What do you do when business is slow? Do you stare at the phone, wondering why it isn’t ringing today?
Do you call it an in-office vacation day and stare out the window? Or do you start to feel anxious and stressed out as you think about the dip in your revenue?
You could be using the time far more productively, engaging in these 6 activities which will reduce the number of slow days that you have to worry about.
1. Write 16 Blog Posts
Write 16 blog posts and schedule them out on Word Press. This gets you ahead on your blogging by two months, because you can schedule these posts to air twice a week and still see a pretty good upswing in your traffic.
2. Catch Up on Social Media
Schedule out updates on your social networks. Use Hoot Suite or a similar tool to get the job done.
You can also take about an hour to share other people’s content like crazy, and to reply to everyone you can. Social is about promoting others as much as yourself, and it’s a good idea to do this while you’ve got a block of time to work with.
3. Build Citations
Remember, citations are the fastest way to increase your local rankings. If nobody is doing this for you it can be a little tedious, but it will help you fill up a slow day.
Not sure where to start? Check out this Moz Blog post: Finding and Building Citations like an Agency.
4. Catch Up on Your Reading
Don’t pull out a novel, however. Instead, take the time to read other blogs from your industry, or blogs from related but non-competing industries. Good content marketing involves as much content consumption as content creation. Without this step you won’t have much to share, you won’t have any place to make comments and you won’t experience the sudden flashes of insight that allow you to share someone else’s work on your blog while adding your own take on the issue.
Content marketing is, at its heart, as much about joining a conversation as it is about writing a bunch of useful stuff. So plug in get inspired, and really participate in the online community. It matters.
5. Set up a Way to Keep Track of Your Community
Don’t just drop a comment without ever showing up again. You need to build stronger ties than that if you want your own website to endure.
This means that you’ll need a place to store blogs that you’ve visited so that you can find a way to return and join the conversation once more. I like to use the Twitter Lists feature for this, but you could also create a special set of bookmarks, circle the bloggers on G+, add them all to Feedly, or even just keep a pen and paper list.
6. Pitch a Guest Post
Guest posts are one of the best ways to build backlinks for your business. A slow day is a great time to scout some guidelines so you can put together some ideas.
Sometimes it can take a lot of pitches to get the green light, so target 10-15 blogs at first. Sooner or later you’ll stroke gold.
Once you’ve put together a good relationship with a blogger you can even do multiple guest posts on the same site, becoming a presence that the other blogger’s audience responds to.
Does All This Sound Overwhelming?
These are great ways to spend a slow business day because they’ll eventually bring in more business. But if you hate to write or if you don’t feel comfortable with all of this relationship building then a professional webmaster and blogging service may be the way to go instead.
Sure, you won’t have as many useful things to do on a slow day, but all of these things will have been done for you…which means you may not have to worry about so many slow days!
