Time is a limited resource, but when starting a home-based business, it is the most valuable thing. One of the best time management strategies for entrepreneurs is to create a concept from the book “time dividends.” From the clock.
The idea is simple. What you spend time and money now saves you more time later. These investments continue to be rewarded by “creating time” just as investments in stocks can pay dividends.
And if you are trying to build a home business while working 9-5, taking advantage of your available time is essential to your success!
These are the six best investments to pay off your time dividends when building your home business.
1. Audiobook
If you are beginning to work from home, it is especially important to learn from a professional. Doing so will help you to promote your success while helping you make fewer mistakes. That means reading all the books!
Finding time to read may seem virtually impossible. That’s why investing in audiobook services like Audible and iBooks is a must! While you can buy only a small portion of the e-book version, being able to “read” on the go is a time management hack worth an additional investment.
Suddenly, commuting doubles as a continuing education class, allowing you to “read” while jogging in the morning. The best feature is that it can speed up your audio. This means you can pass through the material faster. Instead of spending a week or two dedicated reading every day for a book, you can go through the same book on an intensive listening afternoon.
2. Idea verification
Many ambitious entrepreneurs are excitedly rushing to a building or service building without actually investigating whether it is a viable money-making idea.
There is nothing more discouragement than pouring your heart and soul into something just to flop. Put legwork to validate your ideas before wasting valuable time!
Asking for feedback on your ideas is one of the easiest (and most important) ways to validate your ideas. If your business already has an audience or mailing list, ask open-ended questions about the issues you are trying to solve with your potential product or service. Another option is to throw the landing page with a brief description of your idea, service, or product. You can then assess your product interest by the number of sign-ups.
If you are a little threatened or disappointed by the concept of validation of ideas, It’ll fly Pat Flynn is an excellent resource on this topic. (Tip: Get the audiobook!)
3. Organizational Technology
Many people avoid learning new online business tools as the best features often come with monthly bills and it takes time to learn how to use them effectively. However, investments in the streamlined process from Get-go will pay off later with spades. Here are some web tools that almost all small businesses can benefit from:
- Trero: A great (and free) web tool with many uses, Trello is a bit like a flashy to-do list that you can use yourself or in collaboration with your team. With Trello, you can prioritize workflows, brainstorm ideas, and manage deadlines.
- toggle: This is a time management tool that helps you track the amount of time you spend on a specific task. This is especially useful if you have a service-based business that requires you to record the time you spend on projects. You can also track how much time you spend on each aspect of your business. After weeks of data, you can assess which tasks are eating the most and identify how to streamline or batch task items to make the process more efficient.
- ZAPIER: This is a time-saving powerhouse that helps to automate repetitive (probably your favorite) processes in your business. Zapier can connect around two web applications to another web application to create an automation or “ZAP” that acts when a particular trigger is satisfied. For example, you can connect a Facebook lead ad to your Gmail account and Gmail sends you a follow-up email each time the lead completes a call to the action. Alternatively, you can connect to Google Sheets and create a list of leads obtained through Facebook lead ads.
4. Voice typing
If home-based businesses involve blogging and writing, voice typing can become a time management superpower. The good news is that you don’t need expensive equipment to do this. Google Docs has voice to text functionality, and is free to use from both your computer and mobile phone!
Even if you are a skilled typist, it’s not just the speed at which you put your words on the page. Voice typing could be another approach to harnessing creativity. When you enter them, defeat your ideas without censoring them as they are.
However, learning voice typing requires some practice. You need to tell the document punctuation and learn document navigation commands. But when you work to make it comfortable, you will be amazed at how easy it can be to create content!
5. SEO
Search engine optimization can be overwhelming at the start, and instead of learning SEO, it’s appealing to rely on other forms of traffic (such as social media and Pinterest). Building stable SEO traffic is slow burns, but it has the long-term impact of social media traffic not being able to hold candles.
If you work together to optimize your pages from the start, you can save countless times by optimizing your old posts.
For WordPress users, Yoast has a great plugin with a free version that helps you optimize when building each page, making Google algorithms easy to please.
Other great SEO tools include Neil Patel’s Uber Prossion and Chrome Extension, keywords everywhere. Both are free and can help you find the right keywords for your webpage or blog post.
Certainly, spending time doing keyword research to strategically optimize your posts may not be something you like, but your future self will appreciate you when your website traffic begins!
6. Social Media Tools
It’s a different beast than SEO, but social media can play a major role in digital marketing efforts. Social media tools are usually financial investments, and some have a substantial learning curve. However, if you exercise them correctly, you can create serious time dividends for your online marketing efforts.
Most of these tools come with free versions, but they are relatively limited. If you spend hours on one or more social media channels every day, it’s worth investing. There are three things that are especially worth checking out.
- Tailwind: This tool allows you to pre-schedule pins to post on Pinterest when your audience is at its peak. Pins can be scheduled a few weeks in advance so you don’t have to pin for hours each day! Additionally, Tailwind Tribes help pins spread faster to your target audience. Tailwind is also integrated with your Instagram account!
- SocialBee: Instead of logging in to each of our social media platforms and reviewing and responding to your audience’s activities, you can monitor everything in one place with Social Bee. One of the biggest time-saving tools SocialBee offers is the ability to save drafted social media updates. So there’s no need to constantly rewrite and upload your posts.
- StatusBrew: Although it is compatible with Instagram and Facebook, StatusBrew is a particularly powerful timesaver for Twitter users. It’s a great tool to manage your followers and automate tweets.
Related content: How to prevent social media marketing from taking away huge amounts of time
Be proactive about time management
Enthused to hit the running ground, many home businesses avoid these investments ahead of time, but we find that they don’t seem to have enough time to get their ventures off the ground. But most of these positive investments don’t ask much about whether it’s time or money.
As you grow your home business, look for more ways to create time dividends. In most cases, there is a very large opportunity to streamline, expand or integrate processes. Excellent time management skills create a healthy work-life balance, not only necessary to build a successful business.