You want to be more productive, right? Get more stuff done. Make a lot of progress. Start to move the bottom line to make your business more profitable. It’s what we all want. And most of us think we have to make some big leaps to get there. But here’s the big secret. It doesn’t have to be that way. If you focus on consistency and do something to make progress every single day, you’ll greatly increase your chances of success.
Remember the story of the turtle and the hare? It applies to all areas of your life, including your business. Yes, you can go all out and get a lot of work done all at once. For example, you may put in long hours for a couple of weeks to prepare for a new product launch, or when you’re first setting up your website. But this shouldn’t be your default strategy. Why? Because you’ll burn out.
Most entrepreneurs and small business owners have experienced burnout and know how long it can take to recover. A much better strategy – aside from those brief periods of hustle – is consistency. If you make an effort to get something done every single day, you’ll make a lot of progress in the long run. Over the course of a year, you will go further and your business will grow more than if you overdo it and then go into a slump because you have no energy for anything else.
On a daily basis, it’s much easier to motivate yourself to do something that takes fifteen minutes, than something that’s hard or takes a long time. Wherever you want to progress, keep it easy, make it fun, and get into the habit of doing it each and every day. In the long run, you’ll get a lot more done if you put in fifteen minutes per day, five days a week, than working for two hours once or twice a week.
That consistency habit can help you grow your business. Even better, when you start to put in a small bit of effort every day, you’ll build momentum and that’ll take you even further. Think of the snowball effect.
Shift your mindset towards a focus on consistency that will allow you to continue growing, expanding, and most importantly moving the needle in the right direction when it comes to your bottom line.
Consistency on your blog
One area where consistency will start to pay off quickly is when it comes to your website or blog. Putting out fresh content regularly is great for both your readers and search engines. Both will reward you for your hard work in their own ways.
Let’s start with the holy grail of web development. Free search engine traffic. We all want Google to send us as many new potential customers as possible. Google in turn want to send the freshest and most up-to-date information to their customers (i.e. people who search something via their search engine). How does Google’s desire to deliver the best possible result connect with you and your consistency?
When you update your site regularly, you’re showing the search engines that you are up to date and relevant. Search engines aren’t interested in dormant sites that have been sitting online for ten years and are probably outdated. So if you’re actively working on your blog, search engines will reward you by giving you higher priority over dormant sites. Of course there are many other factors that go into ranking, but creating content consistently is an easy way to improve your SEO.
Consistency and your readers
Consistency also nourishes the relationship you have with your readers. Think back on the last time you landed on a new blog or website through a Google search. Assuming the content was up to par, you appreciated the information, but were probably a long way from considering buying from this site, or even giving them your email address. If you were curious enough to browse around, you may have become interested enough to bookmark the site, or at the very least have it on your radar when you come across it again later.
When you update your site regularly, you’re training your website visitors to come back for more. They’ll get in the habit of visiting and reading often. Of course that’s not going to happen with every single person who comes across your site, which is fine. You want your ideal target audience, the people who are really interested in what you have to share. You’ll get their attention by publishing regularly. As they read and engage with you on your blog, they’ll move closer to becoming a subscriber and then a customer.
Of course, as an added bonus all this content you’re adding regularly is out there attracting new people through search engines, social media, and other people sharing links to your valuable content. That’s why you want to publish consistently to continue to grow.
Photo by Debby Hudson on Unsplash