It’s time to Spring Clean your business

It’s Spring cleaning time! You know the time you clean out your closets, pantries, garage, etc. Along with doing all of those things don’t forget to clean up your business/blog this Spring. Every Spring I make sure I get rid of what’s not working, add in things that are and just go through a Spring cleaning of my website and pictures. Here are a few ways I Spring clean my business and my blog for the upcoming season.

Spring Clean your Business

Go over your goals

Are you on track? Are you sticking to the goals you set forth for the New Year? One of my goals was to be more present on my social media channels and I am doing well with that. You may not see my face on my insta but you are seeing more images of me on there. Another goal was to get my website for my photography business up and running along with a blog. I have done both! Another goal of mine was to spend a day on each social media and not focus on trying to do all of them in one day. In my planner, I have Twitter on Mondays, Facebook on Tuesdays, Pinterest on Wed, and Instagram on Thursdays. Fridays and the weekends I take that time to nurture in-person meetups and connect beyond social media. Another one of my goals this year was to start pitching companies. I haven’t done a good job with that as of yet but I’m working on it. I have daily goals that I want to accomplish as well and their small goals. For example today I want to make sure I clean some pictures on my desktop. I will spend 10 minutes doing that and that is my daily goal. My monthly goal is to get out there and be more creative with my pictures and also teach my kids how to use the camera as well.

Marketing

I have a degree in marketing and this thing hard. Marketing to me means you want customers to make a demand for your product. How do you do that? Advertisement, captions on Instagram, ads, word of mouth, etc. You have to market and figure out how to market. If you aren’t good at it hire someone else to do it for you. No one will buy if they don’t know what you sell. Figure out how to get your blog out there for others to see. Be a guest on other blogs, have someone create some dope ads for you to promote and hashtag the shat out of it. Figure out what makes you stand out and then go stand out. That’s basically marketing in a nutshell. You want people to talk about you and buy from you. In my case I want people to come to my website, buy what’s in my shop, and hire me for photography. I admit I haven’t done a good job with marketing my shop. I have shirts for sale and I don’t think a lot of people know. I did put it up on Instagram and it got a good amount of traction but I could have done better with an ad on Facebook and had someone else promote on their page also. I have to figure out how to market better!

Check your websites

Broken links, check em. Outdated content, redo em. SEO posts that are older and make sure you have Yoast. Make sure everything is up to date. I can’t tell you how many times I go to someone’s website and their Instagram doesn’t work. Not everyone is on social media or knows about you. I may see an article from a blogger that I loved and I am curious about them. I may click on the Instagram link and bam….it goes nowhere. I hate that because I may have followed them but since their link wasn’t working I couldn’t and I am not going to take the time to look them up. Get rid of links you are no longer active on. I had LinkedIN on my blog but I realize that I am never on there (I need to be but we will save that for another time) so I took it off. Check your images. A lot of my blog posts don’t have images on them. I am working on fixing that as we speak! I also updated the pictures on my about page. Make sure you update your about page and reread just in case something has changed or you want to add something to it.

Clean up your phone

I run my business from my phone and I need that to be cleaned. Get rid of all those screenshots where Y’all talking about folks *side eye*. Get rid of all the texts. I know some of you all have texts from last year get rid of em. Get rid of the millions of pictures on your phone…I ain’t gonna call no names but this person right here…reedamdiculous. I went through my phone the other day and saw that I had 5k pictures. While watching a tv show I started to go through all my pictures and erased the ones I no longer needed. While you are at it clean up your Dropbox too. You can run more efficiently if you have less stuff on your phone.

Email List

I know y’all saw that Instagram and Facebook went out about a week ago. Well if you depend on social media I feel so sorry for you. You should have your own website and your own email list. Email lists are still gold and that’s where your real clients are. Everyone that has spent money in my business or who reads my blog is on my email list on their own accord. I clean out my email list twice a year. Normally in March and then again in September. I clean out the folks that haven’t opened up any of my emails or who seem to be spam. How does your opt-in look? I actually put mine on my page now so I can have a link that I can get to easier. It’s under my Meet Kita page if you hover you can see my Talk Tuesday. I don’t offer any freebies because that’s an ole bait I don’t want people to sign up because I’m offering something I want people to sign up because they want to see what’s going on with me. I do offer freebies but that’s for my folks to know who signed up I don’t let new people know I’m offering something just to get them to sign up. I want genuine people who want to stay and get to know who I am.

Clean up social media

I saved this one for last because this is a doozy. Unfollow accounts that serve you no purpose. Unfollow accounts where you are jealous of them because they have this perfect life. That’s not getting you anywhere. Follow people you want to follow. Clean up your Pinterest boards. I deleted 5 of mine and kept it minimal. I don’t need one for every holiday. I pick my favorite holidays and roll with those. I went through my Facebook page and unfollowed people who no longer post on their page and got rid of all the groups that I have no interest in. Yes, I may have joined your group to see what it’s all about but if I forgot I was in your group and I don’t even speak or post why am I there. Twitter I cleaned up my list and made a new one specifically for the people who always speak to me on there. I also unfollowed a lot of spam accounts ( I have a lot on twitter)

This is how I’m cleaning up my business and blog for Spring. How will you be Spring cleaning your business or blog?