Speaker: Mike Taber (@SingleFounder)
Mike talks about different hacks, techniques and strategies to improve different aspects of your business.
Twitter Automation (how to build an audience)
Increasing your twitter followers helps you expand your footprint and influence.
- Tools used: Hootsuite, TweetAdder, Google Docs (to collaborate with VA)
- Make sure you follow the Twitter rules or you’ll get banned
- Don’t follow or unfollow people too fast: following 100 people per day is acceptable
- You want to provide relevant information and real value to people
- Create a repeatable process:
- Identify the people you want to follow
- Follow them
- Unfollow who is not following you back
- For each 100 people you follow, you get about 50 that follow you back if your tweets are interesting
- The operation need to be done manually (you cannot automatically follow or unfollow on Twitter)
- Thanks people for following sending them a manual message
- Results: doubled the number of followers in 2 months.
Automating your finances
Managing your finances is not something that provides value to your business and takes a lot of time. Automating them can be a sage choice.
Automate your finances in three stages: plan, execute, give authority.
- Plan: identify the things that need to be done
- Execute: you need to execute the process at least once and identify gaps in the execution
- Give authority: you need to give the person that is working with you the authority to make the decisions needed to get the jobs done
When starting working with a bookkeeper (or VA).
Provide a general guideline for how the business works and details documentation for standard procedures. If any documentation needs to be changes they can do that without my permission.
Finally you shall give praise for a job well done.
This saves between 4-6 hours / month.
Leveraging internal data for SEO
- Add your website to pre-launch email lists: bit.ly/prelaunchdirectories but that’s tapers off.
- Target long tail keywords:
- For AuditShark, Mike implemented a content system that added a lot of pages extracting them from the documentation DB and adding them to the website
- Pages were linked to one another
- Doubled the traffic in a couple of months
- Use Google Analytics to measure effectiveness of that content
Personal development
- Work less and do more
- If you are compressing the time you are focusing on things that really matter because you know you don’t have much time available
- Works tends to fill up all the time available
Limiting the time you have available increases productivity but it can go only that far.
Personal fulfillment
- Learn about your strengths: https://bit.ly/strfinder
- You need to understand who you are and what things you like
- Learn to be comfortable at being uncomfortable. What’s the worst that can happen?
- Trying new things is what makes you grow and boosts your courage
Personal health
- Focus on getting 3 aspects of your life in order: sleep, exercise, eating habits
- A problem in one of them, will often affect the others
- Decrease stress and give your body what it needs to function properly
- Sometimes lifestyle adjustments don’t work
- Developers, entrepreneurs & depression. A wonderful talk at Business of Software Conference.
Read notes of all the other talks on the Microconf 2014 Hub page.