How To Use the Power of Focus to Have a Successful Business

Why What You Focus On In Your Business Matters 

Let’s talk about focus and why it matters where you put your time and energy in your business. There is an old marketing saying that that which is measured and tracked, improves. Have you ever wondered why that is? If you start to track the size of your list, you notice fresh subscribers joining on a daily basis. When you track your sales, numbers start to go up. It even happens outside of business. If you step on the scale each morning and record your weight, it will likely start to move in the right direction. Why is that? 

It’s because tracking and recording results puts your focus and energy on whatever it is you are tracking. In this case, you are often doing it unconsciously. You skip that second helping at dinner or send out a tweet promoting your newsletter before calling it a day. In other words, what you focus on matters. 

Take a moment to think about where you want to see growth over the next month, quarter or year. Do you want to add a new list building funnel? Do you want to create a secondary stream of income? Do you want to grow your paid membership? Do you want to add a certain amount of paid products? If so, how much more revenue do you want this to generate per month? 

Be specific in these thoughts and write them down. Create goals for yourself. They will help you focus when it comes time to decide what to work on. Review those goals regularly and track your progress. Are you focusing on the right tasks? If you’re not seeing results in a reasonable amount of time, it may be time to switch focus to something else. 

Work on one task or one project at a time. This is another place where focus shines. By working on one thing at a time, you’ll get it completed quickly and see results faster. Let’s look at product creation as an example. Let’s say you want to publish three new eBooks this year. You have two options. You can focus on one book at a time, or you can try to write all three of them simultaneously, jumping from one to the next as the mood strikes. 

If you focus on one at a time and get that first book finished within three months, you can have it up and selling by the beginning of April. It’ll start to generate income for you. If, on the other hand, you split your time equally between the three books, you won’t have anything ready to publish until the very end of the year or the beginning of the next one. That’s a big difference. You’re losing nine months of sales of book one and three to six months of sales on book two. Focusing on the other hand allows you to benefit from your hard work more quickly. Book one in this scenario would be making you money the entire time you work on book two and three. 

I hope this convinces you that focus is important. What you focus on matters and focusing on one project, one task, one goal at time does as well. What will you focus on first? 

Identifying Your Top Performers

If you want to boost the profitability of your online business, one of the first places to look is your top performers. These are the parts and pieces of your business that are doing the heavy lifting already. By making small tweaks to improve them, or duplicating them, you can quickly boost your bottom line. Let’s take a look at some of these top performers and how you can use them to your advantage. 

Paid Products And Services 

The first thing you should look at are the products and services you are currently offering. What are your best sellers? What makes you the most profit month after month. Surprisingly those are not always the same thing. You may only sell a handful of your high ticket items, but they can make up the bulk of your income for the month. It’s important to look at this. It may be worth raising prices on some of your lower end stuff and sell less, but pocket more. If nothing else it’s worth testing. 

But focusing on your most successful products does something else. It gives you insights into what your audience wants and needs. Take a look at what those products are and try to come up with related products that have the potential of becoming your next best seller. Two easy ways to do this is to think about what’s next after they get finished with one product and to look at something related that they may want to learn about as well. Brainstorm a list of topics and get to work on that next paid product or service. 

Customers 

Did you know that the top twenty percent of your customers are likely contributing to eighty percent of your income? Read that again. You can go even further. The top five percent often contribute ninety five percent of your sales. What does that mean to you as an online business owner? That you should identify your top customers. Treat them well, create more products for them, and learn what you can about them. If you can identify what makes your ideal customer or client, it becomes so much easier to attract more of them through your content and advertising. A little focus here can go a long way to increasing your bottom line. 

High Traffic Web Pages 

Another great exercise is to look through your website analytics and find your top performing web pages. What’s getting the most traffic? Make it a habit to look through those and optimize them where you can. Do you have an attractive lead magnet on that page? A call to action to buy a related product? An affiliate offer? How are you monetizing each of your top pages? 

Your Best Converting Funnels 

Last but not least, don’t forget about your funnels. What’s working well for you right now? What brings you leads that turn into customers. Take a look at those funnels. Walk through them step-by-step. You’ll be surprised how often you’ll find room for improvement. Tweak those opt-in forms to seek out a better conversion rate. Take advantage of those thank-you pages and make your new subscribers an offer they can’t refuse. Look at open rates and click-through rates for the email sequence that goes out after someone subscribes. Is there one that’s under performing? What could you do to improve it? 

Then come up with another funnel based on your best converting one. Can you tap into an adjacent audience? Can you take a different angle with your opt-in offer that would draw in a new audience? These are fairly simple tweaks to make because you’ve done the majority of the work already. Give it a try and see for yourself. 

Identifying Your Bottle Necks 

An important consideration when it comes to growing your business is bottlenecks. What’s holding you back? Is there a step in your process that slows down growth? Maybe it’s something you don’t know how to do or that you keep off doing because you don’t like it. Maybe it’s a critical piece of infrastructure that’s missing. Let’s look at a couple of possible bottlenecks in a typical online business. 

You’re Missing A Piece of Software

Let’s say you’re selling digital products and you know you could increase your profits if you implemented an affiliate program. Your current shopping cart doesn’t provide that functionality and switching seems too difficult. Or maybe your shopping cart only accepts one type of payment, cutting out a portion of potential customers. Or there’s some courseware you’ve been considering that would allow you to teach online classes. By not identifying your bottleneck and focusing on overcoming whatever the obstacle may be, you’re holding yourself and your business back. 

You’re Lacking Certain Skills Or Funds To Outsource It 

Maybe what’s holding you back is setting up your website. Or creating that first lead magnet. It could be building your list and getting into the habit of emailing them regularly. Or maybe you have an idea for a great product or service but no idea how to deliver it. Whenever you find that there’s something you know you should be doing, but you don’t know how to do it, you’ve found a bottleneck. 

And you usually have two different ways to overcome it. You can learn how to do it yourself, or you can hire someone to do it for you. Don’t know how to format and upload a pdf? Watch a few YouTube videos or pay someone to do it for you. Don’t know how to publish a Kindle book? Take a course, follow the tutorials Amazon KDP has available, or hire someone else to do it for you. 

Which brings up an important point. To overcome a bottleneck / any bottleneck, you usually have to invest. That investment can be time and energy, or it can be financial. Only you can determine what’s the smarter choice. The only thing you can’t afford is to stay stuck. 

You’re Lacking Motivation Or Time 

Sometimes you lack the skills. Other times you lack the motivation or the time. It happens to all of us. There are tasks we enjoy more than others. And guess what? The stuff we don’t like to do gets put on the back burners. We know we should be working on a website redesign or to finally create that product customers have been asking about for months. But something else is easier or more fun and it’s how we end up spending our time. Or maybe you’re in a season of your life where time is a precious commodity. That’s okay. What’s important is that you recognize these bottlenecks and then make a decision on what to do about them. And yes, ignoring them for the time being is an option. If that’s what’s best for you and your business. 

No matter what your bottlenecks are, take some time to identify them and work around them. You’ll be amazed how much of a difference this kind of directed focus can make on your progress and your profitability. 

What’s Your Main Focus For This Quarter? 

One of the most productive shifts you can make is from focusing on yearly goals and plans to quarterly ones. Remember the feeling of making a New Year’s resolution? You get to do that in your business again and again – four times a year to be exact – when you start to implement a quarterly planning schedule. 

Ninety days is a long enough time to make some progress, yet short enough to keep you focused. That’s the second big advantage to quarterly planning. You can’t do all the things in three short months. But you can accomplish one or two important ones, or wrap up a larger project. 

How do you decide what your main focus for any given quarter should be? I like to start with a brainstorm session. Write down anything and everything you can think of that you could or should do for your business. Don’t judge. Don’t edit. Get it all out. That alone is a great exercise to help you focus. You won’t have to juggle all these thoughts and ideas as you go about your day. 

Next look at your list. Cross out anything that doesn’t make sense or are things you know you’ll never do. This starts to widdle the list down. After that, go through and highlight anything that sounds like a great idea right now. Not every project should be tackled in a given quarter. Maybe something requires a lot of capital or infrastructure that you don’t have yet. That’s okay. It can stay on the list until next quarter. 

If you’re feeling stuck or unmotivated, look for easy wins. What are some things you know you can do on that list. Will they move you in the right direction? If so, highlight them and put them on the top of your to-do list. You’ll get them done, bear the fruit of that labor, and use it to tackle some of the harder projects on the list. 

Toward the end of the quarter make the time for a quick review. What worked well and what didn’t? Did you bite off more than you could chew? What project surprised you? What gave you the best results. This review will prepare you to make an even better plan for the next quarter.

Rinse and repeat four times per year and you know you’ll be focusing on growth and improvement.

It’s amazing what you can get done over the course of a year by focusing on a few important tasks and improvements per quarter. And let’s not even talk about the kind of growth you could see after a decade of practicing this … 

Measuring Progress & Staying On Track 

What do top athletes and successful online business owners have in common? They keep their eye on the prize and stay focused even when the going gets tough. They push through the hard days and they don’t let themselves get distracted by anything. All of this helps them stay on track to reach their goals, no matter how lofty they may be in the beginning. 

They also measure their progress along the way. A sprinter will keep track of his or her time and decide if the current training and nutrition regime is getting the results hoped for. If it doesn’t they adjust. A business owner does the same. You may try a new marketing strategy, launch some fresh ads, or invest in a new logo for your brand. Maybe you try a different type of product or a new pricing structure. You test and you track. You stay focused on what you want to get out of your business and you measure your progress along the way. 

How do you measure your progress? You start by deciding what you want to focus on. Set a goal. Make it specific. Decide how you will measure your progress. Is it a certain word count? An incremental improvement in conversions or sales? Then get to work and keep track of how you’re doing. Put it in writing. Be specific. Spreadsheets are your friend because they can help you see trends over time. If you want to get fancy, add some graphs. Plot out your sales over the course of a month, a quarter, or a year. Or how about your word count, or email open rates? All of this can help you stay focused and move in the right direction. 

If you struggle to come up with a way to measure and track, google and see how others are dealing with this. Or ask a trusted friend or colleague. Once you figure out how to get started, get in the habit of tracking and reviewing your progress. Your goal will serve as your compass or guide post. It will keep you on track and keep you focused. 

Not only does measuring your progress help you stay focused, it also keeps you motivated. There’s nothing worse than feeling like you’re spinning your wheels and what you’re doing is making little to know difference. If you take the time to measure your progress you’ll know exactly how far you’ve come and how much further you need to go. That helps you to stick it out when the going gets tough and of course keeps you on track. 

Stay focused and you can reach big goals and do great things!