Here are five questions to inspire you to come up with a plan to keep your business going strong during the lean times.
* Do you have friends or acquaintances you can contact to help boost your business, brainstorm, or advise you about your business? (List names and contact information)
* What can you do offline to increase you income?
* What are five things you can do to boost your business right now?
* If your shop was closed down right now, what are you going to do to keep your income flowing?
* What do you need to stay motivated?
Take a few minutes and answer these five questions. Be as creative as you want, write out your answers, collage, or use paint, whatever inspirations you need to help you through the process.
Use the answers to your questions to create your plan, and how you are going to put your ideas into action. That way when business is slow you are a step ahead and you won't lose any income.
Here is a printable form for answering the questions and a little doodling space for inspiration. Also an additional form to put your plan on paper. When you are done with the process you will have a business boosting plan to post in your work area and keep you motivated.
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| Five Question Printable Form |
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| Business Boosting Plan Printable Form |
Do you have a plan in place for the slow times of the year?
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Cool visual for a strategy!
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http://christiecottage.blogspot.com
Interesting questions, Valerie. Especially the one about keeping the income if our shop got closed. I think the answer to this question might not only set us one step ahead but also give us n idea as to what might actually be our passion.
ReplyDeleteI think these are great questions to consider. I've finally realized for my own shop that during the down time (spring-summer) I should be focusing on expanding my skills, developing new products, and spending lots of time making them so that I can have a big shop update in the fall. I'm also in the meantime working on lots of promotions & giveaway ideas to clear the shop (hopefully) for next big season.
ReplyDeleteThanks for the q's!
Wow, this is great! Thanks so much for sharing the printable forms too, I love this!! :)
ReplyDeleteWonderful questions Valerie! I love your forms!! Thanks!
ReplyDeleteGood questions Valerie. I've been spending time thinking about how I can get more traffic into my shop without the monster amount of hours I was spending online previously. That burnt me out so bad I needed to shut down shop for awhile and regroup. What do you find the most beneficial for you, in regards to getting people in and viewing? Ideas are always flitting through my head, but not all of them are a great fit for me and my goals. ;)
ReplyDeleteMelinda, I wish their was a simple answer to getting views to our shops. One thing I did that really increased my views was change all my titles and tags. If you read my titles now they make no sense, but my view have tripled since I October when I made all the changes.
DeleteMy other recommendation is HootSuite for social media marketing, where you can schedule tweets and facebook posting. I can set it up all my tweets for the day in about 30 minutes, and check back a couple times during the day for 5 or 10 minutes to interact with twitter friends. I have saved so much time using HootSuite.
I hope this helped a little. Feel free to message me if you have any questions.
Have a great day,
Valerie
I love these forms! I'm always sitting down when business is slow and thinking of something "extra" I can do, but having a more formal plan would be much more beneficial. (I normally end up with a... well, it's been awhile since I updated my webpage or it's been awhile since I've done extra advertising, etc, etc.)
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