Money-making activities: 3 types you need to move your business forward

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Today’s talking point:

Want to end your workday feeling like you've been super productive? Money-making activities are where it's at! That's because you know you’ve focused on the right tasks to move your business forward.⁣

In this episode, I'm revealing the 3 core groups of money-making activities to focus on to grow and run your business effectively. Plus I'll give you some examples of the daily activities you can focus on straight from my own dairy.

identifying your core money-making ACTIVITIES

How many times do you end a workday feeling completely overwhelmed? If it's more days out of the week than not, then keep reading. The power of money-making activities is that you end each workday feeling so, so good because you know you focused on the right tasks to move your business forward.

In order to manage and eventually scale a sustainable business, it is paramount that you know what money-making activities work for your business.

Marketing and launching are not one-size-fits-all strategies
Filling your day with tasks that make you feel like you’re doing the work (when really all you're doing is busy work) is not going to move your business forward
When you go all-in on what works for you, that is truly when the magic happens (because copying other people’s strategies will not help you reach your biggest goals)

And that is what I want to share with you today. I want to share how it's worked in my business and how I split these activities into different groups.

I don’t know if you’ve ever felt this, but when I first started my business I was constantly busy. I would leave, a meal with family on a Sunday to go home and work. I always had my nose in my laptop. I skipped lunch and I actually never seemed to really get anywhere.

So I wanted to figure out what I needed to do day in and day out to reach my goals without hitting burnout. And that came from reverse engineering and really digging into my business. Because I knew that there had to be a more productive way to run an online business.

So I’m going to start off by talking about the 3 groups of money-making activities generally. And then I’ll split those down even further into 4 smaller groups of daily activities that you want to make sure are on your calendar.

group 1: your current clients

This is first for a reason: there is no point in trying to get more customers and more clients if you are not serving those you already have.

I take the same approach with Instagram followers. There is no point in trying to get a hundred new Instagram followers per month if you are not nurturing the followers you already have.

So group number one, your current customers and clients is a huge, huge category for money-making activities. These are the people who have bought from you, who may buy again, and who will refer you to other people. This is the place that you want to put your focus.

For example, my day always starts by serving my current customers. That looks like checking in with my 1:1 clients. I then check in with my Busy to Boss Academy Facebook group.

Those are the things that I do at the start of every single day, because my customers come first.

Other things you can do in this category are:

Sending out surveys to existing clients to ask them how you can better serve them and provide them with a better service
Making sure that your programs and products are the best in your industry
Providing your clients and customers with the best possible experience once they have bought from you with onboarding processes
For product-based businesses, look at your packaging and how customers receive their goods

If there is ever a moment where you are thinking, “I want more clients and customers, and I want more income, but I don't know what to do” I would look at this category first. Instead of hustling to get new clients, check your current clients are getting the best service or products possible.

This leads us to the next group…

group 2: your community (potential clients)

When you focus on your current clients, it will make it easier to attract new potential clients to your community. Brilliant service will also mean that your current customers recommend you!

Here are some ideas to work on your community:

Building relationships with ideal customers
Messaging, commenting and engaging with other people on social media
Taking people behind the scenes of your business
Giving value with your content based on what your ideal client wants to know and see

group 3: yourself

The third group of money-making activities is focusing on yourself. And I shouldn't need to explain why this is here, but this doesn't just mean, getting out your yoga mat and having a green smoothie.

There is so much more to this than that. Self-care, doesn't have to be complicated. It can be as simple as going on walks or spending time with family.

These are all acts of self care that I do on a daily and weekly basis that don't take any investment other than my time.

A few things you can include in this category:

Organisation and having a process for time-blocking your week
Updating your calendar with daily profit activities
Organising your business files
Prioritising your mindset work

All of those are super important things that are going to make sure that you are focusing on you. And you might think that sitting down to plan your week is a waste of time, but actually it's one of the biggest money-making activities that you can do.

Basically, include self care activities that make you feel good, and that will help you show up as the best version of yourself.

Now, before we get into the next part of this post, I just want to say that it might seem like your Instagram feed and growing your audience should be your top priority. But it is far too easy to get caught in the trap of ticking a box by simply posting to Instagram or creating a bunch of Pinterest graphics.

We want to keep the focus on your money generating activities. So right now you might be looking at your calendar and thinking “I've got a lot of things on here that don't fit into these categories Holly. I don't even know what fits into these categories!”. Don’t worry, because we’re now going to move into the daily profit activities…

Daily profit ACTIVITIES

These are things you want to make sure you are doing in your business every single day. I’ve divided them into 4 groups of non-negotiable tasks. I’ll also share some of the exact activities I do in each of these areas.

These are basically a bank of profit-generating tasks that focus on the key areas of successful business growth. So the money-making groups are over-arching activities and this takes us deeper into what these tasks actually look like.

What you could do with these categories to allow you to maximise your impact whilst minimising your workload is to set aside an hour each day on your calendar and choose one daily profit activity from each of these four categories to execute. That is what we want to aim for.

This is going to ensure you have a repeatable monthly plan to grow your business. It also allows you to keep your audience engaged. It's also going to make sure that your daily profit habits give you a little bit of an edge, which means you'll be able to grow your email list, get a more engaged audience and make consistent scale set sales.

The reason we focus on these daily profit activities is not just to reach income goals. It also allows us to give ourselves time back each week that we can spend on other things. So no more spending all day glued to your desk wondering how to cut through all the noise in the online world!

Mind

Entrepreneurship is a mental game. And if you are neglecting this area, no amount of strategy or productivity will get you to that next milestone.

So how do you prep your mind for business growth? You do this by committing to daily mindset activities. And we're not just say affirmations to ourselves in the mirror. No, no, no. We're going to get a little bit deeper than that.

If you struggle to hit your goals or launch successfully, if things doing seem to be working in your business, then mindset is where you want to start. This is something you will want to prioritise because in order to become energetically available to your goals, it is essential you focus on your mindset.

We want to be preparing our brain for our most productive days!

My favourite activities to help mindset:

Morning pages or an end of day reflection. It is so incredible to help you empty your brain either before you start work or when you finish.
Morning lines. Essentially, you choose some of your goals or affirmations and write them as many times as you want.
Gratitude lists. I always split a piece of paper in half. On the first half, I write down a list of things I am grateful for in my current state or the past. On the second half, I write a list of things I am grateful for in the future as if they’ve already happened.
Meditation
Reading or listening to an inspiring podcast
Listening to affirmations
Visualisations
Exercise
Watching videos that hype you up. For example, I love Gary Vee’s videos!

Essentially, you can just pick one of these things per day to do for your business. It could be the same one every day for a month. It could be different every day!

Growth

Your community is your currency. So from your social media following to your email list, if you want to scale your business then you need to grow. It's a non-negotiable. But I know a lot of people ask, “how do I do that?” And so these kinds of growth activities are going to make you stop wondering how and allow you to focus on actually getting it done.

My challenge to you in this category is to commit to growing your community by one person a day. Just one person! That’s it.

So this could look like…

Growing your email list
Growing your social media following
Growing your network IRL

If you commit to this and track it, you will witness daily progress. But you will also position yourself to receive everything that you are trying to achieve.

Here are some different activities you could do for this category:

Interact and share knowledge in a Facebook group. Remember to share your email list on the days when you’re allowed to promote your own work!
Collaborate with someone else in your niche/industry. This is a great way to get in front of a new audience
Post to Instagram with a call to action – ideally one that drives people to your email list
Create a longform piece of content with a call to action to join your email list. For example, a blog post or a YouTube video
Update your most popular blog posts with content upgrades/freebies encouraging people to join your email list
Create Pinterest graphics for your lead magnets
Pitch to be a guest on someone’s podcast

There are so many more options here but I don’t want to overwhelm you!

Nourish

The nourish category is basically as simple as this providing overwhelming value to your audience. This means that they are going to be searching for ways to pay you.

So nourishing your community doesn't just position you as an expert in your industry. It also reminds your people that you are the key to their transformation. And these daily activities mean doing things like getting in front of your people, solving their problems whilst building a genuine connection that translates to money in your bank account.

The size of your community becomes irrelevant if you don’t nurture it. If you provide overwhelming value to your community, I promise they will fall madly in love with you. It’s as simple as that.

If you don't nurture your community, you really miss out on those authentic connections that fuel not just your business, but your soul as well.

These are different to the growth activities, which we've just talked about, which is where I think a lot of people think they overlap, but they don't. I really want to encourage you to keep these separate.

So here are some ideas for what you can do to nurture your audience:

Go live on Instagram with some valuable content
Send a nurturing email to your email list, sharing a personal story – people like to buy from people. Get inspired by your everyday life and connect it with your business purpose and values.
Write a blog post and solve a small problem for someone in your community
Show up on Instagram stories. Stories will go a long, long way to nourish your audience and establish you as an expert
Post a nourishing Instagram post. Use the CTA to ask people a question
Send a DM to a new follower saying hi (don’t ask for anything in return)

I am not asking you to do all of this right now. Don’t feel overwhelmed. But understanding this will also help you develop a content workflow that can run across your entire week.

Offer

then finally we have the author category. So obviously we want to make sales. We're not beating around the Bush, but are you making offers to your community daily? I'm going to guess that the answer is no. And a key difference between the I hit every single one of my goals this month, versus, you know, I didn't even come close is that they are always showing, telling an offering the community, the amazing things that they provide, but it's about doing it in a way without sounding like a broken record or annoying your audience that I know is, is super, super tricky.

This phase is about making sure, at least once a day, we are letting our community know how they can buy from us.

This can look like…

Sending out a sales email
Sharing client transformations and testimonials
Adding a PS to an email, offering a free discovery call – explain why this call will be helpful and valuable
Share what it’s like to work with you by sharing wins of your clients, or pictures of your products being used by happy customers
Offer a free workshop or masterclass

Final recap

If you're feeling overwhelmed right now, don't worry. What I want to encourage you to do is maybe go back and write down the ideas that stood out to you the most in each of those four categories.

What we want to do is combine those to create infinite combinations. Then just pick a daily profit activity from each of those four categories every day. You’re probably already doing some of them! Like Instagram posts and journaling, for example.

But what I want you to do is make sure that as you're planning every day and you identify how those activities fit into your money-making activities.

This way, when you get to the end of the week, you can look back and see that five days this week, you worked on your mind, you did something to grow your audience, to nourish your community and you did something to make an offer.

Imagine how good that’s going to feel?