Devote 20 Minutes a Day To Improve Your Online Business
By setting aside just 20 minutes per day you can make a huge improvement in your business and also in your life. Anyone who’s been inducted into an eCommerce environment knows how competitive it can be, and to be successful you need to learn how to stand out in the crowd. By following these simple everyday habits you can manage your time better and become more efficient.
Here is a list of four simple 5-minutes activities:
- Go over your eCommerce data
- Get to know your customers
- Read a good article
- Think outside the box
Pretty simple, right? Let’s go through the points.
1. Go Over Your Ecommerce Data
Numbers, graphs and statistics are sometimes boring, but can nevertheless be very valuable when it comes to improving your online store and helping you grow. Data is the driving force behind most successful businesses, so why not be one of them?
Additionally, once you start to analyze your data and understand how it relates to the different aspects of running a company, you’ll become more confident and learn to develop your own strategies to help your company grow organically. In some ways, it’s very much like a game — every day watching the numbers and doing everything possible to keep it better than the previous day.
Nobody’s saying you should spend hours and hours reading and analyzing big tables and long graphs with hundreds of metrics, but knowing how to interpret and control the most important numbers can drastically benefit your company — and often this takes less than 5 minutes a day!
The most important metrics to track daily are:
- Revenue: to keep track of how you are doing at that particular day
- Orders : check average order value, amount of orders and shipped versus cancelled orders
- Products: the best selling products which will help you to track your stock and see what products are in demand to have them in the stock
- Audience: check your conversion rate — what percentage of visits result in a successful order
- Customers: check the ratio between new versus returning
- Marketing activities: track especially the performance of your active campaigns across all your marketing channels.
Not possible in 5 minutes? I tested it myself with the MonkeyData app while sipping my coffee and eating biscuits and the result was 2 minutes 52 seconds. The more you familiarize yourself with the basic metrics, the faster and easier it will become to look at them on the fly and have all the background information you need at a glance.
2) Get To Know Your Customers
Use your CRM system, pick one of your customers, and find some interesting facts about him or her. Check social media, look at their LinkedIn profile, and try to put yourself in their shoes. In a few weeks you will have developed a greater insight into who your customers are, how to create a loyal and beneficial relationship with them, and what you need to know in order make smart and savvy business decisions regarding your customers in the future.
3) Read A Good Article
It’s not hard to read a good article, however it can be quite difficult to find one. You probably have your favorite websites with lot of useful information regarding your field of business, sometimes you might even receive an interesting article by email, and quite often you’ll bump into quality content just by browsing the web. However, even if you find a relevant article, it can be hard to prioritize or find the time to read it. Use some of the available Read Later Services and save the content for your 5-minute reading time, at lunch or during a coffee break. You just need to find out what solution fits you the best.
Here are few tips:
- Instapaper: you can use the free version or premium for 3USD/month which lets you save the article for later in “newspaper-like” form, and allows you to adjust the size of the text or highlight something. One crucial feature is the connection between devices — you can use your phone, tablet, computer or Kindle. It’s very user friendly and intuitive, especially for those who don’t have time to read manuals. Just install and go.
- Pocket: free version or premium for 4.99 USD/month. Distraction free reading without ads or sidebars. You can archive the content (but it won’t be available offline). You can use all types of devices, Kindle included.
- Evernote: this is more like a Read Later app, however you can use it for storing your content although it takes little bit of time to learn how to use it properly. Once you’ve got the basics of Evernote down, though, it’s really great and reliable tool, and we highly recommend this one if you plan to read a lot of supplemental material.
Don’t forget to track topics such as trends, what’s happening in your sector worldwide, competitors, self-education, and more.
4) Think Outside The Box
Another five minutes are devoted for breaking away from your routine for a while. This will help you to think creatively and develop new innovative ways of approaching your issues. Thinking outside the box will set you apart from the crowd by considering solutions to problems that haven’t yet been adopted. By limiting yourself to what you already know, you’re likely missing out on lot of professional opportunities.
You can try to:
- Learn something about different culture, philosophy, or religion (for example buy a book about Hinduism and devote these 5 minutes to read a chapter from it, highlight some points, save them to your Evernote or paper note — I love pen and paper form so my treasures are all in my Midori Traveler’s notebook, however a computer or tablet can be far more practical depending on your style)
- Read something from a travel journal (you should also save this kind of content to your Read Later app).
- Find an exotic recipe for your weekend meal
- Draw something or engage in a small activity that works the creative muscles such as the type found here
We hope you’ve enjoyed this article and encourage you to try some or all of these tips and see if it makes a difference. Do you have anything else that works for you? Share it with us.
