Running a business can be hard. But it does not have to be. In the beginning stages of your business, you may feel you are all over the place and constantly overwhelmed. 

I’ll let you in on a little secret. The key to running a successful online business without running yourself ragged is to have systems in place for everything. You’ll be surprised by how much time you will save each week and how much more productive you are once these systems are in place. So let’s take a look at a couple of different types of systems I use that have helped me run my business more smoothly.  

Why You Need Systems To Be Productive In Your Business 

Document your systems and create checklists for them as you start to create them. They will come in handy over the coming months and years. 

Product Creation 

Your product creating systems will depend on what your products are and how you will deliver them, but there are some things you may want to consider maintaining a format for: 

• Topic Research 
• Creating An Outline 
• Writing or Recording the Info Product 
• Editing and Formatting 
• Uploading It To Your Site 
• Creating Sales and Download Pages 
• Creating Marketing Materials 

In addition, it is a good idea to create a template you can use for all your short reports and ebooks to make sure they follow your brand across the board. This will also make your job a lot easier when it comes time to format your products. 

Content Creation 

Templates and calendars are amazing and will make your life so much easier when it comes to content creation. Each month spend some time creating an editorial calendar for your blog. 

In need of a calendar template grab your 2019 calendar here and 2020 calendar here! 

Figure out how often you want to blog and what topics you want to cover. With that in place, you’ll never sit down at your desk with no clue what to write about. 

Having a template in place is also helpful. Look at what content you create on a regular basis. Is it a newsletter, short reports or eBooks? Make templates for them. Most of your formatting and branding will be taken care of and you won’t have to start with a blank page every time. Trust me its a pain and this will save you so much time. 

Social Media 

Ever feel like you are always on social media, trying to post in your feed, on stories on your facebook page? The grind is real y’all. But if you set these social media systems up ahead of time you will always have a template to plug and play into and will decrease the time you spend with the time suck that is social media.  

Figure out how often you want to post and during what times. When will you post your own content, when will you ask a question or make an observation and when will you share other’s posts? Having a schedule allows you to work ahead when you need to and just like the blog schedule, it helps you get things done faster if you know what you’re writing or sharing ahead of time. 

Website Maintenance And Security 

Here’s a biggy. How are you keeping your site safe and secure? If you’re using a CMS like WordPress to run your site, you want to make sure it is updated regularly. Backups are also a must. I suggest using the plugin Updraft for backups and paying close attention to WordPress updates monthly. 

Schedule both updates and backups on a monthly basis and review your sites regularly to make sure everything is safe and secure. Set an alert on your phone or add the task to your calendar each month. 

Customer Service Systems

Have you thought of the systems you need in place for handling customer service requests? Having a page with Frequently Asked Questions (and your responses of course) is always helpful. You can point customers to the page and be done! 

A list of canned responses to common questions will also save you a lot of time. Personalize them as needed, but have the bulk of it ready to copy and paste. Having these systems in place also makes it much easier to outsource customer service down the road. 

Having these systems in place helps you run your online business more productively, but there is an added bonus to getting them in place. Once you have a system set up, it makes it easy to outsource that portion of your business to a Virtual Assistant. As you grow and there is more work to be done than hours in your day, you will appreciate being one step closer to outsourcing.