I believe minimalizing your daily tasks is the most important aspect of minimalizing your business.
That doesn’t mean you only work an hour or two every day (unless you want to), but it does mean you focus on only a small number of achievable goals every day.
Some people will tell you that you need to be everywhere with your marketing – all the major social media platforms, pay-per-click, written/audio/video, and so on.
Or even if they don’t tell you that, you may see some of the people you admire who are everywhere, and therefore think you need to be everywhere yourself.
But here’s the thing.
First of all, they almost certainly didn’t start off by being everywhere.
They probably got one thing working and then brought another thing into the mix, and then another, and so on, over time.
That’s what you should do, too.
Second of all, maybe they aren’t interested in minimalizing their business. You are.
Maybe they want to build an empire. Maybe they want to be a celebrity. Maybe they love working 80 hour weeks.
Maybe you don’t. Maybe you want to pay your bills and spend your evenings and weekends doing yoga or stand up comedy or reading a coffee table book about coffee tables.
If that’s the case, here’s how I suggest you minimalize your daily tasks. These examples are aimed mostly at online marketing because that’s where I have my experience:
1. Content. Choose one type of content to create:
- Written
- Audio
- Video
- Other visual arts (e.g. comics, infographics, photos)
- Conversations (i.e. skip all of the above and just talk to people instead)
Start posting one of the above on your website, probably at least once/month, often more like 1-3 times/week (the ‘conversations’ one obviously doesn’t go on the website – you may skip having website altogether – and may happen a little more often).
You can add more types of content later if you have a good reason for doing so, but start with just one.
Personal admission: the reason I haven’t honed my writing skills particularly well even though I’ve been writing as part of my work for 5 years is because I spent the majority of those years doing a hundred other things, too, because I wasn’t thinking about minimalism for most of those years.
Imagine if you woke up every day and wrote for an hour. Your writing would get somewhere after 5 years.
2. Promote. Choose one method of promoting it, my favorites being:
- Social media (pick just 1-2 sites and focus on them)
- Guest posting on other websites
- SEO (Search engine optimization)
- Getting interviewed all over the place
- Networking at in person events
- Runing an affiliate program
- Pay-per-click
Sure, maybe over the course of a few years you’ll implement more of these promotion strategies, but don’t rush into it, and don’t force the ones that aren’t appealing to you.
It’s much more effective to be awesome at one of these rather than being not awesome at all of them. I know from experience.
3. Sell. Create just one product or service to have for sale, and make it a simple one.
You can add more down the road if you want to, but you don’t have to. Life is easier when you have one really great offering that you love, and ‘great’ doesn’t have to mean ‘complicated.’
In fact, simpler is often better. If you can solve someone’s problem in one hour instead of 20 hours, that’s better for you and them.
In summary, choose:
- One type of content to create.
- One way to promote it.
- One product or service to sell.
In the next lesson, I’ll show you some examples of what this may look like for you.