What should you be doing more of to get more paid speaking gigs?
You probably already know the answer to that but may not be taking action. Maybe you don’t like doing the activities required or maybe you just don't have the time. If it’s the former there’s no shortcut, you could pay someone to do some of it for you, but a lot of the activities rely on you showing up and getting your hands dirty. If it’s because of lack of time it might be that you are spending too much time on activities that aren’t bringing you results or that aren't focused on getting you business.
This week’s missive is all about what you could be doing less of to free up your time.
Here goes, things to potentially do less of include:
1. Micro-managing. If you're spending a lot of time overseeing every small detail of your business, consider delegating more responsibility to your team members or hiring some help if you don’t have any. This can free up your time to focus on strategic planning and business development.
2. Non-Targeted Marketing. If you're casting a wide net with your marketing efforts without seeing a significant return on investment, you might want to narrow your focus. Spend less time and money on marketing to broad audiences and more on targeting potential customers. That does mean you need to work out who they are first of course.
3. Attending and organising unproductive meetings. Zoom has enabled us to do so much but the downside is that it also means that we may be scheduling and attending many more meetings than we need to as it’s so easy to have a meeting on Zoom. If there isn’t a valuable outcome or specific objective to your meetings it might be time for a rethink.
4. Repetitive admin tasks. Admin is important you need to keep on top of it, but can some of your processes be automated, or simplified? There are so many tools that can help you to cut down your admin. Here’s one of my favourites, introduced to me by Melanie Goodman: Textexpander for quickly inserting text by using snippets – try it out it’s a game changer https://textexpander.com/
5. Saying yes. It's important to seize opportunities, but taking on too much can lead to burnout, reduced quality of work and overwhelm. It's okay to say no to invitations, projects, work, meetings etc, that aren't aligned with your business goals.
6. Believing in magic. You will be tempted by the next secret, trick, new gimmick, app, tool, gadget, system that will get you to where you want to be without having to put in any effort. The reality is that the magic solution being marketed to you is going to distract you from doing what you really need to be doing with a promise that it won’t deliver on. It will take your attention and your money. If it sounds too good to be true it likely is too good to be true.
7. Getting distracted. Stay focused. Be clear on what you want to achieve. If an activity will not get you to your goal don’t do it. You don’t want to be Dug the talking dog distracted by the Squirrel. You just understood why I have a squirrel as my image for this now don’t you? 😂
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