Websites 4 Sale

PROCESSING TRANSACTIONS

You begin with checking the orders that have come in. Next, you check on your inventory. Are any items out-of-stock or discontinued? You’re on top of inventory because you check it a couple of times a week at the very least. However, today is not the day on your calendar for the routine inventory update, you’ll do that tomorrow. But, you do check the inventory with each order just in case an item was sold out since your last update.

Next, you know that your vendors (this is a “drop-ship” business, did I mention that?) need orders before 2 p.m. EST in order for them to be shipped same day, so you go ahead and push the orders through to meet that deadline. You had quite a few orders overnight, so that takes a little time in your day to process. During the day, you will continue to check orders up until the “drop-dead” time to make same-day shipping. You send out communication to your customers in “order receipt” and “thank you” emails. For the most part, you are done with processing transactions, unless others come in. As I mentioned before, you will keep checking for those periodically throughout the day.

BUILDING TRAFFIC ON SOCIAL MEDIA

On your schedule, today is the day for building traffic and updating the site. First, you schedule your social media posts for the next 7 days, beginning with reviewing your running list of topics for posts and picking enough to have at least one post a day on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram. As you’re looking at the list, you think of a couple more and add them. Thank goodness for the list because sometimes you can think of topics and sometimes you can’t. No worries for you because you have a constant supply of possible future posts!

You need to do some quick research for a couple of topics and then use your posting scheduler (for example, HootSuite or SocialOomph) to create the posts and line them up for the next week. Your social posting for the day (and hopefully planning posts for the future) has been done.

Now, it’s time for an early lunch and some market shopping. Or, maybe you need to do some gardening. Or, maybe you need to pick up the kids. What’s next?

BLOGGING

After the fun break, you sit down to write a blog. You’ve found that blogging really gets your customers and potential customers to know you and your business, and in turn it helps drive traffic to your online property.

At first you found blogging to be daunting because you never saw yourself as a writer. However, over time it has become second nature to you because you don’t really think of it as writing only. It’s your way of talking about your niche market as an expert in a conversational way and connecting with people on the web.

You write a blog post, publish it on your site, and you never forget to include it on relevant social media platforms to reach even more people that are looking for what you’re offering. Or better yet – allow potential customers to discover you based on their own interests and allow them develop real connections with your store and brand.

MONITORING KEY PERFORMANCE INDICATORS

The next thing you have on your schedule for today is to monitor the analytics of your website’s traffic. This isn’t building traffic to the site necessarily, but it is integral to knowing where your traffic is coming from, how much traffic your site has, and other important information that you use in marketing and advertising.

As a successful business owner, you don’t have to do this every day. However, this is important to the profitability of the business so it is something that you stay on top of either daily or several times per week. Let’s say that you have some pay-per-click ads running on Google and Facebook and you want to monitor how effective they are.

Afterwards, you have some errands to run, or you have more play time with the kids, or you help them with their homework, or you meet a friend for a movie, or….you get the picture!

UPDATING YOUR WEBSITE(S)

The last thing on your “to do” list for the day is updating your site. Later in the week you’ll be adding some new seasonal products, but today you just want to revise some web page content and catch attention by announcing the future sale and new products.

That’s it for today! It was one of the busiest on your weekly calendar with processing transactions, updating the site, building traffic through social media, and some review of key performance indicators.

You’ve been productive in maintaining and continuing to grow your ecommerce business, been productive in your personal life, and there was time for some fun too!

POSSIBILITIES FOR TOMORROW

Tomorrow you’ll begin again with processing transactions and send communication to your purchasers. Then you’ll do a complete inventory check. Also, (and you don’t know this yet, because it hasn’t happened yet) you will have some inquiries from customers that you’ll need to respond to. Later, according to your calendar, you’ll spend time going into more depth on evaluating the Key Performance Indicators for your ads. Based on the analytics information, you may want to change your ads.

After that, you’re working on the newsletter that will go out tomorrow night to all of your customers and folks on your email list, informing them of some sales and special events coming up. Exciting!! By the way, you can do this most anytime, which will leave more free time for fun during the day.

Hopefully, we have painted enough of a picture for you in “a day in the life of an business owner” that you can start to imagine it for yourself. The days are busy and full of a variety of activities. For sure, you must be organized to get everything done. At the end of the day, you are definitely NOT bored, you are rewarded for your hard work, and you had fun doing it!