IntegratED With Jamie Palmer - A podcast for online entrepreneurs

Content vampires are a very real threat to any entrepreneur that has made their business around sharing their wisdom and knowledge with others. These are people who make their living off of taking material from other business personnel and selling their own watered-down version of the insight. This has become increasingly present in my own life within the past few months and I have seen it affect others that I am close with as well.

With the holiday season in full swing, there are probably more and more things that are coming up for you to do each day. There are only so many hours in a day, and as an entrepreneur your time is a valuable key to building your business and having continuous success. Along with keeping you on track, giving yourself more time by saying no to thing you don’t want to do will allow you to be creative while focusing on your business and let you be more intentional with your current and future choices.

Aaron and I review how to streamline your selling through sites such as Amazon in order to create more traffic to your business and ultimately be successful in the e-commerce world. Aaron also offers the key to spreading out your business across multiple platforms. Each of us gives our best advice for entrepreneurs who are looking to start out on their own and explain the different pillars of success that we both utilize to keep our businesses running in the most effective way possible.

I can admit that I am guilty of overcommitting. Agreeing to too many things in the day that I know I won't be able to accomplish. For me, when I was not able to complete the near impossible list that I had created for myself, I would often be disappointed and feel as though I were playing catch up. As a mom and an entrepreneur, there were countless times when unexpected responsibilities would pop up that I was unable to get out of and I would leave half of my to-do list for tomorrow

It's time to discuss one of the biggest mistakes that I am always seeing entrepreneurs make. You start a project, the interest is generated and you're immediately ready to move onto the next best thing. But there's a problem with that - so many entrepreneurs are great at starting but need help on following through. All entrepreneurs have a craving to constantly be creating, but the only way to ensure success in business is to complete the products or services that you already have.

On this week's episode, I met with Rebecca Douros who is a life coach and retreat specialist. Her work focuses on helping women and entrepreneurs get unstuck in their business.

She shares her insight on how she was able to become more courageous, both in her personal life as well as her business and uses that to her advantage. Rebecca tells us how others can utilize this opportunity as well, to find bravery in business that allows them to continue their growth despite the fear of failure.

This is one of the many marketing tactics that I see out there in the online world. The problem with this is that it is not how you build a sustainable online business. You have to have a strategy, you have to be consistent, and you have to grow strategically over time. It's not complicated, but these marketing gimics aren't going to get you to a million dollars a year.

Sales tracking is one of the most important actions you can take in your business to help you understand your current reality when it comes to where you are in business.

For the longest time, I never tracked my monthly numbers on a daily basis. I would do it monthly and hope that I ended up at my goals. I made a sheet and started tracking every sale in real time, what my monthly goals was, what was the actual cash into the business, along with my yearly goals and where we were at towards that goal.

I genuinely believe that to build an online business you need to do it sustainably and lay the proper foundation in place so that you can grow strategically over time. This starts by understanding with great specificity what the customer/client journey is and how you are going to help clients go from where they are to where they want to be. Meaning that you need to understand how your product or service can help user them along on this journey.

All too often I hear entrepreneurs say, "My clients just don't get it." or "I'm having issues with my clients" or "My clients aren't getting me the stuff I need to do my job properly." When I hear this sort of thing, I can't help but challenge the thinking because from my experience that often is a lack of education on the part of the entrepreneur with their client or prospect.