Step 4: Ask Yourself If You Would Benefit from Expanding or Narrowing Your Niche
Another way in which you want to audit your business periodically is to see if your niche needs to be broadened or narrowed. It’s possible that when you started your business, you niched down too narrowly, and it has caused you to experience stifled profits.
Or, maybe you went too broad and found it impossible to be competitive with consumers and in the search engine results pages because you are trying to attract such a broad audience.
You must find the sweet spot of a niche to cater to the needs of a big enough audience that it’s profitable for you but not trying to lead everyone.
Sometimes, narrowing your niche will mean tweaking it to address a specific demographic. For example, instead of targeting everyone who wants to lose weight or get fit, you could target people over 40 years old.
Then, you must start asking yourself if you should narrow your niche even more. For example, you may only want to cater to women or men over 40. You could still see a lot of success with this type of narrowing, but if you continued to whittle it down, it might become too specific to profit from significantly.
You might want to conduct an audit about how much of an audience you’ve been able to grow over the past months and the years. If you struggle to attract new people, it may be a sign that you need to expand.
Or, if you are attracting visitors, but your products aren’t converting, it may be a sign that you are trying to market with a catch-all approach, and people don’t feel your content is specifically relevant to their needs, so you should narrow it down.
You can learn a lot from keyword tools, but you also want to get online and look at the size of the market, the engagement that you are seeing on social media platforms, and which products are dominating so that you can try to figure out if your slant is too broad or too narrow.
You can also look at the engagement that you have had with your subscribers and customers. You may be able to spot patterns and trends that show you exactly which direction you need to go.
For example, suppose you receive many emails telling you that they are looking for more products geared toward senior citizens. In that case, you will know that most of your subscriber base is in that age bracket, which might improve your profits to zero in on that demographic base.
Step 5: Check Your Productivity and Time Management
Another part of your audit should be how effectively (or ineffectively) you manage your time and achieve the productivity you want in your business. If you notice that you are spending a lot of hours working but not earning as much as you hoped, it may be a sign that you must enact some strategic time management efforts.
The longer you work online, the more distractions you may encounter. At the beginning of your business journey as an entrepreneur, you might be motivated and highly focused on the tasks.
But as time passes, and especially as you start earning money, you may let your foot off the gas a bit and allow yourself some indulgences that come with working from home.
Growing your business requires you to be tough on yourself and ensure that you are adhering to a proper schedule that contributes to both the success of your business and the balance with your personal life, too.
When you audit your time and effort, you may discover that you are not achieving even a quarter of what you could produce if you eliminate all your distractions and focus on the task at hand.
You also might discover in your audit that some of the tasks you must carry out as a solo online entrepreneur might be best handed off to someone else. The administrative work and jobs that slow you down can detract from the profitability of your business if you’re not careful.
You never want to get in the mindset where you believe you are the only one who can do a job. Many freelance service providers are willing to act as your virtual assistant, ghostwriter, and graphic design specialist so that you can focus on recruiting affiliates, brainstorming products, going through your data analytics, etc.
You may have to crack down on yourself initially until you get used to a stricter productivity environment. You may need to change the space you are working in and even use tools that keep you locked out of websites like Netflix until your tasks are done.
You won’t have any information until you track how you spend your time. Some tools can do this for you, so at the end of the day, you know which sites you are on, how long you were on them, and whether they align with your work goals.
Another thing you may discover is that your productivity is not lacking at all, and in fact, you are turning into a workaholic. If you conduct an audit and determine that you are not spending enough time with your loved ones or even relaxing by yourself, it may be time to lighten your load and step away from work more often.
When you’re ready to discuss or develop your marketing strategy, we can help. Contact us and schedule a free marketing consultation.