Springtime is here, and that means it's time to throw open the virtual windows of your business and let some fresh air in. In this episode, I'm walking you through 5 things you can do to spring clean your business - from updating your website to the most important one: running a realignment assessment to make sure your business still fits the life you actually want.
If things are feeling a little stuck or you're in a bit of a funk, this reset is exactly what you need.
Grab the Anti-Strategy Guide π https://www.amytakespictures.com/anti-strategy
Timestamps
00:00:00 - feeling stagnant and stuck?
00:00:48 - why spring cleaning matters for your business
00:02:32 - the 5 things to spring clean
00:02:37 - freshen up your online storefront
00:04:11 - cultivating an engaged community
00:06:27 - does it spark joy?
00:08:52 - showing your face matters
00:10:35 - the most important question of all
00:11:53 - when your goals change
00:13:18 - your business can pivot with you
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Watch on YouTube β https://www.youtube.com/amyeaton
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Full Transcript
Tell me if this sounds familiar. You've been going through the motions in your business. You're going through your never-ending to-do list. Maybe you're in a funk, and things are starting to feel stagnant.
Well, my friend, springtime is here, and that means it's time to throw open the virtual windows of your business and let the sunshine and fresh air in. You're going to do a proper reset on your business. Out with the old stagnant energy and in with new, fresh, revitalized energy.
I'm Amy. I'm a former burned out photographer turned multiple 6-figure creative entrepreneur who works less than 25 hours a week. And I run my business in rhythm with nature. And that means that in springtime, it's time for spring cleaning. So let's dive in.
Now, I don't know about you, but when springtime rolls around, I start to feel all the feelings of possibility and hope, and I look forward to what's to come. It really genuinely feels like an opportunity for a fresh start when the snow melts. I live in Canada, so that's a very real thing. When the snow melts and the flowers start to peek through and everything starts to become lush and green again, it's an exciting time. And it can be an exciting time for our business too.
Now, one of the things that I love doing in springtime is spring cleaning, getting rid of all of the old stuff that's been bogging me down, making space for new things, and that's exactly what we're going to do in our business too.
Now, if you're like me and you've been in business for a minute, you may find that things start to feel stagnant after a while. You go through the rhythm and things build up. So maybe you have an email list that's full of subscribers that don't really engage anymore. Or maybe your social media has become a weird mishmash of things that you're not really even interested in anymore. Maybe you have a ton of followers who don't engage because they're in a different place in their life and they're not interested anymore. Things become stale after a while.
And that is why spring cleaning is so important and I think that we should all be doing it at least once a year.
A reset lets you refresh your online presence. It lets you update your online presence, and it gives you an opportunity to realign your business with the goals that you have for your business and for your life. This is a good opportunity to take a close look at your business and make sure that it is actually what you want to be doing and that you're headed in the direction you really genuinely want to go.
So with all that in mind, let's go through 5 things that you can do to spring clean your business this year.
Number one, update that website, my friends.
Listen, I am so guilty of this. So I'm in no position to criticize anyone about their outdated website, but I can tell you that with my spring cleaning this year, my website is at the top of the list, because my business has pivoted a fair bit in the last year and my website doesn't quite reflect that yet. I'm pretty sure the link in my menu to my podcast still goes to my old podcast name. So yeah, I have some work to do there.
This is a great opportunity to check to make sure all of your links still go to the right place. Check and make sure that copyright at the bottom of your page is updated to the correct year. Go to your about page. How old is that headshot on your about page? Be honest. Maybe it's time for a fresh new one. Maybe you want to update some details there. Maybe you have some new accolades that haven't been added to it, or maybe you want to put a different tone on your about page. That is a great thing to do during spring cleaning.
So go through all of the pages on your website, make sure all of the links still work. Make sure that there hasn't been anything that has been broken and has some weird formatting issues, and update any of the information that is now defunct or that could use a refresh. And have fun with it.
It's great to refresh your online presence. Your website is like your online storefront or your online office building. Just imagine putting little flowers in your little window boxes outside of your virtual online space. That's what it's like to update your website. So enjoy it.
Number two, time to purge that email list.
So that means that you're going to go into your email list and you are going to remove anyone who hasn't engaged in some time.
Now you don't have to straight up remove them. What I usually do is I will highlight people who haven't engaged with any of my emails in maybe the last 6 months or so. And I'll send them an email that says, "Hey, I'm cleaning my email list. If you still want to be on it, click this link." And that link will flag that they are still engaged, they do want to stay on the list. Everyone who doesn't click, they get deleted and removed from my list.
Because number one, we pay for our subscribers. I'm not going to be paying for people who aren't reading my stuff. Plus, it changes your open rates. It makes your open rates look a lot lower than they really are just because you have a slew of uninterested people on your email list who just maybe goes to their junk mail and maybe they just delete them or maybe they just ignore them.
We want to remove those people from our email list and cultivate a community online that is engaged and interested in what we do.
Me personally, I am not interested in having a huge audience. I'm interested in having an engaged audience. A huge audience does nothing for me if they are ignoring everything that I'm doing. So I would rather have a small, more intimate audience of people who actually are interested in what I'm doing.
So that's what I do with my email list is I cull that fairly regularly. Now that means that my email list doesn't necessarily grow by thousands every year. I don't care. My purpose of my email list is so that when I email the people who are on it to tell them about things that are going on or to share a new episode or to talk about a new program that I offer, that people are paying attention, they're like, "Oh, cool, something new" and they're clicking through and they're interested in what's happening.
And that's why I go through and cull my email list on a regular basis. And the springtime is the best time to do that.
So depending on what you use for an email marketing service provider, I use Kit, and I set up an automation. Most email marketing services will have the option for you to set up some automation, where you can identify the people who are what we would call cold subscribers, people who haven't engaged in quite a while, and you can send an email out just to those people, give them a chance to re-engage, and if they don't, they're out of here.
Number three, you are going to Marie Kondo the crap out of your social media presence.
Now, if you're not familiar with Marie Kondo, she is the genius mind behind tidying up and purging things from your life that don't hold as much meaning anymore. She has a series of books. I think her most famous book is probably The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up. And basically, it involves sitting with everything in your home, having a look at it, looking at it carefully. Does it spark joy? If it doesn't spark joy, you can get rid of it. That's a very basic analogy of what she does.
But essentially that's what you're going to do with your social media with the spring cleaning.
As you're scrolling, you don't necessarily have to go and intentionally go on Instagram or go on TikTok or wherever and do this, but just as you're going through the spring and you're scrolling Instagram or you're scrolling whatever your social media platform of choice is, if you see a post that doesn't bring you joy, unfollow.
You can also mark things as not interested on Instagram at least, and I believe also on TikTok and so on. Most places will have that. A way to cue the algorithm. I don't really want to see this is a way to manually take control of what the algorithm is showing you.
So if you are scrolling, try to do it consciously so that as you're going through, "Oh, I like this post," like this, give it a heart, give the algorithm a cue that I want to see more of this. And then you scroll on. "I don't like this person anymore. They don't make me feel good, so I'm going to unfollow them." And then you're scrolling and you see a piece of content about something that just doesn't make you feel good inside, so you're not interested in that.
It's about consciously scrolling and telling the algorithm what you do and do not want to see, because then when you open your social media, instead of being bombarded with things that make you uncomfortable or make you not feel good or make you feel bad about yourself, you are seeing things that make you happy, things that make you feel inspired, things that bring you peace or joy.
Trust me, it makes a massive difference in how you feel about social media. I do it year round. But if you're going to do it once, do it in the spring and purge all of those things from social media that you do not want to see and you do not want to engage with. It'll make your life so much easier, I promise.
Number four, now this is a quick one. Refresh your profile photo.
So when was the last time you updated that profile photo? Time for a new one, my friends.
Now, if you don't have your face as your profile photo, I encourage you to make it your face, because if you are a small business of whatever kind, our biggest superpower as a small business is us as people. That is why people tend to support small business over big corporations.
Big corporations are trying to find ways to bottle this magic of personal connection because it is so powerful right now in terms of connecting with consumers. We have that easily. We have that naturally, we have it in spades. We are small businesses usually with one or two people. We can be present, we can connect with our people, and we can do that with ease.
Corporations are trying to do it through user generated content and hiring spokespeople and hiring actors to pretend that they are the face of their company and so on and so forth. We don't need to do any of that stuff. We just need to show up as ourselves.
So take a photo of yourself, try to take a nice one. Doesn't have to, you don't have to hire a brand photographer per se, although it can be a really great thing to do in the spring to give your business a refresh, give yourself some confidence online. But because people are looking to connect, that photo doesn't have to be perfect.
So just find a place where you feel really comfortable, really at home, whether that's your studio or out in the forest or in your backyard or with your dog or your cat or whoever, have a fun time with it, take a profile photo and put it up. It'll just make you feel so much better. Give you a nice fresh update.
Number 5 and perhaps the most important of this entire list. If you do nothing else, please do this.
I want you to run a realignment assessment with your business.
So in this process, you're going to take a very hard and honest look at your business and determine if it is still aligned with your values. If it is still aligned with the life that you want for yourself, not just your business but your life.
As small business owners, as entrepreneurs, this is not a job. This is our life that we are choosing. There is very little distinction between the two. Of course, we have boundaries in our life where work is work and our life is our life, but there is so much interconnectedness.
So it is really important that if you want your life to be whatever you want it to be, if you want to be able to travel, if you want to be able to live in a rural area, if you want to be able to move whenever you want, if you want to only work 10 hours a week or 15 hours a week, if you want to have the kind of business where you can become an expert on stage, whatever it is that your goals are for your life and for your work. Is your business still leading you there? Does it still fit?
Because our goals change. Our personal preferences change. Mine certainly have.
If you had asked me a few years ago, my goal would have been to make a million dollars a year. 7-figure year entrepreneur would have been my goal. And I don't know, I'm older now. I'm tired. Now my goal is to not have to worry about money. I do want to be financially comfortable and free. Part of that is that I am financially comfortable and free. So I don't feel that pressure to grind and grind and grind and make more and more and more money. I want a simple life. I want to enjoy my life.
So it's not always about more money, but you may find that your goals have changed. Maybe your values have changed. The things that you want for your life are different now. That's okay. Your business can pivot with you because that's one of the joys of having our own business, right? We can pivot it when we need to.
But having a close look at that business and seeing, does this still fit? Does my business model still work for what I want for my life? Does working with this particular subset of clients still light me up? Does creating these products still bring me joy? Those kinds of things.
It can be tough because you may face some answers that you're not ready for. Like if you've spent a lot of time building a business and you've gotten yourself to a certain level of success, but then you look around and you realize that it's not quite what you wanted or it's no longer what you want. It can feel a little scary.
You can absolutely pivot and you can pivot with care. It doesn't have to be abrupt, but the first step is knowing that some things need to change. And after that, you can start to make a plan for pivoting that business so it is more aligned.
Now, if this sounds good to you, if you want help figuring out if your business is still aligned, if you want help figuring out how to make social media and content for your business feel better to you, if you want a really good fresh start in spring and you want to feel amazing about your business, I highly recommend you grab my anti-strategy PDF guide.
You just download it, it has some information. It definitely will pump you up about wanting to create your own path forward to your own version of success. It also has a lot of prompts in it, journaling prompts, things to write, to explore, to reflect on, to think through, that will help you figure out what does that path actually look like for my business. How can I connect with my audience in a way that feels authentic and genuine to me, and not in a way that feels forced or very rigid with all these rules. It's very freeing.
So you can grab that in the description below. It is totally free. I hope that you love it. It has brought a lot of inspiration to the people who have grabbed it. I've heard so many wonderful things. So I hope that you love it too.
Okay, that's it for this week. Thank you so much for tuning in. I look forward to seeing you next time.
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Join me on Instagram β https://www.instagram.com/amy.takes.pictures
Watch on YouTube β https://www.youtube.com/amyeaton
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