Productivity Tips to Get Your Business Out There

1. Use Your Commute to Get a Jump Start

According to the Bureau of Transportation Statistics, the average American spends 24.7 minutes on their daily commute.

If you use that time to check email, read the news and set yourself up for the workday ahead, you can reduce the amount of time it takes you to settle in once you reach the office.

While many Americans drive themselves to work every day, many commute by train or bus, or some can even walk. If you’re also part of a carpool, this tip also applies to you as well.

2. Remove Some of the Pressure on Your Writing

Many of us have to write marketing related materials for work, but writing in general can be difficult at all times.

We tend to burn through emails rather quickly as they’re fact based and sometimes conversational, but marketing often requires getting the creative juices flowing. Sitting down to create copy for a web page, email newsletter or brochure to advertise your business can take considerably more time.

If you set a goal to write as much as possible regardless of quality, you can create pages of content that you can later refine. You are likely to have to rewrite some materials regardless, so don't stress too much about what you initially write. It’s better to produce work that you can tweak later in bulk, rather than try to craft something perfect initially.

3. Allot Meeting Time for Work

Finding time in a work setting can be a huge challenge even with the most generous schedules.

Prioritizing which tasks come first and how quickly they can be accomplished is an art in and of itself. In general, we tend to always drop what we're doing to attend meetings.

When others are relying on our input, and vice versa, it only makes sense to attend. However, if this is not the case, create a meeting in your schedule and dedicate the time to your most important tasks. By doing so you can achieve superior results.

4. Don't React to Every Little Thing

Distractions arise because we focus on them at the wrong time.

In order to accomplish work effectively, we need to really concentrate more on our tasks and less on our surroundings. If there's an urgent matter you need to address at your company then you should be able to schedule for it. Getting the most crucial tasks completed in your workday is more important than what might or might not happen.

Granted, some issues are far more urgent than others, and family related issues and business crises are typically unavoidable. However, the majority of work related issues that come up can typically be handled better when we focus on them, and that can only be done properly when we’ve cleared our previous tasks.

5. Create a 404 Landing Page

On your website, if a visitor cannot find a page that existed previously but has now been removed, they will be greeted with an 404 error page. You can turn this mistake into an opportunity to increase your business by highlighting some things you'd want a potential customer or visitor to know. By retooling your useless error page into a high converting landing page, you accomplish multiple goals at once.

Landing pages have become a powerful tool for internet marketing. They focus all your most important value points into one concise page. They both address your customer’s objectives for visiting your website as well as put your company’s most attractive packages out on display. An 404 error page does nothing but tell a visitor that the website made a mistake. It’s better to accomplish a goal rather than potentially lose a customer due to an error.

6. Focus Your Marketing on Social Media Channels That Work for You

There are so many social networks and communities that you can use on to grow your business, but not all of them will be the right fit for you.

When it comes to your marketing, you should track the conversations on each social network you engage in and see which has been yielding the best results.

If your business has a lot of products that make for some interesting or exciting imagery, it makes sense to focus your efforts on sites like Instagram and Pinterest where images are shared globally. More text and case study type materials are better promoted on channels like Twitter and Linkedin. Of course, if you notice a subset of your customers are highly vocal on one channel it’s best to engage with them there, but getting distracted across different social marketing channels can slow your results.

7. Dedicate a Browser to Social Media Only

How many times have you been distracted by going onto social media when you were checking email or doing research? Especially when social media is in your daily workload, it can be a distraction.

By using separate web browsers for your work tasks and social media, you can eliminate some of the downtime caused by these distractions.

For instance, using both Chrome and Firefox can be a quick way to switch between work tasks and your personal social media with just a click of the icon. You can also create individual user profiles, each with their own bookmarks and homepages, to reduce the risk of distractions. This is a good practice in general, as you will more than likely have a home account for leisure that you might keep separate from your work-related tasks.