Being a solopreneur is great for creative, business-minded individuals looking to make an impact on the world. You will definitely face a lot of challenges along your journey to success and make several mistakes.
there are 5 mistakes new solopreneurs tend to make:
1. Doing everything on your own
Though you have set out on the entrepreneurial journey all by yourself, you don’t have to do everything on your own. The biggest mistake solopreneurs make is to think that they need to do every single task themselves. A stat suggests that more than 35% of entrepreneurs work 40 hours per week.
While it is understandable from the point of view that they need everything to be perfect, it is not practical. You cannot be doing several tasks at the same time and expect that you will manage to do all of them successfully. If you take the burden of doing everything upon yourself, you will end up making a lot of mistakes.
You Can hire some people to do less important work. You can even automate some of your important work by capitalizing on the most recent technology like taking and storing screenshots of your website from a website archiving tool. This will allow you to focus your time and energy on priority and productive tasks.
2. Ignoring social media presence
Social media platforms like Instagram and Facebook have more than a billion active users. Can you imagine the number of people you can reach by having a successful social media strategy?
Effectively using social media platforms for marketing your business will help you reach a lot of people belonging to your target audience and you will be able to grow at a faster pace.
Despite that, many solopreneurs tend to ignore social media platforms because they don’t consider them important for a business. Make sure that you don’t make this mistake.
3. Not setting attainable goals
It is important to set logical goals and targets if you want your business to succeed. Most solopreneurs commit either of the two mistakes – they don’t set any goals for themselves or the company; or, they set unrealistic goals that tend to demotivate people from working towards attaining them.
You need to carefully make short-term and long-term goals for your business. These goals need to be challenging but at the same time, achievable and logical.
This allows you to create a solid plan of action towards achieving your targets which would ensure that your business grows to an extent that you desire.
4. Forgetting the competition
You might have heard the phrase, ‘mind your own business’ countless times. While it is a good phrase to discourage people from prying into what other people are doing, you should do the opposite in the actual business world.
You cannot simply continue with your business and turn a blind eye towards competitors. It is a mistake that costs a lot of solopreneurs because they are caught like a deer in headlights when they realize that their competitors have made changes to their business that have enabled them to grow at a much faster pace while they were busy managing their own business.
You need to keep a close watch on the changes your competitors are making to their websites and marketing strategies and how customers are responding to them. This will allow you to create good strategies to counter them before they grow much bigger than you.
5. Being afraid of ‘what-ifs’
The biggest mistake solopreneurs can make is to avoid taking risks. You should know that the business world is quite volatile and you need to take calculated risks if you want to do something different than the others in your industry.
It is understandable that you might be afraid of the outfall of a decision that is very risky but if your gut tells you that it could lead to your business attain a level of growth you want it to achieve, you need to go for it.
If you don’t, you will forever be stuck with the question of ‘what-if’ in your head no matter how well your business does.
As you carry on your solopreneur journey of building a successful business, make sure that you avoid making these mistakes to achieve your desired success.
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