What does this mean?
It means up to 250 members of your group can be invited into a chat without you being invited! Yes admins can be excluded and you have not control over it, unless you disable the ability for members to create groups and enable it so that only admins of your group can start up chats.

How do I disable it?
In this video I show you how to disable it and more on why this feature can be a good thing and how it can be a bad thing for your groups.

And while sometimes that relationship dissolves in a negative way – you end up having to fire your assistant, or they break their contract and leave on bad terms – much more often, things end on good terms. After all, there are a lot of reasons that business relationships end. Sometimes it’s a short-term relationship that ends when the project is over, sometimes your needs outgrow your team member’s skillset, sometimes the virtual team member decides to retire, or return to full-time work, or stop working for a while to care for children or other family members.

In fact, the reality of working relationships ending for a number of reasons, good and bad, happens all the time in the “traditional” corporate world. The difference with small businesses, and particularly small businesses who are working with virtual assistants and online business managers, is that corporations and established businesses tend to have procedures in place for what to do when an employee no longer works for them.

If you’re building a business, now is the perfect time to establish these kinds of procedures for yourself. Ideally, you want to have a plan in place before a team member leaves or is fired (whether that person is internal or external). Putting your plan in place now gives you time to think of everything that needs to be done – the passwords that need to be changed, the permissions that need to be revoked, the emails that need to be re-routed, the web pages that need to be updated – instead of scrambling to think of everything at the last moment.

Let’s face it – it’s usually at least a little bit uncomfortable when someone leaves their employment. That goes doubly if the person is being fired or other wise let go, and it goes triply for small business owners who typically have very little experience with firing. Establishing a plan for termination (voluntary or involuntary) makes things easier on everyone. When you’ve got something in place, it’s not personal – it’s policy.

This is also a good time to put a general data protection plan in place. For example, what are your policies about your team members sharing log-ins, email addresses, or passwords? How often should passwords be changed? How do you handle temporary access to accounts (we recommend options like one-time-use passwords from LastPass)?   All too often, business owners don’t think about these kinds of issues until they get burned. Don’t let that happen to you!

Are you overwhelmed by the sheer volume of things that you’ve given someone access to that you now need to revoke or change passwords to? Don’t worry, we have you covered with a great free checklist that covers many of the systems you may need to reset password for. Use the box below to download the checklist now and, as always, if you’re in need of assistance with this or anything else, don’t hesitate to contact us – we can help!

In short, the GDPR – General Data Protection Regulation – is a law passed by the European Union in April 2016 that restricts how companies can gather, keep, and process personal data (including names and email addresses). The regulation becomes enforceable as of May 25, 2018.

Who is affected by the GDPR?

Because the regulation was passed by the European Union, it applies to any company that has (or may potentially have in the future) personal data for anyone in the EU. Since the EU counts in their membership 28 different countries, that’s a significant number of people.

So, does the GDPR affect you? If you have contacts, customers, or prospects from any of these countries, it’s time to pay attention. If you have personal data about citizens from any of the countries listed above (and remember, personal data can be as simple as name and email address!), or you plan to do business with people from any EU country, you’ll need to comply with the GDPR.

Why was the GDPR passed?

The GDPR updates and replaces a piece of legislation that is twenty years old – the Data Protection Act of 1998. And if you’ve paid attention to anything in the last couple of decades, you should be well aware that a lot has changed with regards to technology, privacy, and data collection.

There is a lot of fear mongering out there about the GDPR having huge repercussions for businesses. And if you’re running a very large business, a Facebook or Amazon, you’ll certainly need to put a lot of work into ensuring that you’re in compliance with the new regulations.

But small and medium businesses who have been using email marketing in an ethical way won’t see a tremendous impact from the regulation. That’s because, at its core, there is a very simple principle behind the GDPR: don’t be a jerk.

If you’re sending marketing emails to every person you’ve ever met at a networking event, even if the extent of your interaction was simply passing business cards around a table, you’re being a jerk.

If you’re buying lists of email addresses off the internet to send your newsletter to people who’ve never even heard of your business, you’re being a jerk.

If you’re making people opt-out of your marketing through a check box with tiny text at the end of a long download page for a free report, you’re being a jerk.

And if you’re not actually unsubscribing people when they click the “unsubscribe” link in your marketing emails, you’re being a big enough jerk that you may actually get hit with some fines.

How does the GDPR affect me?

The sanctions that the GDPR can put in place for companies that ignore its rules are significant: fines of 2-4% of annual worldwide turnover, or 10-20 million euros. But despite the sensational articles that make it seem like every mom-and-pop shop in the world is suddenly going to owe thousands of euros in fines, the reality of the situation is that most companies will be able to make minor changes and be just fine.

After all, the goal of the GDPR is not to put thousands of people out of business – it’s to help citizens of the EU deal with the inundation of spam and junk mail, and prevent companies from keeping tons of personal data that they don’t actually need (and can’t reasonably secure from hackers). Even if you don’t yet do business in the EU, it’s worthwhile to start considering changes to your privacy and data retention policies, as the US and Canada are likely to impose similar restrictions in the coming decade.

Wondering what you need to do about the GDPR in your business? Here are a couple of steps you should take now:

• If you’re collecting email addresses, whether it’s for a lead magnet or an “event” like a webinar or live video, you need to make your privacy policy clear up front. That means available to prospects before they subscribe, ideally linked right from the opt-in form. You’ll need to spell out exactly what data you’re collecting and why, as well as what you’ll be doing with it and whether you’ll be transmitting it to third parties (and if so, who they are and what they’ll be doing with the data). The GDPR requires you to send your Privacy Notice to your subscribers to confirm with them how you collect and process their personal data, for what purposes you use their data, how you keep their data secure, and their rights in relation to such data.

• Collect only the data that you need and can use now. If all you’re sending out is a downloadable PDF, you probably don’t need DOB, physical address, industry, income, etc. Far too many businesses in the past have made a habit of collecting as much information as they were able to, with no clear plan for how to store, safeguard, or even use that data. New GDPR regulations make it clear that you need to have a reasoning behind everything you’re asking for on your opt-in form, and if you’re just data-gathering for the sake of data-gathering, you will not be in compliance with the new regulations. If there is data that you would like (and don’t need), make that clear: e.g. “Answering the following questions is optional, but will help us better tailor our marketing messages to your needs.”

• Keep your data accurate and up to date. Have a lot of emails bouncing or returning as undeliverable? Time to purge them from your list. Similarly, if you haven’t sent out any email marketing in a long while, or you’ve started up a whole new product line, you can no longer assume that people who received your old emails automatically want to receive the new ones.

• Only send marketing emails to people who actually want them. You can no longer have people automatically opted-in to receive emails whenever they fill out a contact form on your website, nor can you send messages to anyone who you’ve ever done business with (outside of transactional messages) if they haven’t opted in to receive marketing communications.

• Make it easy to stop receiving your emails. Most companies use automated email systems like MailChimp and MarketVolt to take care of this automatically. But if you’re still using a manual system to send out your emails, you need to be very on the ball about removing unsubscribe requests from your list as soon as they come in. Many of the significant fines issued by the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) under the Data Protection Regulation in the past several years have been due to improper handling of people who wish to unsubscribe from marketing emails.

• Use Facebook wisely. If you use Facebook Pixels to retarget advertising, you must have a cookie policy that spells out what cookies are being used on your website. And if you use, or plan to use, your contact list emails to create a target audience for a Facebook ad, you must include that disclosure in your privacy policy.

• Check to make sure your data processors are GDPR compliant. These could include your email automation programs (like MailChimp, Aweber, Constant Contact), as well as your CRMs (think Infusionsoft, Ontraport), your payment processors (Authorize.net, Stripe, PayPal, etc.)… essentially any system that processes your customer data should comply with the new regulations.

Does the GDPR spell disaster – or opportunity?

For all the uproar over the new regulations, many of the requirements of the GDPR make a whole lot of sense from a consumer perspective. And while many smaller businesses may have to tighten up their data use and retention policies a bit, there is an upside as well: with the GDPR in place, the playing field between ethical and unethical businesses becomes a little bit more even.

If you’ve been relying on spamming as many people as possible with offers for your business, the GDPR will certainly have a negative impact on what you’re doing (as it should!). But if you’ve been cultivating real relationships with your prospects, creating content that your mailing list will value, and ensuring that you’re marketing to people who are excited to learn more about your business, you don’t have to worry – you’re already doing business right.

Want more details about what the GDPR means for your business, or a little reassurance that you’re handling everything correctly? At WPBlogsites, we don’t just create amazing websites for our clients – we help them ensure that they have the technical expertise and effective marketing in place for long term success. To learn more about what we can do to help your business grow, schedule a consultation today.

(Note: This article does not contain legal advice. To ensure that your business is in full compliance with any regulations, please seek the advice of your legal counsel.)

Some people are eagerly anticipating the ability to customize the look and feel of your website’s content. Others argue that the lack of backwards compatibility and forced merge with the core WordPress software could spell disaster. But regardless of your perspective – and despite the fact that there is currently no confirmed release date – it looks like Gutenberg is coming, and we’ll all need to get on board.

Whether you’re someone who loves to poke around and customize your site or someone who just wants to upload the occasional blog post, the release of Gutenberg is going to have a serious impact on what you do when you log into your WordPress site. Here’s what you need to know, and how you’ll need to prepare: 

What is Gutenberg?

At its core, Gutenberg is a new way to manage, layout, and control your content. The classic Tiny MCE Text Editor, with its dual visual/ text editor views, will be replaced by a new system of “blocks”. Essentially, Gutenberg will take the advanced page builder functionality typically found in premium plug-in options like Divi and Beaver Builder and roll it into the core WordPress experience.

The goal with Gutenberg is to make it easier for everyday users to create rich page and post layouts without having to learn HTML or CSS, or fiddle around with custom meta boxes. Each element of your content will now be added as a block in the page editor, whether it’s a headline, a paragraph, an image, a list, a YouTube embed, or anything else.

Ultimately, the WordPress team wants users to be able to see what their content will look like as they create it, and to be able to easily change and customize things on the fly. It’s a big departure from the look and functionality of the current text editor, and only time will tell how well people are able to adapt to it.

If you want to see for yourself what Gutenberg will be like to work with before the official rollout, you have a couple of options. You can install the official WordPress Gutenberg plugin on a testing or staging site (NOT on your actual site!). Or you can poke around in Frontenberg, a Tom Nowell project that allows you to try out the Gutenberg experience without having to do anything to your actual website. Finally, you can watch the 2017 State of the Word Address, which goes into more detail about the project and features a live demo. 

What does the Gutenberg launch mean for you – and for your website?

WordPress is an incredible piece of software that has allowed millions of people around the world to tell their story, design a website, or build a business. But here’s the thing about software: it breaks. And when you start describing a new version of your software as “revolutionary” … well, get ready for it to break a lot.

Historically, WordPress has always touted its backward compatibility (even sometimes to the detriment of the existing codebase). Gutenberg will be a radical departure from that trend. The company has decided to focus on the modern technologies needed to make their vision for Gutenberg a reality, and forget about trying to make it backwards compatible.

I repeat: get ready for things to break. A lot.

Gutenberg hasn’t even launched yet, and we won’t know for quite a while whether it’s going to herald a visionary new era of web design functionality or be a quickly forgotten disaster. In the long term, it may well be an excellent way for more people to develop more customized websites, even more easily. But in the short term, there will definitely be some growing pains to get through.

What should you do to prepare for Gutenberg?

No one knows exactly when the WordPress 5.0 release will happen, only that it’s scheduled for 2018. But before the upgrade comes down the line, there are several very important steps you need to take:

• First things first, make sure you have backups of everything on your site, including your content, your files, and your database and store those backups separately (e.g. in Dropbox or another cloud service) from your hosting.
• Turn off automatic updates so you won’t be caught unaware when Gutenberg is released. Automatic updates aren’t supposed to happen on major releases, but why take this chance. Not sure how to turn these off? Check out this quick article and if you’re still confused (or just don’t want to do it), contact us for help.
• Install the Classic Editor plugin – this will allow you to continue using the current editor view even after Gutenberg has been released. Do NOT update to 5.0 until you have this plugin installed!
• Before you decide to switch over to Gutenberg, test out the install on a dev site for a couple of weeks – give yourself time to see what works and what doesn’t.
• If you’re currently working with a website designer or developer, get in touch to find out what changes will need to be made for your project to be completed.

Ultimately, the bottom line is that a change as big as Gutenberg is going to require a big outlay on the part of website owners. That might mean a lot of time and effort troubleshooting the changeover and getting everything the way you want it, or it might mean spending the money to have professionals manage the transition for you and help you get set up in the new system. Good, bad, or indifferent, the Gutenberg release is going to bring a lot of changes to the way people use WordPress.

Tired of all the talk about content editors? Want expert guidance in creating or updating a business website that works? WPBlogSites can help. You can book a call with us right now using our online calendar, or drop us a line via our contact form and we’ll get in touch within 24 hours to see how we can help.

Recently, we’ve had a couple of clients come to us with a big problem: their websites were suddenly spiking in server load (also called bandwidth and CPU seconds), causing site slowdowns. In some cases, their hosting companies were even taking their sites down completely until they either remedied the issue or coughed up significantly more money for hosting packages (we’re talking from $12 a month to $80!).

A spike in server traffic might not be a bad thing, if it were accompanied by a spike in page views. That would mean that your website went viral, or you launched a new product, and lots of people were paying attention. But for these clients, there was no corresponding spike in page views. They were being dinged for high bandwidth usage without getting the benefits of more traffic, more website visitors, and more paying customers.

So what was actually happening? One of our project managers and website gurus, Cyndi Fleming-Alton, did some sleuthing and was able to find the problem (as well as how to fix it). You probably know that major search engines like Google and Bing have automated processes – often called “spiders”, “crawlers”, or “bots” – to help them essentially take inventory of the internet.

These spiders check websites constantly, thousands of times a day, to ensure that the search engine always has up-to-date content to provide in their search results. That’s incredibly valuable if you’re CNN.com or FoxNews.com and need to have breaking news updates appearing in search results pretty much instantly. But if you’re a typical small or medium business owner who is only updating your site once a day or so, it may well be overkill.

There are a couple of ways to get around this issue. Depending on your goals and the nature of your website, you may need to use one or more of these options to help solve your bandwidth problems.

1. Manually adjust Google’s crawl rate

Google checks all the content on your website with the adorably-named “Googlebot”. But while they have a lot of algorithms that are designed to determine the optimal rate to crawl your site without overwhelming your server, they don’t always get it perfectly right. If you’re finding that you’re getting tons of server traffic from Google crawling your site, it’s time to set a limit. Google’s Webmaster Tools allow you to set a maximum crawl rate for your website. Note: these limits are only good for 90 days, so if you notice the problem cropping up again in a couple of months, you’ll have to repeat this step.

2. Configure your robots.txt file

A robots.txt file is an instruction file that spiders and bots can check before crawling the rest of your website. You can configure your robots.txt to disallow all bots from checking anything on your site at all; to only exclude them from parts of the server; to allow all bots complete access; and to include or disallow specific robots.

3.  Check your visitor IP addresses

Finally, you may be getting lots and lots of bot visits from scammers and spammers overseas. Even if you have a well-configured plug-in suite that takes care of spam comments, the amount of visits can seriously impact your server load. If you see a whole lot of IP addresses from places that don’t make sense – for example, non-English speaking countries sending a ton of traffic to your English-only website – you may want to try blocking specific IPs or IP ranges.

Feeling a bit overwhelmed by all the bot talk? Don’t worry. If you think the spiders might be running amok on your website, WPBlogsites can help. You can book a call with us right now using our online calendar, or drop us a line via our contact form and we will get in touch within 24 hours to see how we can help.

Here are 5 key things you want to know about FaceBook ads before you begin.

1. Plan first

Before you even log into your FaceBook Ads Manager there is some planning to do that will make it easier to create your ads and help you organize yourself.
Start by knowing your customer avatar. Who are they? What are their demographics, interests, who else do they follow on FaceBook and what organizations do they belong to?

What is the goal of your ad? Is it to increase awareness in your product or service? Is it to get more people to consider to work with you or buy your products, or is it to get more conversions (purchases of your product or service)?

2. Get your ad in front of the right audience

FaceBook ads are not magical unicorns!
FaceBook ads work when they are set up to target the right audiences, at the right time with the right offer. It’s easier than it sounds.

There three types of traffic: cold, warm and hot.
Cold traffic are people who have not heard of you and are not yet a lead.
Warm traffic are people who are a lead but have not bought from you.
Hot traffic are people who purchased from you and you want them to become a repeat customer.

You can create an ad for your new list builder (ie. a pdf download) and send that out to cold traffic. Since the offer is zero dollars, this is a great way to build your list.

You cannot however run an ad for your $10,000 coaching program or your $1,000 workshop and run that to cold traffic. Remember cold traffic are people who don’t know you. They don’t trust you because they don’t know you.

You could run the ad to those who have purchased from you previously (hot traffic) or have previously been to those offer pages (warm traffic), (see Pixels in #3 below).

Here are just a number of ways to find your audience on Facebook.
Target anyone who

• has visited your site
• has visited a specific page on your site
• has visited a specific page on your site but did visit another page (ie. visited your sales page but didn’t visit your “thank you” page. In other words they didn’t buy)
• hasn’t visited your site in a while
• signed up for your freebie and now you want to sell them a product or service.

and you can also target:

• People who like your page
• Friends of people who like your page
• People who responded to your event
• People who didn’t responded to your event
• Upload a list of email addresses of your leads/buyers and direct them to and offer (these are warm or hot leads).
• People based on their interests
• People based on their location
• People who engage with your content on Facebook

And many more!

3. The Pixel is your friend

The FaceBook pixel is a piece of code that you add to your website. It enables FaceBook to keep stats on your site such as who visits it and which pages have been visited. This enables you to measure, optimize and build a targeted audience for your ads. This is cool because you can create an ad that appears only to those who went to your sales page about your retreat let’s say. These people are already considering coming to your retreat because they visited your page to learn more. These people are warm leads. So you can put out an ad that encourages them to come back to your offer page by offering them a discount or a special bonus, or warning them that a bonus offer is going to expire soon and won’t be available if they purchase at a later date.

The even cooler thing is that not only can you run an ad that specifically goes to people who went to a specific page on your site, like the retreat sales page, but you can exclude anyone who has purchased. So you are running this ad for people who looked but haven’t bought. You won’t be running the ad to people who have purchased it already. Pretty neat eh?

4. Keeping your ad consistent is key

The key to creating your ad graphic is to gear the look of it towards the page they will land on when they click your ad. Consistency is key. Branding is key. So you will want both your ad and your page to have the same colours, same fonts, same message and share the same image. Doing so will keep your “ad scent” fresh and keep those who click on your ad stick around. You won’t want to advertise “The best ways to get clients” and yet the page they are sent to has a picture of someone snowboarding and promotes a new diet drink, yes? It is enough to confuse the visitor and a confused mind always says no.

5. Leverage your ad

The “Ads Manager” allows you to create ads for FaceBook’s mobile News Feed, desktop News Feed & right column, Instagram and the Audience Network in one shot. When you are starting off I suggest only creating ads for the desktop News Feed. The image size for the desktop News Feed is the biggest out of all of the ads, so it provides you with the most space to get creative. Start simple and grow from there.

Introducing…

What if you could get more traffic to your site?
What if more people knew about you and your offers?
What if you had new people added to your newsletter list daily?
What if you could fill programs and events easily?
What if you could bring website visitors back to your sales page and buy the 2nd time around?

You can do all of the above with FaceBook ads, and in this new course I’m going to teach you what you need to know, especially if you have never created a FaceBook ad, and I’ll do it in plain English…no Geekese!

Registration closes this Friday. 25 spots have been sold and only 15 spots remain. Find out more and register here.

-> Sell digital products, physical products or services
-> Easily display upsells when your clients check out
-> Use their modern and user friendly templates for your product and check out pages
-> Integrate it with your email marketing platform, membership site, shipping solution and more
-> Run your affiliate program easily from it too
-> Integrates with stripe, paypal, wishlist, ditial acces pass, member mouse, optimizepress, aweber, mailchimp, infusionsoft, icontact, ActiveCampaign, ConvertKit and more…

PS the price of SamCart doubles after Thursday September 22nd, 2016.

Another PS if you pay for the year now you save 33%!

I am continuously reading posts on Facebook asking people what the best ___ is, such as “What is the best shopping cart?”, “What is the best payment gateway system?”, “What is the best email marketing solution?”, “What is the best WordPress Theme?” and on and on.

Why does this make me cringe?

Let’s say I asked this question: “I’m going to buy a new hockey jersey. Which hockey team is the best?” Any guesses on what the answers would be? I would assert that I’d get a variety of answers because everyone’s home team or child’s hockey team, is “the best”. If you asked this question in downtown Toronto, you would undoubtedly get bombarded with the answer “The Toronto Maple Leafs of course! They are the best”. Leaf fans are die hard. They are ridiculously loyal. They do think their team is THE BEST, even though the team has not won a Stanley Cup in 39 years….oops typo, 49 years! Do you see my point?

The Problem

When you ask for “the best”, people will happily answer you because you gave them permission to give their opinion. Who doesn’t want to give their opinion? But their opinion on what is “the best” is based on what is working for them. “The best” works for their business, their budget, their needs, their wants and their end goals.

When this approach is taken people become overwhelmed with options, they spend time and money on systems they may never use and they end up where they started, asking questions and scratching their heads (they are just out money and are drained of energy by this point).

The Solution

Before you go to Facebook, your mastermind or any other place you ask questions, get clear and make a list about what you need, want, would love to have and your future needs.

So let’s say you are looking for a membership platform, get clear and make a list about what you need, what your members need, what payment systems & email marketing systems you currently have and will need to integrate with. Then make a list of what you want. These are things you can live without out if it came down to it. Then make a list of what features, integrations etc you would love to have, but are not a necessity, they are more “cosmetic”. Lastly make a list of what you want in the future as your needs, your members’ needs and your membership develops and grows.

Take this list and now go ask the question with your needs listed first. Let them know that you need these items! Then state that the rest of your list is a “wish list”. By pointing out and listing your “needs” you will avoid the overwhelm of answers that won’t work for you. So this may look like:

Fonts changes to make the Admin faster

The fonts used in the Admin area (your WordPress dashboard) changed in WordPress 3.8 to include a font from “Google Fonts”. This meant the font needed to be loaded from Google each time you went into your dashboard, and this slowed the speed at which your dashboard loaded. (Yes this is a bit techie but bear with me.) Now the font has been changed so that it doesn’t have to be loaded from a different site and this will quicken things up for you.

Autosave

When you are writing a blog post or page WordPress is saving backups, called “autosaves”. As it is now, these autosaves sometimes fail and it is not detected. In WordPress 4.6 you will be notified when there is a newer autosave available. This will lead to less or no lost information. All that typing and formatting you did won’t be lost!

No more broken links

This is my favourite feature of WordPress 4.6!
When you add a link to your posts or pages, WordPress will verify the link when you press enter or click “apply”. No more bad “copy and paste” jobs or accidental typos that lead your readers to error pages! D’oh!
Note: You must be in the “visual” tab not the “Text (HTML)” tab.

If the link exists you will see this:

If the link doesn’t exist you will see your link in red and a red box around the text you are trying to link, like this:

Quick on the spot updates

WordPress 4.6 will also include the features of the plugin “Shiny Updates”. This plugin allows you to install and update plugins and themes on the spot, as opposed to being redirected to another page or having a pop-up appear. It’s quicker and simpler.
Here’s an example of what the Plugins -> Add New page looks like when you click to install a new plugin. Notice that I am installing it while on the search results page. I wasn’t redirected to a boring installation page detailing the steps of the installation.

Updating to WordPress 4.6

WordPress 4.6 won’t be released until August 16, 2016 or later. When it is released wait a few days before updating your own WordPress sites. We do this for our own sites and our clients’ sites for two reasons. One we want to be very sure that there are no bugs, and although WordPress’ team are constantly testing you can never test every combination of WordPress versions, plugins, themes and even hosts. Two if there happens to be a bug or *gasp* a security issue, we wait until the secured release is available (you can look out for WordPress 4.6.1).

I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments below. Which new feature are you happiest to see?

1. Allergy and Food Intolerance Tests:
   Back in 2007 I found out that I had a massive list of foods I was intolerant to, things like wheat, rye, soda/pop, egg whites, white rice and grapefruit. At the time I pretty much lived on peppermint lattes and expresso brownies from Starbucks. My energy levels were so low that when I would yawn my whole body felt even more exhausted from the act of yawning. My eyes couldn’t focus on the computer. My vision was blurry. My neck and back muscles were constantly tight, which made it really hard to find a comfortable position to fall asleep.
   Once I eliminated all of the foods I was intolerant too (and stayed away from the foods I was allergic to) my energy and productivity shot up.
   My list of intolerances have changed since then, which is kind of a blessing as I eat healthier meals that give me the fuel I need to focus and work. I am so happy that I am not intolerant to coffee. Mmmmm…sweet sweet coffee!
    
2. Shut off phone notifications: When I got my first smart phone (a Blackberry) I kept all the notifications on and the volume was set to high. Not only did this make my battery die within hours but it scared me each time I was notified of a new email or BBM. Needless to say I lost my focus each time it “beeped”. 10 years later I still have my smart phone on silent, not only to conserve my battery but to keep me focused on the project at hand.
    
3. Shut off laptop notifications: You probably saw this one coming! Yes I also shut off notifications on my laptop too, including sounds and pop-up windows. The only one I keep active is my Skype notifications because I use Skype to communicate with my team and if there is an urgent message I want to focus on it!
    
4. Check things off: I LOVE to check things off when I complete a task or project. It gives me great satisfaction. Most people would think that being a Geek my “To Do” list is probably on some app, but really I’m a paper and pen gal when it comes to my “To Do” list. I recently started using the Bullet Journal system. It’s simple and I began implementing it while watching the video on their page. I really do love it.
   Now while this is a system that works for me, you may prefer an app or a project management system that suits your style.
    
5. Go for a walk: I started my business a year and half before meeting my husband, and before meeting him I never had a dog. There were times where I never left my condo for a 24 hour period (once it was 48 hours). Yikes. When we met I would take his dogs for walks and at first I thought it was disrupting my productivity but in reality I needed the break and I needed the fresh air. Today I walk my dog 5 times a day. Two of those walks are longer walks and I use those to tune out of my busy day or I use the time to solve a problem (this works for techie problems too!)
    
6. Get out of the home office: If I am working on a big project, let’s say I’m creating a new course, I head to a coffee shop or the library. The only problem for me is that most public seating is made for people taller than me and I tend to hurt my neck or back while typing away on my laptop. But, I get around that by only working for an hour. That hour tends to be hyper focused and I get more done in that one hour than I would with two hours at home.
    
7. Say no more often: Say no to telesummits, interviews, partnerships, joint ventures, guest writing opportunities, traveling and anything else that just doesn’t fire you up or doesn’t guarantee you new business. You are better off saying no now, than dragging yourself through it all and hating every step of it. Save that energy for the things you do love to do in your business.
    
8. Review and modify your business: Go through your business and stop doing the things that aren’t working for you. If you do a free (or paid) class each month and you aren’t getting the results you want from it, stop it. If your newsletter isn’t getting published because it takes too long, look at how you can shorten it. I did and I love my new short newsletter that takes me just a few minutes each week to publish!
    
9. Review and modify your expenses: I will go through my expenses quite often. I look at what tools I’m using frequently and which tools I am not using often enough. I either choose to start using those tools or I cancel my subscription. I kept one subscription based service for an entire year because I thought “one day I will use it” and I never did. It ate up my energy a bit when I would see the statement each month on my credit card bill.
    
10. Hire a team: Before hiring a team of people to help me I did everything from sales to content creation to techie stuff to invoicing. It wore me down and soon enough I got so busy that I couldn’t do it all anymore. So I stopped worrying about why I should and shouldn’t trust people helping me in my business and I went for it. Our team is now 30 strong! They help me with my marketing and tech stuff and they are hired by our clients to help with their marketing, launching, content creation, websites, e-commerce and more! Instead of hiring your team bit by bit, why not hire our team and have their skills available at your finger tips! If you are curious, I urge you to book a call with Ericka our business manager here.

There you go! That’s my top ten list. What do you do to keep your productivity up as an entrepreneur?