If you want your business to stay ahead of the curve, here are some tips to help you grow and succeed.

Hi, I'm Shreya Sharan Pawar, I'm an online marketing coach for solo women entrepreneurs the founder of the Womenpreneur Academy. In this video I'm going give you some amazing ideas. So whether it is through social media or just developing a solid marketing strategy, these ideas will help you drive your business to succeed in the new year.

Go ahead, grab a notebook and a pen and take a lot of notes because I've really given this a lot of thought so that, you can make 2022 a really awesome year for yourself.

I've broken these 22 tips into four major categories.

1. Tips related directly to your business

2. Tips related systems that you should build

3. Ideas for marketing on social media and otherwise

4. Tips for your personal growth, because I firmly believe that your business grows to the extent that you grow as a person.

Tips to Grow Your Business

So without spending any much time, let me dive into the first section of business. What are the things that you could do in your business in the new year?

1. Join a mastermind - A mastermind is a group of other aspiring entrepreneurs who have similar passions as you. When I first started my business, you know what I used to do. Very simply, I used to create small masterminds where ever in my city. Just bring people together who have you know who have similar dreams and brainstorm together and learn from each other. So that is something that you could possibly do if you can't find a mastermind around you to join, initiate one, create one in your own society in your own city, because that way you won't just be growing, you'll also be helping other people grow.

2. Join communities which are specific to your interest - Say, you are in the health niche, then join communities where there are other people who are also doing or who are also in the health niche. They could be in the same industry as you or complementary industries, but, when you are a part of these, like minded communities, they are a great source of learning and interacting with other people and seeing how things are being done. The reason I'm mentioning these - joining a mastermind and joining communities is because I'm sure you've heard this saying that you are the average of the five people that you spend the most amount of time with and, mostly what happens is that as a solo womenpreneur you would be too caught up at home. I know there's a lot of other responsibilities at home. So if you really want to grow, it is very important for you to start networking. Start reaching out to people, because here you will be finding people who are finding a certain degree of success and you can start learning from them.

3. Start collaborating - So, when you find other like-minded people in this , you can start collaborating with them in terms of promoting each other to your followers, doing say exhibitions together. I remember there was a friend of mine who was into natural stationeries, so I collaborated with her. For every order that she would send, she would send out a flyer of my products. So I would do it in exchange too. These are small things that you can do to really extend your reach without really having to do a lot of hard work. So collaborations are really, really great to get yourself shown to an audience which hasn't seen you before, which is absolutely new to your work.

4. Organize and simplify your business - What do I mean by that? See if you are anything like me, you know you'll have, things would be very scattered. I find that by nature , I am not a very organized person, but I realized that this habit of mine was making me lose a lot of time. It was just driving me crazy and I wasn't working to the best of my efficiency. So since then I've made it a point to try to simplify things in my business. Here are some tips:

a. have a practice of tracking your expenses and finances on a weekly basis. You know, don't leave it to the end of the month because at the end of the month it just gets too overwhelming and many of times you'll forget what expenses you had incurred, honestly speaking. Get into the habit of doing this. So create an Excel sheet. Then you can use and start tracking it, or you can even find any other app online and start tracking it. But honestly, even if you use an Excel sheet it's superb. Just get into the habit of doing this even if you have a small business right now and not a lot of income and expense. But this is a good practice to get started on.

b. Clean up your emails: you know, don't have a lot of junk in your emails because that just takes away your mind energy.

c. I would also recommend you know if you have a lot of different accounts and you can't recall your passwords. You can use a tool called 'LastPass' to organize all of your passwords. It's a safe, secure app and every time that you log into a window or an app it will prompt you with the username and the password.

So these are simple, simple things that you can do to organize and really, really simplify your life because you know if you don't have these things sorted out, then a majority of your time is just spent on trying to firefight and I would want you to spend that time on creating new content, being more visible out there on social media, focusing on creating better products.

Now let's get to the second part and talk about systems.

Tips related systems that you should build

5. Build a website - See when you have a website that also is a form of simplifying your life because a website will help you process all of your orders on auto mode. If you need help, I've done an entire five day series on how to build a website using Instamojo. If you just follow along with it, you will have a wonderful, ready-made website which will be super simple and very easy for your customers to order from.

6. Use WhatsApp business: WhatsApp has penetrated into everybody's life and WhatsApp is a great place to start that connection to start following up with people. So create a WhatsApp for business account, upload all of your product catalogs on that, link it to your website. So that when people WhatsApp business account, they'll be directed to your website to go ahead and shop from you. So these are small, small things. I would also recommend you know that put your WhatsApp number on your Instagram and Facebook. So that when when people say like your posts on these platforms, they'll automatically want to reach out to you. And if you have a ready or WhatsApp business account, they can come there, they can browse, they can talk to you and they can instantly order from there itself.

7. Email marketing system: Now email marketing...... A lot of businesses just kind of brush it aside thinking that emails kaun padta hai. But can I be honest with you? Emails are a very powerful way of growing because emails have a very high open rate as compared to the reach that you have on social media. So you can use tools like 'Mailer Lite' and 'MailChimp'. They have a free plan that you can get started off on. Now the reason email marketing is a good thing to do is because see it allows you to do a lot of automations. So suppose somebody has bought from you, you can instantly send them a nice welcome email talking about your brand, talking about your brand philosophy. If somebody has clicked on a specific link, you can automate the system to send them a specific email, which is, you know, unique to that particular link. So email really helps you personalize your communication with people, which is not possible on social media at this moment. So those you know the businesses that I have seen doing very, very well are businesses who have adopted email marketing at a very early stage. So you have to give this a shot.

Marketing Tips To Grow Your Business in 2022

Now let's jump into some specific aspects of marketing and what can you do to grow your business on this front.

8. Focus on building a brand and not just a business: What do I mean by this? See a business is the organization which sells your products, whereas your brand is that emotional aspect that relates to your followers. It's the personality of your business. So many a times you know people just start up business but they forget to work on this brand building aspect so as a result, what happens is that their business has no personality and if the business has no personality, honestly people don't relate to it. So your aim for 2022 should be not just focus on building the business aspect of it, but also focus on building the brand aspect of your business.

9. Increase your posting frequency: And if you're very new to a business, I would suggest that you commit yourself to posting at least five times a week. See the reason I recommend doing it more often, specially if you're just starting out, is because there is so much content on social media. So if you are not frequent, people will just forget you and you know out of sight, out of mind. And that is exactly what happens here. So get active on Instagram stories, start doing some video content.

10. Show yourself: you can't hide behind the camera anymore. OK, in today's day and time people want to connect with a business before they buy from you. And the easiest way to connect with a business is when they can see your face as the business owner, as the brand owner. Get into the habit of recording some videos. So inside my community, 'Womenpreneur Academy' anybody who tells me that they are camera shy I make them do this one activity where they need to record one video every day and share it in a private group so that you can get some confidence. You can do something similar with your friends. Or if you've created a mastermind, do that. Build some confidence on camera because really, I wish I could tell you that you could do without being on camera, but honestly, nahi hoga is time pe, so get into the habit of shooting yourself.

11. Create a Google business page: specially if you are a local business who has a pick ups and people can buy from you. Create a business page. It's absolutely free and I see that most people don't do it. All that you need to do for it is go claim your business on 'Google My Business' and they will send you a confirmation . For confirmation of your location they will send you a postcard with a specific code. And once you receive the postcard, you just need to feed the code in and you'll be able to claim your business. It is that super simple OK. But it really will help your business be discovered, to be found, and you can also collect your testimonials and reviews on that business.

12. Create a lead magnet to build your email list: What is the lead magnet? A lead magnet is a small gift or a freebie that you offer to people in exchange for their emails. So idea of a lead magnet could be a coupon code,, could be a ebook. so for example like if you come to my website I have a lead magnet on tools to use for businesses. So it's a short ebook that you can download and for that you need to of course enter your email ID but you see that way, if you start practicing this in your business, you will be able to really build your email list and start engaging with your potential customers. So definitely look into this even if you know you have a very small list of subscribers. Create a small lead magnet with just something as simple as the coupon code and at least get started on that.

13. Run a challenge on social media: So if you, if you've been following me for awhile, you would know that I run a challenge called 'Meet the Womenpreneur' . It's a monthly challenge in which I give some prompts. I run this for a week and I'll give you one prompt to or which would be a guideline on what you should be posting for your week. So the reason I'm telling you to run a challenge is because when you do these kind of activities on social media, it really helps to build your engagement. And it also helps to get people coming back to you because once I take part in a challenge like this, it gets embedded in your mind. Another example of what I had done for burst of happiness was that I did the 30 day natural skin and hair care challenge. So you could possibly do something like this for your business as well.

14. Focus on engagement: So, the kind of account so you should be engaging with is, first engage with people who already have been engaging with you, either through stories or through DMs, or have been commenting with you. Start conversing with them, ask them questions about what are their likes and their preferences. Get their feedback on your products and this would be a great way to get some honest feedback which you can incorporate into your business. The second type of accounts that you should engage with is people who are in the same niche as you . So other brands who are also selling similar products. It's a great idea to make friends with your competition. Really, I firmly believe that you need to follow a practice of community over competition and if you can truly do this, trust me, you will see immense growth in your business. The 3rd is people who are in complementary businesses which serve the same target audience. So say for example, you deal in silver jewelry, OK, you could collaborate with or engage with other brands out there, say somebody who's into handloom sarees. Because your target audience is the same. So you can do collaborations like say you can do photo shoots together, you can , like the other kind of collaborations that I had mentioned right, giving a shout out to each other, doing some live sessions with each other. So these are great ways to grow together in the coming year.

15. Study your insights: Get into the habit of checking out on a weekly basis, which are the stories which got you the most responses, which are the posts which got you the most amount of likes or shares or comments. Use this feedback to craft your content strategy for the future. Now many times what happens is you know, we think that our followers will like a specific type of content and we go ahead. We spend a lot of time in creating that content, but us par koi likes nahi aati, koi shares nahi aati. There are no views on it. OK, so the only way to judge what your audience really wants is to study insight and then keep building content on that.

16. Improving the shopping experience for your customers

So what do I mean by this? See a lot of small businesses, they have a very tedious order processing system or ordering or an inquiry system. If you can simplify this for your customers, it will make it easy for them to buy from you. So , having a website really can help you do this. Having more payment options like offering a debit card or a credit card or an EMI payment, or even say UPI and all will really make make a huge difference to their shopping experience. Also, think about how can you improve their experience for shopping. So, maybe you can send some handwritten notes with your order. Maybe you can really give your packaging a lot of thought and a lot of love so that they feel that you know they feel that buying from you is a gift. And they really, really value that. So you can also do something along the lines of like I used. I used to do this you know, sending out handwritten postcards during festival seasons, so these are small things that can really help keep your community together. Keep your customers coming back to you and you know build that brand loyalty in your customers.

Personal growth tips to grow your business.

For personal growth like I had mentioned, see personal growth is very very important if you really want to scale your business. People feel that if they only work on their business and they don't work on themselves, they will see some marvelous results. But in truth, I've never seen that happen. Not even in my own life. I started seeing results in my business only once I started working on my personal development and I would definitely encourage you, that don't waste time on doing other things but focus on your personal growth in this year and you'll be able to see like a whole all rounded growth in your business, in your life, in every aspect of your life. So what are the things that you could possibly do in this?

17. Work on your mindset: Work on your mindset I would definitely recommend that you listen to this one audio recording called the 'strangest secret in the world'. It's a 30 minute audio recording. Get into the habit of listening to that on a daily basis.

18. Practice some affirmations: So what I do every morning is I get up, get up. I put on my air pods and I put on some affirmations for happiness or success on YouTube. And I listen to it and that really helps set the energy for the day. So the being a small activities that you can do which can help you have a mindset of success.

19. Learn skills which you lack: See as a solo or women preneur there'll be a lot of tasks that you need to do in your business and there will be a lot of things. So whether it is graphic designing, whether it is writing better content, whether it is taking better pictures of your products or whether that is even marketing. You have to go out and learn each of these skills. See just knowing about your product, how to create your product is not enough. OK, that is why you need to learn these other aspects which are also essential for your business. If you are interested in this, you can definitely go check out my program called the 'Womenpreneur Academy' where I teach various marketing skills, social media marketing, how do you build a brand? How do you build a website?

Go check it out and see if that is something that you can resonate with.

20. Read inspirational books: They really have the power to change your life and two books that I would recommend that you get started off this very year is the 'Millionaire Mindset' by T Harv Ecker and 'The Success Principles' by Jack Canfield. These books will change your life. I promise you that.

21. Take regular breaks on social media: It's very important for personal growth. WHY, see I know social media can be very very demanding. Especially if you're trying to stand to grow business from scratch. But that is why you need to set boundaries between using social media for fun versus using it for your business. I don't use social media for my personal work at all, because I already spend so much time on social media for my business that I don't want to do it for my personal life and that will help you know kind of stay grounded, keep a calm, calm mind because social media can be very, very overwhelming. So definitely you know you can set aside some days like I try to avoid doing social media on Sundays. I just like to take a break from that. So you can also define this for yourself. So maybe set a specific day or you can set that you know after a specific time everyday you will not, you are not going to open up your phone. That's also means getting off WhatsApp ok, because WhatsApp is another time sucker. It just drains your energy, just drains your time. OK. So if there's one thing that I want you to take out of all of these, is this, one particular thing, take regular breaks

22. Go inward if you want success outside: So what do I mean by going inwards? It could be something as simple as taking out five minutes a day to do some deep breathing, or if you have a spiritual practice, do some puja if you believe in meditation, do some meditation. But any form of going inwards, where you disconnect yourself from the world, where you disconnect your mind from you know all those thoughts that are constantly running in your head. Just get rid of those. Take 5 minutes of silence and you'll really see a difference in your creativity. Now, every time that I feel that I am struggling for post ideas or I don't know what to post or I don't know what to write, I do this. You know I'll just breathe for five minutes and then come back and I'll write. And I feel that what I produce after that is much, much better.

So I hope that you find these 22 tips useful and I would love to know from you in the comments below. Which one of these are you going to start working on from today? Which of these 22 tips are you going to prioritize?

I look forward to hearing from you.

Now if you would like to learn how to grow your business on social media, I conduct weekly free trainings for women entrepreneurs. These are live trainings that I conduct and last year more than 1500 women attended these trainings. If you too would like to attend attend this training,

Check out live training schedule here

Register for my webinar and I will be happy to help you in my life sessions and to clear all of your doubts regarding branding about how do you use social media, how do what is the kind of content that you need to create. So this is a 90 minute session that.

I take where I'm going to dive deep into all of these concepts, so go ahead, register for this training, and if you haven't already, please do click on the subscribe button and hit the Bell icon. Because I'm planning to create more such videos in 2022 to serve you to give you value and help you in your personal and business growth. So I look forward to seeing you again next week with a new video.

Till then, bye. Take care. Stay connected with me because

I Would love to know what it is that you would want me to create for you

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