As They Say, Knowledge Is Power

Sort out all your ideas and see how you can minimize your time on production. Be smart about your planning and look for ways to get it done fast. Do you need to set aside an hour a week to align your photo grid? Or maybe you need a weekend alone every 3 months to get your captions done. Be sure to schedule it in your calendar so that you get it done. Always produce in bulk and stay well ahead of your posting. A quick search will produce many apps available to help you plan your grid, captions and hashtags. Decide on what part of your business and your life you think will interest your target audience the most and start brainstorming topics around this. When you create posts for at least two weeks ahead, you can limit your Instagram use to minutes a day! The purpose of your Instagram profile is to connect and convert. When you build a ‘know, like and trust‘ factor with your audience, they are much more likely to buy from you than if you just treat your Instagram account as a catalogue to browse through. To create really good content that will actually get you customers, you need to be strategic. Decide ahead of time what you would like the account to accomplish. Then separate your posting into 4 phases and think of each sequence of 4 as a launch.

No Second Thoughts

A launch can be every week or twice a year. The point is to include all the 4 phases in each sequence. Who are you as a person? Why should we trust you? What is unique and different about you? This phase is for creating goodwill and building a tribe of raving fans. Create tons of value for your target audience so you can establish yourself as an expert in your niche. This is something you must do all year around. This is where you show your target customer that you care about her. You let her know that you understand her struggles and that you are familiar with the objections she might have to investing in your solution. Create posts that help her through these struggles and you will have a raving fan. The goal for this phase is to position your product as the solution to your audience’s problem. Use live videos, stories, host challenges or free workshops. This is also the phase where you use your best pictures. They know you are the expert and that you care.

Prove Yourself

You have proved that you understand their problems and now they are ready to commit. This is the phase where you promote your product. Jot down a list of all the posts you need to create in order to take the customer through each of the phases. If you have ongoing promotions, divide your sequence throughout the month. Aim to provide value on most of the days. A few posts a week showcase your products with the intention to sell. When you know your customer avatar, create interesting posts that provide value by combining your expertise and personality, use high quality pictures that tell a story, and build your sequence of posts in the way I described, you will build a tribe of loyal followers with many who are ready to buy from you! I help busy, stressed out mompreneurs balance their health, parenting, and business so that they can be the superstar mompreneurs that they are. My mission is to support the complicated lives of mompreneurs. The one thing every mompreneur needs to know when she’s stressed out and exhausted with no energy to accomplish all that she wants is that she needs to have strategies in place to power her through her day. Here are 5 steps to help you do that. As they say, knowledge is power. First, you need to understand what is draining your energy.

Glad All Over

Though you may think it all stems from how busy life is with your kids, significant other, and all that you need to do to have a successful business, you may not realize that there are other factors impacting your energy levels. In fact, you may be unintentionally doing things that are actually draining your energy instead of giving you energy. For example, you may be consuming too much sugar. Do you know how much sugar you are actually having? Hidden sugars are everywhere, even in foods that are marketed as healthy. Just as you need to be savvy in business, you need to be savvy when it comes to the foods you eat, especially when it comes to sugar intake. The average person consumes 95 grams of sugar a day, which equals 77 pounds of sugar a year! The American Heart Association recommends that women only consume 20 grams a day. Many are way over that. Are you one of them? You may be aware of how much sugar you put in your coffee and tea and how much sugar you personally add to your foods. But what about packaged foods? Did you know that foods that have less or no fat almost always have more sugar? They replace the fat with sugar, so it tastes better so that we continue to buy these foods. They also sneak sugar into boxed foods you buy such as crackers, bread, pasta, pasta sauce and even those healthy cereals many of us eat! What about having too much caffeine? Though caffeine will give you that quick boost of energy, if you have too much caffeine, you will experience an energy crash. The more caffeine you consume throughout the day, the worse those energy crashes feel. There are foods that are not that well known for containing caffeine such as chocolate, pudding, breakfast cereals that have chocolate flavoring and even decaffeinated coffee. Believe it or not, even headache relief medications have caffeine! What about eating breakfast? Being a mompreneur is full of busy days and weekends. You may be so pressed for time that you skip breakfast. Or maybe you skip breakfast because you are late running the kids to school or you overslept because you were up working late. Whatever the reason, if you are skipping breakfast, you are setting yourself up for an energy crisis. Early in the morning, your body is naturally at its lowest level of energy, so it needs you to feed it to jumpstart the energy you need for your busy day. If you are exposed to any of these throughout your day, they are depleting your energy.