What Can You Improve By 10% In Your Online Business?
Jan 3rd, 2008 by admin
Firstly, have you decided on your Mission Statement for 2008 yet, and have you started repeating it to yourself? (see yesterday’s post)
Most people rack their brains trying to come up with a great new idea to make them a millionaire. Most of these people never make a million and never come up with that once elusive idea that could change their lives.
What they fail to realise is that most people who become millionaires don’t actually come up with new inventions or totally new services. What they do is make something that already exists, or provide an existing service … BUT … they do it better and bigger than others who do the same but fail to make a lot of money.
So as the New Year gets going, take some time to think about your entrepreneurial ambitions.
Are you beating yourself up trying to come up with totally new product or service ideas? If you are, don’t spend to much time on it.
Instead look at what is successful for others already. Then think up 20 ways you can improve on what they are doing. Look at your competitors, what are they doing that you’re not? How can you improve on their:
- Product
- Price
- Service
- Marketing
If you can copy what someone else is doing, and do one of these areas better, you have an immediate competitive advantage that you can heavily promote. Just a 10% improvement in one area will give you a significant advantage.
In fact why not take the time to study your existing business and see what you can improve for 2008. What could you do 10% better than you’re already doing? Think of the areas above? Again think up 20 ways of doing things differently.
It’s often difficult to come up with 20 different ways, but trying to think of the last few will often have you thinking out of the box, and that’s when you may come up with a golden nugget!
One final piece of advice. When looking at your business products and tasks, consider which actually contribute the most to your profits. Use the 80 – 20 rule. Often you’ll find that 20% of the things you do or 20% of your products create 80% of your profits … if you can think of ways of improving these products and activities by 10%, you’ll have a much bigger impact on your profits … 10% of 80% is a lot more than 10% of 20%!
So take some time out and stand back from your daily activities, analyse your business as above, or if you haven’t started a business yet, analyse someone else’s … I did just that before Christmas and that’s when I realised that I needed to focus on list building and do that a lot better, which led to my mission statement for 2008, and to the current project I’m working on right now … I got so many new ideas from completing the exercise.
Don’t forget to share this post if you find it useful, and leave a comment either way!
Until tomorrow …
Richard
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