6 more of the best business tips from 2017’s most popular articles

Want to have your best year yet? Read six more of the very best business tips from 2017’s top Flying Solo articles.

Medicate stress without alcohol during the work week

While alcohol has the capacity to calm you after a stressful day, it can also affect your sleep and mental clarity – not ideal for the work week. Kelly Exeter believes the easiest way to medicate stress without alcohol is to try one or more of these 8 alternatives:

Go for a walk or hit the gym
Meditate
Try a different drink
Laugh
Listen to music
Have a bath
Keep your hands busy
Phone a friend

Stay positive in tough times

Tough times are part and parcel of both business and life, but Andrew Griffiths has some excellent strategies to boost positivity:

Think more about what you have, as opposed to what you don’t have.
Be conscious about the people around you, particularly if they’re negative.
Be careful about what goes into your mind because it impacts what comes out of your mouth.
Celebrate.
Do more of the things you love.
Keep one eye on the horizon.
Help others.

Learn from these marketing mistakes

After eight years in business, Matt White has tried everything marketing-related. In this informative article, he generously shared some of his marketing mistakes.

Mistake 1: Trying to be the jack of all trades

“You end up wasting money focusing on too many tasks that are poorly researched, poorly implemented and poorly measured. The quality of your work diminishes and, as sales start to fall away, you become stressed and overwhelmed.”

Mistake 2: Mass marketing and not knowing my audience

“It’s better to target 500 people who are likely to spend money with me than 10,000 who might.”

Mistake 3: Wasting time and money on social media

“I now focus only on the social media channels I know my customers use.”

Mistake 4: Not measuring what I should be measuring

“If I can’t figure out: Did the activity work? In what way did it work? Can it be repeated? Then that strategy is useless to me.”

Mistake 5: Running campaigns for too long

“If it’s not worked for eight weeks, it’s not likely to work for 16.”

Come up with a great business name

Your business name can make or break your business, so before creating one, Vanessa Emilio advises that you’re clear on: what you are doing in your business, what values you want to convey, and what goods/services you will be providing.

Once you’re clear, keep the following business-naming tips in mind:

Keep it short, simple, easy to remember and memorable.
Don’t limit your business by naming it something too literal.
Don’t pick a business name that is too obscure.
Test the name with a teenager (“Passing your name by the younger generation is a great idea as the name may be slang or have an interpretation you are not aware of. The well-respected Canadian company Roots had to consider this when they looked into expanding to Australia.”)

Understand why you’re not making money

If you feel like you’re working hard but not really getting ahead or making money, Andrew Griffiths has a simple yet highly effective process to work through. Print out a landscape sheet of paper and draw a table with four columns. Write a headline in each of the columns from left to write. The four headings are:

Specific task
Is this moving me towards my immediate goals?
Neutral
Is this pulling me away from my immediate goals?

Over the next few days, write every completed task in column one, then categorise each task. For example, watching a YouTube video of kittens would fall under “pulling me away from immediate goals”, while completing a project that’s important to your business would fall under “moving me toward immediate goals”.

Neutral refers to tasks that don’t overtly pull you back or move forward, like paying a bill.

As Andrew puts it, “Do this for two days and any weaknesses in your business will soon become apparent. Most of the time it becomes very obvious that I’m simply spending too much time doing work that doesn’t pay, hence my billings are down for the month.”