The Savvy Seller with Kristen Doyle

142. Prioritizing for Profit: The Top 3 Tasks for Every Season of Your Online Business

• Kristen Doyle, TPT seller, SEO coach, and web designer

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Do you ever find yourself buried under an endless to-do list, bouncing from task to task, but never feeling like you're making true progress? If you're an online business owner, you're in familiar company. This common challenge of trying to handle everything all at once can be overwhelming. But recognizing which season your business is currently in can guide you in setting priorities that truly move the needle without veering into burnout.

When your list of business tasks is a mile long, there’s one important thing to remember: you don’t need to do everything at once! In this episode, I’m breaking down the three business seasons and sharing what to prioritize based on the specific season you’re in. You’ll also learn how to recognize when it’s time to shift from one season to the next. 

Each business season serves a special purpose. Whether you’re a seasoned entrepreneur or just starting out, recognizing and embracing your current business season allows for targeted growth and sustainable success without falling into the endless hustle trap. Wherever you are in your business, I’d love to hear about your priorities! Send me a message on Instagram @kristendoyle.co and share your current focus.

01:50 - What the three business seasons look like and how to identify which season you’re currently in

07:45 - Specific tasks to prioritize in each of the three business seasons

22:04 - Tell-tale signs that you’re ready to shift into a new season

26:49 - Action steps to take and apply to your business as soon as today

Links & Resources:

Show Notes: https://kristendoyle.co/episode142 

Tired of constantly hustling to sell your digital products? Check out my free 19-minute training where I show you how to turn all those products you already have into a profitable, automated business. 

 

Get more freedom and less stress ➡️ watch now at kristendoyle.co/training 

Check out my Everything Page at https://kristendoyle.co/everything

Kristen Doyle:

Do you ever feel just overwhelmed by your endless business to do list? Do you find yourself constantly jumping in between tasks, never really quite feeling like you're making any actual progress, or like you can never finish all the things on your checklist? Well, you are definitely not alone. This is one of the most common challenges that I hear from digital product creators, and course, creators and really all on business owners of any kind, and it's something I have struggled with myself in the past. But here's the good news that I've learned. You don't need to be doing everything all at once. In today's episode, I am breaking down exactly what to prioritize based on your specific season that you're in in your business right now, whether you are just starting out, you're in a growth phase or maybe you're in a phase of maintaining what you've already built. Because really what moves the needle the most right now for you depends entirely on where you are in your own business journey and just where you are in your life in general. So let's dive in to what these different business seasons actually look like. Are you a digital product or course creator, selling on platforms like teachers pay teachers, Etsy or your own website? Ready to grow your business, but not into the kind of constant hustle that leads straight to burnout? Then you're in the right place. Welcome to The Savvy Seller. I'm Kristen Doyle, and I'm here to give you no fluff, tools and strategies that move the needle for your business without burning you out in the process. Things like SEO, no stress marketing, email list building, automation, and so much more. Let's get started y'all. So let's dive into what these business seasons actually look like, so you can identify where you are right now and know what to prioritize in your season. So the first business season that you might be in is what I like to call a starting out season. This is probably where you are if you've just started your business or if you're still working on getting everything running well. This is where you're really building the foundations for your business. You're probably doing a lot of experimenting, because you're not quite sure what's working yet. So you're trying lots of different things to figure out what works. And you're creating that first set of products or offers that The second season that you'll move into is a season of growth you're going to sell. in your business. This is where you have that good foundation, and now you're ready to start scaling what's working well so that it can grow more and more. You might be expanding the products or the services that you offer, or building out really streamlined systems, cleaning up your processes, all of those kinds of things happen in growth seasons. And then in a maintenance season, you're taking those existing products, offers, assets you've created for your business, that you have that are working well, and you are really just optimizing those, automating some processes. And honestly, you're taking some time to step back a little bit so that you can make sure that you prevent burnout in your business. So let's talk about how you can figure out which season of business you are in right now. For someone who is in that starting out season, maybe you're still really figuring out who your target audience is and learning about them. You're not quite solid on who you're talking to. Maybe you are working on that initial offer that you're going to put out there, or you're building up an initial product catalog of digital products. You're probably still learning some of your platforms or tools that you're using for creation, and you're not quite solid on those things yet. And one of the biggest indicators that you're in that starting out phase is that you aren't quite yet bringing in consistent income in your business. Now, when it comes to the growth phase, some of the best indicators that you are ready to move into that growth phase are that you now have proven products they are consistently selling for you. You have a really clear understanding of who your target audience is, and how to talk to them, what they desire related to the products that you offer, what their pain points and their struggles are, and you're ready at this point to expand your reach and to increase your sales. You probably are hitting a point where you really need some systems in place, because the demands on you and your time are getting a little more than you can handle by yourself. So you're maybe thinking about putting in some systems to help you handle things, or even hiring maybe an assistant or VA to help you. For the maintenance phase. If you are in a maintenance phase in your business, you probably already have a nice, solid catalog of products, or you have your services or your core offers really dialed in, but you are feeling a little overwhelmed. You have that feeling that you might be approaching a point of burnout in your business. This is a really good indicator that you need to move into a maintenance period for a little while and step back temporarily from your business. Sometimes this is due to life changes, health reasons, or it could just be that you've been working really hard for a really long time and you need to take a little break. In that maintenance period, what you want to do is preserve those things that are working and set up systems to automate things so that you don't have to be as active and as present, and give yourself space for things like brainstorming and future planning, those sorts of things that we don't have time to do when we're busy in a growth season, or we're just starting out because we have too much on our plate. Those are great things to be doing during your maintenance period. It's really important to figure out what season you are in and understand that specific season, because every season in your business requires a different focus, different strategies and a different amount of work from you. If you are trying to do growth season tasks when you are in a maintenance season, that will lead you straight to burnout in your business. So it's important to make sure that you're being honest with yourself about where you are and what current season works for you, so that you can set some appropriate expectations and goals for your business. I know for me, I moved from a kind of a starting out season to a big season of growth in my business, and I was pushing hard. I had created a boot camp. I had launched it several times. I was, at that point, launching it three times a year, and along with that, I was growing my web design business and working with more and more clients. And what happened is I didn't notice those signs that I was getting close to burnout until it was a little too late, and I was overwhelmed, stretched way too thin, just exhausted. I had gotten myself to a point of just exhaustion and burnout because I didn't make that shift into the maintenance phase I needed to move into for a little while. Alright, so now that we've talked about the different business seasons and you know how to decide which one you're in, let's break down those specific tasks that you need to be prioritizing in each one. If you're in a starting out season, your biggest priorities are your audience, your products and your brand. Let's talk about what that looks like. You want to make sure that you are spending some time in that starting out season really getting to know your audience, not just on a surface level, but a lot more deeply. So you're researching things like where your ideal customers hang out online. You're starting to hang out in those same places so that you can study their language that they use around the things that you offer, especially. You can learn their pain points, their struggles, the desires or the goals that they have for themselves, because that's what's going to help you really identify what solutions they're looking for so that you can create an audience that is based on real people and not just assumptions that you're making. It's really important to know your audience well, because that is how you create the right type of messaging that speaks to that audience. So don't skip out on doing the audience research work, just because it feels maybe like it's not the actual progress. You don't see those tangible results at the end of it, like a product that you've created that you can now sell. But that foundational work really is so important for being able to reach your audience and talk to them in a way that resonates with them long term. So don't skip out on that work. It is so, so important. The second thing to focus on during your starting out phase is creating really high quality products to start your business with. The focus here should be on quality, not quantity. I know a lot of people will throw numbers out there, like you really need to build up your catalog of digital products to a certain number, but I would say focus on quality over quantity and make sure that you are creating the right products. You need to create products that solve specific problems that your target audience needs, because those are the products that they're willing to purchase. When you're doing this, don't take shortcuts. Make sure you're including lots of support materials, like instructions, examples, templates for things, so that your products are really thoroughly created and they are high quality. As you're working on these, take some time to gather feedback from people, especially those early customers and maybe even some friends, before you start getting purchases and be willing to make changes. I know once we've created a product, we've poured our heart and soul into it, sometimes we feel like it is perfect, just like it is, and if everyone else doesn't see that, then that's their problem. But if you want to sell these products, make sure that you are gathering feedback from other people, and that you're looking at it objectively and being willing to make some changes and adjustments based on the feedback that you get. It really can help your products just be that much better, which will help them to sell more in the long run. The third thing to focus on, if you're in that starting out phase, is establishing a good, solid brand foundation. Now this could look like developing those visual elements of your brand. What are your fonts and colors? What is your logo going to look like? What style will you use in the products that you're creating? Once you nail that down, I would encourage you to start creating templates for your products, because that will really help you speed up the creation process long term. You can create templates for email, opt ins, for downloadable PDF kind of products for your social media, posts, anything that you are creating on a regular basis. Go ahead and create templates for those things so you can save time in the long run, when you are creating. You'll want to make sure that you have gotten your brand name in as many platforms as possible, even if you aren't using them all yet. Even if you don't think you will use them! A good example of that for me is I just really don't see myself creating a lot of tiktoks or posting on X slash Twitter. It's just not my thing. But I don't want anyone else on those platforms having my name, because that could lead to some confusion with my audience. And you never know, things might change, and I may want to start doing that someday. So I went ahead and got those names on those platforms so that they will be mine if I need them. Think about getting your brand name on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, X, I keep forgetting to call it that TikTok, Threads, Pinterest. But then also make sure that you're grabbing your brand name as a.com. Grab that URL so that when you're ready for a website, even if you're not using one right now, you're able to build your website on that domain. The other thing I would suggest that you do, as you're establishing your foundation for your business in this starting out phase, is go ahead and start building your email list. It is never too early to start building a list. The only caveat there is, once you start building your list, you do need to start emailing them, even if you only have two or three people on your list today. Make sure that you are emailing them on a regular basis, because that way, as people come onto your list, they are immediately getting to know you, and they aren't forgetting who you are if they join your list and it's two or three months before you ever email them. All right. So those three tasks are the ones that I would recommend you work on when you're starting out. But as your business gains traction, your priorities need to shift. So once you have those solid products and you have a growing audience, here's where to focus your energy during a growth season in your business. You've sold lots of your products or offers by now, so that means you have some data. So spend some time analyzing your data to find opportunities to improve, opportunities to grow, what kinds of new products you should be creating. To do that, you want to track two key metrics, your page views and your conversion rate. Page views tell you if you're getting enough traffic to your offers, your products, your posts, and then conversion rates tell you how many people are actually purchasing those things. So you want to make sure that you are focusing your efforts on products that are like those that are your current best performing products. So identify those best performers, figure out what they have in common or why they are working so well. Look for things like patterns and customer behavior too, and then use your data to guide your decisions in the future. Instead of just guessing about things, you can use that data to create more products, like your best performing products, to change the content of your course or to shift the messaging around your service offer. It takes all the guesswork out when you're able to analyze your data. Once you've analyzed your data, take a little time to optimize and update those existing products. So you'll identify some high performers, but you'll also see some that aren't performing as well. Take some time to improve those products that are getting traffic but they're not converting well. Look at things like the visuals, the design, especially of older products that maybe you haven't touched in a while. Think about expanding those successful products into bigger bundles or product lines, and use your customer feedback to make good improvements, especially to the things that aren't working as well as you want them to. And then the third thing that you want to focus on growing during a growth season is your connection with your audience. I would recommend that you kind of pick one primary marketing channel that you're going to use, whether that's a podcast or Instagram or Tiktok, whatever that is, pick one to really focus on and excel at that thing. And then find ways to repurpose that content onto other platforms. Make sure you have some systems in place for staying consistent in your content creation or your posting schedule, and build in things like automated email sequences for welcoming and nurturing your new subscribers. This is also a good time to start doing some paid advertising, because that can help you grow your email list. It can also help you send more traffic to your offers. Now, growth seasons are exciting. You might find yourself in a growth season for a long time in your business, but they can be a little intense, because you were working really hard on growing your business, and eventually every business needs to move into a maintenance phase. Sometimes that's by choice, and sometimes it honestly just becomes a necessity. Whether it's something in your personal life that causes you to need to take a step back, or you just find yourself at a point of burnout and you know that you have to. So when you find yourself needing to move into a maintenance season, because it's not a question of if it's going to happen. When you find yourself there, here's what you need to be focused on. Those priorities in a maintenance season are automating everything that you can, optimizing your setup for passive income, and then preserving your own energy and your creativity. So let's talk about automating and systemizing things. You want to set up a system that can recycle your content in an automated way. You can do that with something like SmarterQue or Meet Edgar for social media. You can also do this with some email automations that continue to send out your content to your email list over time. Another thing to systemize is your templates and your SOPs, those standard operating procedures. When you have those things in place, repeated tasks get a lot faster and easier, and you're able to hire out for lots of things that you might not have been able to hire out for before, if you're in a place where you're ready to do that. During that maintenance season, you'll find some times where you feel like your energy is higher and you can create new things. And if you want to then absolutely lean in and do that. Give yourself time to do some batch creation of either blog or podcast content or new products when your energy is high and you're feeling up to it. And think about which tasks you can either delegate to someone else or eliminate all together. I like to look for three things, what can I automate, what can I delegate, and what can I eliminate when I'm in a maintenance phase. Let's talk about how to optimize what you have for some passive income. In that maintenance phase, make sure your best sellers are updated and optimized so that they're performing as well as possible. If you have been doing launch seasons during your growth phase, transition those over to some evergreen funnels that can run automatically. I would really encourage you, if you're selling digital products, to set up some evergreen email funnels that will send those products out to your audience over time. And focus on things that can scale over things that are time intensive if you're a service provider. So what can you do that's maybe a one to many offer instead of one on one offers? Or how can you take your one on one offer and make it take less time so that you can serve more people with less of your energy. And that leads us right into the third thing to focus on during your maintenance season, which is preserving your own energy and your creativity. This is really a season of establishing some firm boundaries around your time and your availability. My web design clients and my maintenance clients have probably noticed that happening in my business over the last year, where I am setting some boundaries around when I am checking emails and when I am responding to things. That's important, because when we start reaching a point of burnout, we have to set those boundaries to protect our energy and to give us that time to recharge and be ready to dive back in. Make sure that you are scheduling regular breaks with real time off. I'm not talking about the kind where you go on a trip like I did not too long ago, but you take your laptop and you work in the mornings and then enjoy your trip in the afternoon. Those are great. It is wonderful that we are in the type of business where we can do that sort of thing, but make sure you're scheduling some real time off too, where you leave your laptop at home. Or you close it on a Friday and commit to not opening it again until Monday. This is also a really good time to revisit your business foundation a little bit, connect with your why again, why do you love this business? What are those personal benefits you get out of it? How are you helping your customers or your clients just really reconnect with why you love the thing that you do? And use this maintenance season to learn new things, to get inspired, to do some brainstorming, but take the pressure off to implement those things right away. Only do the things that feel good, that you really want to be doing at that time, that'll give you the time to recharge, so that you're ready to move back into a growth or a starting out season, and you have the energy to really show up and do a great job in those seasons too. All right, so that's your roadmap for each of the different business seasons. But what happens when it's time to shift gears? How can you know when it's time? Let's talk about recognizing those signs. So if you're in a starting out season, some good signs that you're ready to move into a growth season in your business are that you're starting to get consistent sales, you're feeling more confident about your products, and you're really ready to scale that growth to reach a bigger audience and to get more sales of those products. Once you're in that growth season, you'll probably stay there for a while. In fact, most business owners spend the bulk of their time in growth seasons. It's a good sign that you need to move into a maintenance season when you're starting to feel overwhelmed, the quality of the work that you're doing is suffering, when it's taking you twice as long as it usually does to do things, and you feel like, I just don't know why this feels so hard. Those are some really good signs that you're approaching that point of burnout, and you need to take some time to shift into a maintenance season for a little while. Now, once you're in a maintenance season, you might move to a new starting out season or back into a growth season, depending on what's going on in your business. Either way, when you start feeling energetic again about your business, you're inspired and have lots of fresh ideas. When you have those systems in place, then you are ready to think about moving to one of those other stages again. You might move into a starting out season if you have gotten lots of fresh ideas, sometimes that leads to a little bit of a pivot in our business, and we need to go back and revisit things like, who is my target audience for this new thing that I want to do? Maybe you need to build some brand foundations for something new and big that you're excited about starting. So then move into a starting out phase for a little bit again. If not and you are just ready to get back into the groove, back into the swing of things, then it's time to move back to a growth phase. I know for me that it's time to move back into a growth phase when I start finding myself pushing at the boundaries I've put in place. So if I have told myself, you know, just think and brainstorm and get ideas, but don't create those times when I feel like I really am so excited about this thing I want to go and create it right now. That's when I know that I am ready to move back into a growth season. When it comes to transitioning between seasons, you don't necessarily have to let your audience know what you're doing, but if you have a team, make sure you communicate with them kind of what is happening for you personally and where that is affecting things in the business. You'll want to make sure that you are setting up systems before you transition from the growth season into a maintenance season so that things still run well while you're in that maintenance period. And you want to make sure you're being really intentional about that transition that you're making. Don't let yourself just slip in and out between seasons, especially when it comes to moving into a maintenance season. Really be intentional. Set boundaries for yourself around your energy and the time you're going to work what you're working on, so that you really do give yourself time in that maintenance season to recharge and be ready to go back in to a starting out or a growth season, excited and renewed and ready to go. Before we close out, I want to just kind of give you some permission, hopefully, to be where you are right now. See these different seasons in our business are natural. They are necessary, and it's a flow that we have back and forth through those different seasons over time. The season you're in has nothing to do with whether you're a success or a failure. If you've been in your business a long time and you feel like you're still in a starting out season that is perfectly fine. Sometimes it's not even us that force that season change. Sometimes there's external circumstances out there, family needs, health concerns, maybe it's just a busy season in your life. Keep in mind that when it comes to being really successful as an online entrepreneur or a solo business owner of any kind, it really comes down to sustainable growth over time. Having a business that grows in a way, that you love it, that you feel inspired and energized and excited about your business, and that it fits into your life, instead of you having to always make your life fit into your business. We're saying goodbye to that constant hustle and creating a business that really works for you. All right so, understanding these seasons is one thing, but actually applying this to your business is another altogether. So here are some action steps for you to actually put this into practice, starting today. Right now today, I want you to figure out where you are. Take a little honest inventory of where you are right now in your business, not where you wish you were, but where you are right now, both in your business and in your personal, just capacity to work on your business. Once you do that, choose one priority task from your season that you're going to work on this week. If you're just starting out, pick one way that you're going to spend some time learning more about your audience. If you're in a growth season, pick one of your highest performing products to optimize or to start creating a product line around it. And if you're in a maintenance season, find a task that you can automate or systematize this week. And then step three would be to schedule some dedicated time in your calendar. If you're like me and you use Google Calendar, I want you to open it up right now and block out at least 90 minutes of uninterrupted focus time to work on that one thing that you chose in that time block. When you do that, I would really encourage you to just eliminate distractions. Put your phone or your computer on do not disturb, close the doors, get really focused and put in some good hard work for that 60 to 90 minutes. Whether you are in a starting out season, a growth season, or you're in a maintenance season right now, taking action on just one of those priorities will really help move your business forward this week and get you working in A way that works for your life right now. Speaking of action steps, I would love to know which business season you are currently in and what you've decided to prioritize after listening to this episode. Send me a DM on Instagram at Kristen doyle.co and let me know. Or you can look for a story in our stories today and respond there. And if you found this episode helpful, please screenshot it and share it with another online entrepreneur like you, who maybe is struggling with knowing what to focus on right now in their business. Talk soon friends.