. It’s hammer time. Your reward is a 15-minute break afterwards in which you get to play.

Play time! You’re kidding. Who has time to play?

You do. Play time saves your sanity. If you finished your mini-task, great! If you didn’t, you at least made progress on it. Smile as you head off to play. I recommend knitting, but you do what you please. You’ll come back refreshed, less stressed and ready for another whack at your first task or doing your second one.

Side benefit!

You might have gotten whacked upside the head with a great work idea while you played, because great ideas would rather come when you’re otherwise occupied. They’re sneaky like that.

I’ve spent entire days timing work and play like this, often whacked with great ideas in the bathroom. Frequent timer beeps can drive my mate bonkers, but beats having me beached like an unhappy, stressed out, sluggish, unproductive lump. Eesh! Use a vibrating timer for quieter alerts.

Good grief, where are your standards?

Here’s where your perfectionism gums up the works. Yes, you want to do excellent work. We all do. But if you’re not working at all, or just take notes, or shift Titanic deck chairs, you’re in trouble. When your high standards smell unachievable, they whack you.

I just found a great quote in Michele Scism’s Decisive Minds LLC post called “5 Ways to Get Blog Post Ideas.” Her mentor Adam Urbanski says, “Anything worth doing is worth doing poorly to begin with!”

As a recovered perfectionist and expert procrastinator, I can’t tell you how much I love this! Set your timer and do what you can with all your might, even if you  whack out something as crude as a child’s art work.

Where do you think Picasso and Michelangelo started, hmm? Did they know these tips for overcoming procrastination?

Best,

Karen

Here’s an adult taking out his stress on his nephew’s Whack-a-Mole game. Thank you, CarbonNYC.

Got a goal? Write it down!

“A goal without a deadline is nothing more than a wish,” says Rosalind Gardner, the multi-millionaire affiliate marketer who literally wrote the book on affiliate marketing, Super Affiliate Handbook. That line shook me like a thunderbolt. Why?

Time Sickness

In my years as a tailor, I often laughed inwardly at three customers with their last-minute crunch-time need for clothing alterations. They are sisters who show up the night before Easter or a dance or a wedding needing alterations on an outfit they just purchased. Their whole family suffers classic time sickness.

I laughed because I regarded myself as having recovered from time sickness. Some recovery!

Always Late

When my well-organized daughter calls and we plan our errands, I tell her when I can be ready to go. Turns out she knows she can expect me a half hour after that. The weird part is *I* didn’t know it! I’m eyeball deep in dreaming I get things done–but with poor results, I’m now realizing.

Affiliate Marketing vs Time Sickness

According to Rosalind, an affiliate marketer takes 7 big steps:

• market research
• build a site
• add content
• monetize the site
• market it
• manage the business
• grow the business

All seven involve many actions, right? If you’re like me, you feel overwhelmed almost from the get-go.

I either set a work goal unaware it would take FOUR people all day to do it, then fail and feel useless. Or I feel whatever little step I take is inadequate. Or I guess how long a job will take and I’m way off. Whether the “hour” job takes ten minutes or a week, I don’t even NOTICE so I never learn better!

Score: Time Sickness 1, Affiliate Marketing 0.

My Cure–And I Do Have One!

Today I woke up with an idea to log my time. Sure I’ve heard this idea before, probably in Getting Things Done by David Allen. Never mind. Rosalind’s line about goals, deadlines and wishes hit me where I live. I’m ready for real, measured action–the kind that makes her a multi-millionaire.

24 hours ready for affiliate marketing action.

Here’s my time log I created in Note Pad and printed out with FinePrint. I’m recording my actions in fifteen minute increments from today on until I KNOW how long it takes for me to do the simplest or most complex things. I included a place for the top six goals for the day. I never get six daily goals done, so maybe this is ridiculous. We’ll find out, eh?

Today's top 6 goals

The Rewards

First, no more impossible goals that I beat myself up for failing. Second, lay out do-able goals and track my progress so they get DONE and I build my affiliate marketing business. Third, reach my necessary income goals–no more just wishing! My daughter’s look of surprise when I show up on time? Priceless.

Best,

P.S.

Thank you, Rosalind Gardner, for sending me that thunderbolt. That’s a life-changing lesson for me. Did you mean to teach that in the Super Affiliate Handbook? I bet you did.

P.P.S.

While all the links in my post are meant to help you, some are affiliate links, which means if you click and buy, I could earn money.

Proof that a misfit works.

This is not a redneck joke, but thank you, Jeff Foxworthy. I’m stealing your idea to explain to some folks that they’re not so bad after all. In fact, they’re uniquely talented and perfectly suited to run their own home businesses. How about you, dear reader? Are you an entrepreneur and don’t know it?

You might be an entrepreneur if…

You’re a misfit. You couldn’t hack school and you’ve failed at every job you ever had. Others regard you with suspicion because you can’t toe the line like everyone else.

You’re always asking, “Why?” And you don’t like answers like, “Never mind why, just do it.” Or, “Because I said so.” What kid hasn’t heard that phrase? Does it still make your teeth grind?

You’re a failure. You feel like a failure because you can’t do the simplest things other people do. You’ve tried a whole lot of things and failed at most of them.

Others see you as a failure. They’re disappointed in you or frustrated with you and forever saying, “The trouble with you is…” They insist you must be a good little robot who follows orders and does as asked without trying to change how things are done.

Your motto is, “Don’t tell me what to do.” You’re convinced that every boss or bossy person you ever met is a knucklehead who never had an original idea and doesn’t appreciate one when it’s handed to him or her on a plate.

You hate rule books. Whatever stifling, hide-bound tradition others regard as the way things are has almost nothing to do with the way you see life, think or want to live.

Why? Because you have the ability to prioritize ideas over data, be nomadic and learn endlessly.

An entrepreneur is someone who creates value by offering a product or service even if it takes carving out a niche in the market that may not currently exist. He or she gets a vision and sets about bringing that vision into reality.

You’re in good company with authors like Edgar Rice Burroughs who failed at everything until he wrote Tarzan.  Ever hear of Einstein? Some folks considered him retarded in school and he didn’t know his own phone number.

So the good news is you may be an entrepreneur. When are you going to start your home business? Please get busy chop chop. Look around, see what’s wrong and how you can fix it. The world needs you and your vision.

Best,

P.S.

If you’re unsure exactly what you want to do,  affiliate marketing is considered one of the easiest home businesses.

P.P.S.

While all the links in my post are meant to help you, some are affiliate links, which means if you click and buy, I could earn money.