Expert Tips: What do you focus your time and money on in your business to maximize results?

As a home business owner or freelancer, you know all too well the challenge of running a business, You wear every hat from product or service provider, marketer, accountant, customer service, and more in an attempt to keep expenses low. Most likely your daily to-do list requires more hours than you have in a day, which means you need to prioritize your activities. This week, I asked work-at-home experts to share their opinions and advice on what they focus their time and money on in their business to maximize results.

Eric Brantner, BloggerElementary.com

Focus on outreach: Since I became a full-time blog owner, one thing I’ve learned is that content is only half the battle. Great content is fine, but if no one ever sees it, what good is it? These days I spend probably 50% of my time on outreach. From answering HARO requests like these to making connections on Twitter and LinkedIn for my various sites, it’s endless value. Through outreach not only have we managed to get the word out about our sites, but we’ve also gained valuable backlinks in the process, as well add guest contributor spots for multiple publications. Never underestimate the value of outreach.

Dani Meyer, The Adventure Bite

We focus our time on creating new valuable content for our websites and clients, and outreach to new clients.

We focus our money on training courses that increase our skill sets and on assets that dramatically increase our earning potential.

Elizabeth Grace Saunders, www.RealLifeE.com

In my time investment philosophy, I encourage individuals to see time as the limited resource it is and to allocate it in alignment with their personal definition of success. That leads to a number of practical ramifications:

Decide where you will not spend time: Given that you have a limited time budget, you will not have the ability to do everything you would like to do regardless of your efficiency.

Strategically allocate your time: Boundaries on how and when you invest time in work and in your personal life help to ensure that you have the proper investment in each category.

Set up automatic time investment: Just like you set up automatic financial investment to mutual funds in your retirement account, your daily and weekly routines should make your time investment close to automatic.

Aim for a consistently balanced time budget: Given the ebbs and flows of life, you can’t expect that you will have a constantly balanced time budget but you can aim for having a consistently balanced one. Over the course of a one- to two-week period, your time investment should reflect your priorities.

Rueben Taylor, Business Wealth Educators

Think about where you’re investing your time in your business and how much of your time are you investing in growth. What I mean by that is, how much time is spent on marketing and selling? Take a couple of seconds now to work out your average week – What percent of your time is going into sales and marketing? Growing the business; moving the business forward, versus being on the tools; dealing with customer issues or whatever it might be.

Most business out there could be ten, twenty, or thirty percent. There’s some that might have a lot more than that. I recommend at least 50% of your time needs to be allocated to this side of the business. It’s easy to find the other people who can deliver the work. And the rest of the time, you need to focus on making sure that’s working well by creating systems, building your team, creating it. Just remember; where you put your time is going to shape your business’ future. If you want more sales, if you want more growth – Focus more time on marketing sales and growth. To start, write down 3 areas you could be doing more of to grow your business. You could focus on more on marketing and selling and moving the business forward.

PETER COHAN, Peter S. Cohan & Associates

If your capital is running low, you must persuade potential investors that they will be missing out on high returns unless they write your venture a check.

To do that, start off by telling a story of a person in pain and how your venture will relieve that pain better than any other company.

Continue your tale by toting up the number of people who suffer from the same ailment and how much they are willing to pay for your product.

Note from Leslie: 

These are all excellent ideas. I know that I organize my day so that I focus my time based on what pays off first. I like the idea of determining what DOESN’T need to be done as well. That helps you free up time. And, of course, along with what pays now, it’s crucial that you do activities that keep the money coming down the road, which usually involved marketing, but also quality product or service, and excellent customer service.