How To Have A Successful Online Business – Be Consistent

One of the things that I have found difficult with my online business is consistency. Consistency is the key to building any online business. It doesn’t matter whether you are a blogger, website owner or affiliate marketer, consistency is the biggest key to your success.

I find being consistent difficult due to other demands on my time and quite often my mood…. not great!

This is not a post about making excuses, it is a post about how to be consistent when consistency is not your strong point.

We all have different reasons for not being able to be consistent. It could be our family commitments. Being consistent in term time when we have children is easy but what about the School holidays ? Being consistent when mental illness can affect us differently on different days is a nightmare for a lot of people. Being consistent during our usual working week is okay but how do we remain consistent when extra work issues or family pressures eat in to our time?

It does not matter what the reason, consistency is hard but it is something we need to achieve if we are to have successful online businesses.

Why is consistency important ?

We need to be consistent in our online business for the search engines and our readers. Click To Tweet

The search engines will always favour sites that have regular updated information on them. Google wants to serve its customers well, so will give priority to websites or blogs that have been around for a while and ones that regularly post new information. These two things add up to a trust factor with Google and the other search engines.

It can be really hard in the beginning to stay consistent, especially if we are not seeing any tangible results for all of our hard work. In the beginning we have to have the mindset that we are building the foundations of our business.

Our readers and followers will also appreciate consistency. Communicating regularly on social media, through emails or new blog posts will keep them interested. A lack of consistency will open up a gap for someone else doing similar things to take your place. The online world is a competitive place to work in.

How Can We Achieve Consistency?

1. The first thing to do is to recognise that this is a business and not just a hobby and treat it as such.

One of my biggest mistakes early on in my business was not setting my working hours. I just worked as much as I could and as often as I could but I soon ran out of steam and became frustrated when others things ate into my time.

2. Set Your Working Hours

Make sure you are realistic with these and make sure other people recognise that these are your working hours too. We all have different demands on our time so this has to be personal to you. Don’t plan to work for 2 hours before you go to work if you are useless at getting up early and don’t plan to work for 8 hours a day on the weekend if you have a family or social commitments.

However, you do need to assign some time to your business and on a regular basis. I personally believe that a minimum of 2 hours a day, 7 days a week is a bare minimum for building any online business. If you religiously stick to these hours they will become a habit and your online business will be all the better for it.

3. Plan Your Time

You need to concentrate on the things that will move your business forward and these things should take priority over anything else. I know this can be hard when you are just starting out and you have a lot of learning to do. Assuming you already have your site set up as a bare minimum, then your focus should be on content.

Content is king and you should ideally be posting to your site 2 to 3 times a week. Google likes consistency with new content. It will start to crawl your site and index it ready for searches, more consistently if you are consistent.

I find it easier to block my work at the beginning of each month. I will decide on the subjects of each of my posts and then do my keyword research for each of the titles. If you need help with finding great Keywords and titles, take a read of my post by clicking here.

I then plan out an outline for each post so I know what research needs doing ready to write the article later. I then tend to write in blocks of 3 at a time, meaning I have posts ready to publish ahead of time. I also make sure I spend no more than 15 minutes a day on social media. Social Media can be a huge time waster. You might want to take a read of my post on the tools and services I cannot live without by clicking here. I try to automate as much as I can.

I find that focusing on one task at a time, means I make the best use of my working hours and get more done. You need to create a plan and a process and stick to it.

How To Deal With Hinderances

Hinderances can be anything, unexpected illnesses… I had a bad dose of the flu recently, family crises or even fun social invites. No matter what it is, it will take you away from your daily working schedule. If you are anything like me it can be really hard to get back to your daily routine and panic can set in. This only serves to waste even more time that should be spent on your business.

The reality is that we can work from anywhere as long as you have at least your smartphone. Even when hinderances occur we can at least do some jobs in spare moments. It is your business and running your own business, at least at the start needs a lot of attention.

If you have planned ahead with your posts as I suggest then you can still post content on time.

However, If you have got your self out of a routine and haven’t planned ahead, Don’t Panic not all is lost and your business won’t disappear but you do need to get back to your routine as quickly as you can.

When you run your own online business and want it to be successful you do have to be consistent with everything you do.

I hope you have found this post useful and thought provoking. How organised and consistent are you really? Let me know how you are doing and how I might be able to help you by leaving your comments or questions below. I will get back to you as soon as I can.

With Grace and Gratitude

Karen