Guide To Quarterly Planning For Your Online Business

by Michele | Planning-Organization-Productivity

Guide To Quarterly Planning For Your Online Business

Are you quarterly planning for your online business? I’m not talking about a huge extensive plan, just getting your projects laid out for the next quarter. Where you want to focus your time and energy.

Let Me Guide You Through A Quarterly Planning…

At the end of last year did you get an idea of the types of projects that you wanted to complete in the up coming year? If not, no big deal. Do it now.

Brainstorm

Brainstorm an exhausted list of all the projects that you want to accomplish in the next four to five quarters. When I say exhausted, I mean braindump all the ideas and information from your head on the list. No project is too small or simple for the list. Write down everything that pops into your head, no judgment.

Narrow It Down

Get out your pen and paper and get the projects out on paper. I like to highlight, cross off and of course color code.

Quarterly Planning For Your Online Business post by Miss Task

Align

With your brainstorm list, figure out which projects are aligned with the vision and mission of your online business.

Select projects that are aligned with your online business and rank each of the tasks by importance. This will aid in where you need to start.

Each quarter will be assigned three projects to achieve! Basically, one per month. Start with the projects that have the most impact on the growth of your online business or is the quickest path to cash. Either highlight the three tasks for Q1, Q2, Q3, Q4 with a different color or note the Q in front of the task.

Now on to quarterly planning for your online business

Now, it's time to organize your next quarter plan. From your list above what did you select as projects to work on for the upcoming quarter?

Do you have a project management application?

If you have a project management system you can set this all up inside so you know what to do when. If not, paper will work just fine.

At the top, write out your online business mission, vision, and goals for the upcoming quarter. Under this break it into three columns. One for each project.

Under the Project Header

Now we are going to put in all the tasks that need to be completed by who and when. Will you need any resources, such as a new software application, to complete the task?

Not all the tasks must be completed by you. It’s very important that you stay in your lane and delegate out the tasks that can be done by someone else.

Little Side Note

If you’re planning a large launch to take place in the next quarter and you know all focus needs to go into this. This would be your only project for the quarter.

Should you be wasting your fabulous time on keeping your website up to date?

by Michele | Planning-Organization-Productivity

Should you be wasting your fabulous time on keeping your website up to date?

Is your time best spent keeping your website up to date? With all the things that must be done in your business does keeping your website up to date one that you should be spending your fabulous time on? Really, if finances were not a factor would you still be the person keeping your website up to date?

I know your to-do list is a mile long and keeping your website up to date just happens to be one of the tasks that’s at the bottom week after week. Oops. Hey, I’ll be honest with you. It does for me, so I’m not throwing any stones. I go through seasons when I simply do not have time to get out content or refresh the content on my WordPress Website.

Now that we understand the issue, what is the solution? It may be time to take those items off your to-do list and put them on our to-do list. Just sayin’

Let’s start with content

How much content do you have on your site now? Do you have a great plan in place for reusing that content? Are you going through your old posts and refreshing the images? If not, this could be something that is outsourced.

Why is it important to keep the content fresh? If you use Pinterest, adding new images to a previously published article with relevant content gives it new life. Come on, sometimes coming up with new and exciting content can be a challenge. Well, unless you’re a writer then it’s super simple for you.

The Upkeep

Yep, keeping your website up to date it needs to happen. I’ve stood on my soapbox so many times regarding the upkeep. It’s one of those things, that’s not important until it’s important.

Ya know like the upkeep of your house if you let it go the dirt will still be there. Zang it!

While you can spread out the time in between. I’d like you to really consider not doing this because your website is software that is updated with new and improved security updates on the regular.

Schedule one to two hours per month, to performing monthly backups. Applying any needed updates to the theme or plugins. Reviewing spam, checking links. Keeping your website up to date, you know all those exciting things that I am sure you just L-O-V-E to do. I talk about monthly maintenance here in a previous post.

Dubsado Is A Game Changer a blog from Miss Task OBM

Back to the question

Is your time best spent keeping your website up to date? Really, you’re the only person that can answer this question. Does keeping up with your website bring out your fabulous?

Hey, it may not seem like a ton of time, but those couple hours here or couple hours there, that all adds up to time that you're not working on items that generate revenue in your business.

When you are saying “yes” to the website to do list, you’re saying “no” to focusing on your fabulous.

What if you outsource the upkeep and freshening up of your content? Wouldn’t it feel freeing knowing that someone else is handling this for you?

Leave ya with a couple free resources – yay!

How to Use Asana to Manage Your Website Wellness

by Michele | Planning-Organization-Productivity

How to Use Asana to Manage Your Website Wellness

Hey! I’ve created a quick tutorial on How to use Asana to manage your Website Wellness.

Not familiar with website wellness? Here is a link to a previous post.

In this tutorial, I go through putting this checklist into Asana as repeatable or recurring tasks.

Asana will remind me of the items that need to be completed on a monthly, quarterly and yearly basis to keep my website wellness up to date.

I’m going to walk you through how I would set this up as a project in Asana.

No worries if you use another project management system, the same principles apply.

Here are the steps:

Click on the new button in the upper right corner of Asana
Click add a project
Select blank project
Select either a list or board view (I like board view)

First Column

Rename the first column to Monthly
Begin to add the monthly tasks to complete
- Check Backup is working properly or backup the website
- Update Theme
- Update Plugins
- Update WordPress
- Check Comments & Spam Comments
- Fix any broken links
- Check your security plugin
- Check Website KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) aka Google Analytics
- New Content – At a minimum once per month

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Little Side Note

Fridays are my operations days, so I want to set this to weekly on a Friday every four weeks.

Repeat This

Click the Assign button and assign to either yourself or a team member.
Click on the date and select the due date
Set the date as repeatable

With this set up, the task will keep reoccurring

Second Column

Rename to quarterly or as needed
Add the quarterly or as needed tasks
Delete old unused images
- Do you have any images on your website that you're not using anymore? Delete images that are no longer used so they're not taking up any space on your website.
Delete unused themes
- Did you download ten themes searching for the perfect one? Go ahead and delete them, I generally have two themes installed. Obviously, the active theme and I leave the latest WordPress as my backup in case something were to happen and I needed to fall back to a different theme.
Remove any old revision
- Anytime you make a revision to a page or a post a revision is saved, you can install a plugin to delete old revisions. This could be included in your optimization plugin.

Third Column

Rename to yearly
Add the yearly tasks
Change copyright year in the footer

There you go. That is a nice checklist of how to use Asana to manage your website wellness that I can set up and have automatically reminded me what tasks need to be done on which day.

Please go ahead and let me know if you have any questions.s.

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