Birds are chirping, and flowers are blooming. You know what that means — Spring has sprung, sis. With new energy and motivation for the change of season, spring is a time many people like to declutter and take a deep clean of their lives. It’s also a perfect time to spring clean your business too while you have spring fever.
Here are six ideas to help you spring clean your business for a fresh, new start this season:
Check Those Habits
Have you fallen into any bad habits lately with your business? Maybe you are slacking on your social media outreach or cultivating clients for your networking or email lists. Well, now is as good a time as any to create a new routine, or get back into one that you have been slacking on.
The perfect time to get back to your routine. If you struggle with breaking bad habits, here’s a little a trick I learned recently called habit bundling. It’s as simple as this: You pair an activity that you hate doing — i.e., checking emails with something that you love to do. For example, if you make it a habit to go out to lunch every Friday as a treat yo self moment, bring your laptop to follow-up on some of those to-do’s you have been putting off as you enjoy your afternoon out. You will be so happy you crossed some of those items off before a lovely, long relaxing weekend. Trust me, sis.
Simplify Your Practices
Without putting certain practices in place in your business, things can quickly get messy. Deadlines can get missed, clients can fall through the cracks, and you can end up making some costly oversights. That’s why a review of your processes in your business can only make you more efficient. Perhaps, that could mean outsourcing some of the work on your plate so that you can get into the zone of genius. Or maybe it’s as simple as investing in some time-saving software to help you manage your tasks effectively. There are some great automation apps out there, like Zapier or IFTTT that will help automate administrative tasks for you.
Cleanup Your Inbox
Everyone hates the “300” unread messages in your inbox as much as me? Well, It’s time to get that under control, sis. For many of us, we spend hours a day in our inbox and looking at all that clutter can steal time away from our productivity. The first step in fixing this is obvious, start with deleting messages you no longer need and clean out unwanted contacts. Next, unsubscribe from any promotional emails that no longer serve any purpose.
Consolidate Your Files
Is your computer desktop so cluttered you can’t even recognize your desktop wallpaper? We must rectify this immediately. Some great tools to do this are services like Box, Dropbox or Google Drive, which help you manage your files in the cloud. Even tidying your desktop with clearly labeled folders will improve your workflow so much faster. You can also create separate folders for each client and archive older projects by year.
Manage Your Subscriptions
We all know the drill. Five dollars here, 10 dollars there. Individually, they don’t seem that bad, but multiple subscriptions can quickly add up. First things first, do an audit of your monthly subscription expenses. That way, you can decide if they are genuinely beneficial, or if you can do without them. Some must-have subscriptions for businesses are Freshbooks (accounting), Adobe (design software), and Tailwind (Pinterest and Instagram scheduling app).
Give that website a refresh
Hosting a personal or business website can seem like a never-ending project, am I right? Rather than be overwhelmed by thinking of all the things you want to do with your website, start by looking at your analytics to help give you a clearer picture of your audience and a chance to set a direction and plan for your site. One of my favorite things to look at in my analytics is to check the stats for various publications that I write for. That way, I can keep track of what articles are getting the most hits and find out where my visitors are coming from. Once you know this information, you can focus your optimization on these stats appropriately.
If your website needs more than just a little optimization, it might be time to think about a redesign. You can try website design software sites like Awwards or 99 Designs to get your site a nice refresh.
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