This past year, I started watching Gordon Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares and found myself hooked on the show before I knew it.

At first it was just nice background TV, and it was funny watching Gordon become frustrated with the various owners who couldn’t grasp the fundamental basics of the restaurant business (like cleaning up and not microwaving salads, lol seriously).

After a couple of seasons of the show, I realised that what I really liked was the underlying business lessons I was picking up from the show.

Gordon, quite understandably, knows his sh*t and is an expert leader and businessman.

After watching all of the Kitchen Nightmares and Hotel Hell episodes, I feel like I could start my own small restaurant and I’ve picked up a lot (though Gordon will probably still tell me my food is sh*t).

So here are the business lessons I’d like to share with you that I’ve learnt from Kitchen Nightmares.

1. Strive for excellence

The number one problem in almost every episode of Kitchen Nightmares and Hotel Hell, is that the business owners accept mediocrity.

As a perfectionist, this understandably irritates the crap out of Gordon.

The reason Gordon clashes so hard with the struggling restaurant oweners, is because he has to break each owner out of their mediocrity mindset.

He needs to make them realise that to save their restaurant, they need to strive for excellence.

Ego, personal opinion, everything else has to be left at the door.

And so does the disgusting microwaved food.

2. Focus on doing one thing well

The second thing Gordon does, in I think every single episode, is create a new, simple menu.

In several episodes, he literally throws the menu in the bin. In a couple of other funny episodes he won’t read the menu until the staff clean the dirt and cobwebs off. Lol.

The two most common problems holding back the restaurant owners from serving good food are their quality control and the size of the menu.

The size of the menu is usually the problem, and the owner resolutely refusing to empower the chef to change it.

These small restaurants can’t serve menus with 50+ items, a small kitchen staff and still maintain quality.

So they end up buying in loads of food, freezing it, cooking it poorly, then wondering why the customers aren’t coming back.

Gordon advocates that they serve a small menu, with locally sourced produce and to make sure they nail this menu.

The restaurants need to focus on doing one thing well.

One of the first things he asks the owners is — “What sort of restaurant is this?”.

I.e, what sort of food do you serve? He does this to ascertain whether or not the restaurant is focusing on serving one type of food well, or whether they don’t have a proper identity and are serving lots of different foods poorly.

For example, in one episode he visited a Danish restaurant that wasn’t actually serving any Danish food (with a Cuban chef), much to his bewilderment.

3. Take accountability for your actions

As the business owner, the buck stops with you.

Ultimately it’s your business and it is your responsibility to shoulder the burden and stress, not your employees.

It’s your job to delegate effectively to staff and empower them do their jobs, but also to stay on top of things and take accountability for the end result.

In several episodes, there is an issue with accountability, insubordination and incompetent staff.

In one particular episode that I remember clearly, the chef had no experience, was openly insubordinate, violent and in some instances using drugs whilst working at the restaurant.

This ultimately was the restaurant owners failing, because she was in denial about the quality of her food and competency of her staff, refusing to take action on either.

This chef had been at the restaurant for a prolonged period of time and the food had been sub standard for some time.

Gordon makes it clear that is her accountability to deal with this. She is the owner and she can’t pass the buck to her staff.

If the staff are not qualified or capable of doing the job, she needs to replace them so that the business can function effectively.

Otherwise, she not only jeopardises the business, but the jobs of everyone there, and more importantly, the safety of her customers who are at risk of food poisoning.

4. Value your staff

In one particularly interesting episode of Hotel Hell, Gordon visits a failing hotel where the owners have a big problem with valuing their staff (and basic common courtesy).

There is a big divide between the owners and staff, with the owners treating the staff like absolute crap, even to the point where one of the owners takes a percentage of the tips the servers receive, when he helps them with their work (including an elderly lady’s tips).

This ultimately translates to the poor performance of the hotel and the staff.

If you treat your staff like crap, you won’t get the best out of them.

Nobody likes arrogance.

Gordon teaches the owners that they need to stop being so arrogant and start valuing the people who keep their business afloat, treating them like human beings.

In one particular scene, one of the owners begins barking at the staff like he’s the warden at a prison camp, to Gordon’s shock and dismay. Anyone remember Ari’s rampage?

Would you want to give someone your best if you knew they didn’t care about you, and you were just an expendable employee to them?

The lesson here is value your staff, treat them like you would any other human. With respect, empathy and understanding.

5. Don’t lie to your customers

It’s bad enough lying to Gordon about the practices of your restaurant, after he’s taken the time and spent the money to come and basically make your restaurant a success for you, as long as you’re not stupid enough to disregard the changes he makes.

But it’s another thing to lie to your customers.

In several episodes we see the owners lying to their customers about the quality and content of their food.

Usually, the owners lie about whether food is fresh or frozen, passing off cheap frozen food as fresh high quality food.

If there’s one thing people hate, it’s being lied to and having their intelligence insulted. Amusingly, most of these customers are well aware the food is frozen when Gordon asks them outright.

In one particular instance, Gordon receives the truth from a particularly brave waitress which angers the lying owner. Don’t lie!

6. Maintain standards across the board

One of the first things Gordon does when he suspects a chef is no good is check his walk in fridge/freezer.

“You can always tell a chef by his walk in” — Gordon is fond of saying.

And of course he is right. In every instance when he visits the walk ins of the unfortunate chefs, they are in complete disarray.

Dirty, disorganised, cooked meat next to raw meat.

In several instances Gordon actually shuts down the restaurant during service because the restaurant poses a health risk to customers.

In one particularly horrifying case of neglect, an ambulance is called after a customer consumes a rotten lobster and takes a turn for the worse.

The lesson here is, the little things matter.

Gordon tries to drill into the owners that they need to maintain standards from the little things up to the big things.

Caring about the little things translates to caring about the big things.

Every dish needs to be served perfectly as if it is the first of the night. If you let one crap dish go out, the standards begin to go out the window.

7. Lead by example

Gordon is a classic example of leadership from the front. He’s a natural leader.

He leads by doing, by maintaining a high personal standard that he expects others to match and follow.

He teaches the restaurant owners that they need to do the same and lead by example.

That if they are lazy and don’t care, their staff will follow suit. If the owners are arrogant and don’t take responsibility for anything, why would the staff care?

A good example of a leadership failure on the shows is the case of the ‘two spoiled sisters’ on Hotel Hell.

Gordon revamps the menu at this restaurant, then removes the young owners, empowering the dedicated general manager to turn the restaurant around.

Gordon realises the hotel already has a strong leader being hamstrung by the owners, so just empowers her to do her job properly and works to make the owners realise this is the best course of action.

In summary, we can learn a lot from both Kitchen Nightmares and Hotel Hell about business. There are probably numerous other lessons you can pick up from the show.

Not only can we learn a lot from the show, these lessons are delivered with a large slice of humour and entertainment factor too!

Thanks for reading!

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Why WordPress Is The BEST Platform To Build Your Business or Startup Website On

30 Days Of Medium

This story is published in The Startup, Medium’s largest entrepreneurship publication followed by 340,876+ people.

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What We Can Learn About Business From Gordon Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares was originally published in The Startup on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Thank to you everyone who has been reading and following along to my 30 Days Of Medium posts so far.

Make sure you subscribe to my content using the little sign up box at the bottom to make sure I can email you each new post.

If you’re just discovering my posts, you can check out the other 30 Days Of Medium below.

0. 30 Days Of Medium

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2. How to find a business you love — 30 Days Of Medium

3. How to build your own website — 30 Days Of Medium

4. How to measure your website’s performance — 30 Days Of Medium

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28. How to do keyword research — 30 Days Of Medium

29. Why The Pareto Principle is the world’s biggest hack — 30 Days Of Medium

Your content is more profitable than your telephone

For years I thought outbound sales was the best way to grow a business.

Then I discovered inbound marketing 6 or 7 years ago through Hubspot.

After attaining a tenuous grasp of the concept and achieving mediocre results, I tabled it for a while to review at a later date.

Fast forward to today and I no longer do any outbound sales.

By this I mean, 100% of my new business efforts are focused on authority marketing and inbound marketing.

I want new customers to find me.

I don’t want to have to do lots of outreach or try and chase up new business every month.

And neither should you.

Your content is a lot more profitable than your telephone.

If you spend an hour writing a good, short piece of content and it generates you 2–3 customers over the year, your return on investment is huge and this happens on autopilot without further time investment from you (apart from order taking).

All it takes is decent knowledge of SEO and the subject matter you are discussing.

How many hours on the phone does it take to drum up a cold piece of business from scratch?

How many man hours are spent prospecting, calling, qualifying, demoing and so on?

How profitable is this customer once it’s closed?

For enterprise sales with huge deal worth’s, I can see the logic in this. If you aren’t making huge deals with huge lifetime value though, it’s not worth it.

If you’re a small business, I can’t see how it’s profitable or a good way of scaling up, after factoring in the salaries, working hours, software, office space and every other cost involved in the calling process.

How much would it cost to hire a blazing hot growth marketer who can write killer content, SEO optimise it and manage your inbound process to ensure a steady flow of leads?

It seems to be what all the high growth technology companies are doing, why is it any different for a small business?

Sure tech companies are much more scalable (generally) and the margins they make are probably bigger, but maybe your margins as a small business would be a lot bigger if you adopted inbound and didn’t have to shell out hundreds of thousands for sales guys to hard sell your product.

Telling isn’t selling.

Something Brian Tracy said, one of the godfather’s of modern sales, has stuck with me.

“Telling isn’t selling.”

What he means by this is, talking at your customers or trying to sell to them, isn’t selling.

A sale is a transfer of enthusiasm. It’s understand your prospects needs and providing a solution that solves them.

The best sales people can rapport build, requirement gather and benefit match, all while challenging their prospects assumptions and presenting alternative courses of option when necessary.

Like The Challenger Sale talks about.

Evidence of this in action is the fact that Brian Tracy has adopted inbound better than most I have seen. Check out his blog.

He also has a hugely useful YouTube channel where he creates fresh video content all the time.

This is because video content is one on one sales on steroids.

If you know your product and your market, why aren’t you making video content?

With a video you have the potential to sell hundreds, thousands or even millions of people in one go.

Video content especially is a visual transfer of enthusiasm that can draw in and convince a universal audience.

Which is why all of the biggest motivational speakers and business coaches hammer video content, like Tony Robbins.

Use content to sell your customers en masse

Content marketing is about answering your customers questions or making them aware of problems and opportunities they didn’t know existed.

The three stages of the Inbound Funnel are:

• Awareness. Your prospect doesn’t know they have a problem, or opportunity.
• Consideration. Your prospect knows something is wrong (or they aren’t taking advantage of something) and is investigating solutions.
• Decision. Your prospect has narrowed down the solution and needs to find a vendor to provide it. Will it be you?

You can learn Inbound for free from Hubspot Marketing Academy.

If you’re a good sales person you’re also probably a good content marketer.

Content marketing isn’t just about writing blog posts or the written word. There’s tons of different ways of getting your message across. And if you are confident and good at speaking, video is your platform.

Remember those sales calls you have with tricky customers talking about why they need your product in the first place?

Make them into videos — Awareness

How about those sales calls where you had to match what your product does to your customers specific requirements?

More videos — Consideration

And do you remember trying to close that customer who wanted to know who you’ve worked with and have you got experience in their industry?

Make them into killer video success stories showcasing the end result. — Decision

If you adopt an Inbound Approach and put some strategy in place behind your content and how you distribute it, you will be able to generate, nurture and close leads on autopilot.

Each great piece of content you produce becomes an asset that can attract new customers and aid your sales teams in the process.

Outbound becomes easier and easier, then as your inbound pipeline grows, unnecessary.

Do you feel otherwise? Let me know in the comments why.

To anyone who has been following my 30 Days Of Medium so far thanks so much for reading up to this point and for your claps and feedback. Don’t worry, this isn’t the end. There will plenty more content to come!

You might also like this:

Why WordPress Is The BEST Platform To Build Your Business or Startup Website On

How To Build A Website — The Ultimate Guide

If you enjoyed this story, please click the 👏 button and follow me for the other 30 Days Of Medium.

This story is published in The Startup, Medium’s largest entrepreneurship publication followed by 339,876+ people.

Subscribe to receive our top stories here.

30. Your content is more profitable than your telephone — 30 Days Of Medium was originally published in The Startup on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Thank to you everyone who has been reading and following along to my 30 Days Of Medium posts so far.

Make sure you subscribe to my content using the little sign up box at the bottom to make sure I can email you each new post.

If you’re just discovering my posts, you can check out the other 30 Days Of Medium below.

0. 30 Days Of Medium

1. What do you need to build your own website? — 30 Days Of Medium

2. How to find a business you love — 30 Days Of Medium

3. How to build your own website — 30 Days Of Medium

4. How to measure your website’s performance — 30 Days Of Medium

5. How to get more customers by answering their questions -30 Days Of Medium

6. The successful business website cheat sheet — 30 Days Of Medium

7. How to measure success — 30 Days Of Medium

8. Understanding the Online Sales Funnel — 30 Days Of Medium

9. What is traffic and why is it important? — 30 Days Of Medium

10. What is Google URL Builder and why should you use it? — 30 Days Of Medium

11. Double your traffic by automating your social media schedule — 30 Days Of Medium

12. How to tell what sells — 30 Days Of Medium

13. How I grew my Medium following 6,500% — 30 Days Of Medium

14. How you look at things matters — 30 Days Of Medium

15. How to SELL services to small businesses — 30 Days Of Medium

16. How to win more deals with effective proposals — 30 Days Of Medium

17. How to setup an online store in 10 minutes — 30 Days Of Medium

18. How to work from anywhere — 30 Days Of Medium

19. Why your website is sabotaging your sales — 30 Days Of Medium

20. Where does your traffic come from? — 30 Days Of Medium

21. How to actually recognise burnout — 30 Days Of Medium

22. How to hack your schedule and get twice as much done — 30 Days Of Medium

23. Don’t copy your competitors — 30 Days Of Medium

24. How to SEO optimise a blog post — 30 Days Of Medium

25. Be unique or be forgotten — 30 Days Of Medium

26. Going with your gut — 30 Days Of Medium

27. People don’t pay for average — 30 Days Of Medium

28. How to do keyword research — 30 Days Of Medium

29. Why The Pareto Principle is the world’s biggest hack — 30 Days Of Medium

30. Your content is more profitable than your telephone — 30 Days Of Medium

What is the Pareto Principle?

The Pareto Principle, named after Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto, or The 80/20 Rule, is an absolute truth of the universe.

The Pareto principle states that:

“20% of of our actions will account for 80% of our outcomes”.

You could also say that:

“Roughly 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes”.

What does this mean?

Well, as far as business and startups go, it means that 20% of your work is going to account for 80% of your results.

It also means that if you learn how to leverage and apply the Pareto Principle to your life, you can take advantage of the biggest life hack in human history.

The Pareto Principle in action

Did you ever wonder where the term work smart comes from?

I’d wager a guess it comes from the Pareto Principle.

For example, the Pareto Principle is a well known axiom in sales. Many sales people have probably had it drilled into them that 80% of our sales come from 20% of our clients, or something similar.

The Pareto Principle is even evident in what I do, which is WordPress. Using WordPress staging environments allows me to cut out 80% of the stress I would receive, if I was brave enough to test new features and updates on my live client sites.

Richard Koch even authored a book on this.

The 80/20 rule is basically the work smart rule.

If you apply this universal truth to your business and routine, you will only work on the 20% of tasks that yield 80% of the results.

This is something I’ve been working on a lot lately. I’ve been allocating planning time a few times each week to just sit down and think about what I’m doing.

What is generating results? What could I do better? How could I be more productive and get more done in the same amount of time?

Leveraging The Pareto Principle

Leveraging The Pareto Principle in your life is the definition of working smart.

Think about it.

You are spending the time to deeply self analyse and weed out all the sh*t.

What actually has got you the results? And what is just a waste of time or busy work.

We are lazy by nature. All of us, even me. We are constantly fighting against our own natures to get stuff done and be successful.

We weren’t designed to climb the corporate ladder or become self made millionaires.

We were designed to procreate and escape death by predator. Our minds simply haven’t evolved to handle the complex levels of decision making and weird new kinds of stress and anxiety this modern level entails.

Which is why you need to get smart and leverage the 80/20 rule.

Why? Because it can drastically cut down the time it takes you to start achieving some level of success.

I wish I had been more self critical 6 years ago. But it’s the lazy thing again. I never used to see the value in planning and an exercise like this would have been something that I would have put off deeming it unnecessary.

The first step to getting smart and massively hacking your life is to take a look at your routine. A good look. Like this:

• What have I done that has moved me close to my goal?
• What have I done that has a negative, or no impact on moving me closer to my goal?
• Drill down a list of the specific tasks that you can do every single day to move you to your goal.
• Plan those tasks a month ahead.
• Consistently execute them every single day.

You also want to remove any friction you can from your life, and burn that stupid no days off t-shirt.

I’ve written before about how most of us aren’t superman. There’s a tiny percentage of us who require 6 hours sleep and no days off. These guys are usually already killing it and at the top of their game.

So my theory is, their willpower is at absolute maximum most of the time because they can to afford to utilise every force multiplier possible, to squeeze every last drop of productivity out of their routine.

For example, having personal trainers to wake you and take you to the gym at 5 am. Good healthy meals cooked and waiting for you when you return, or the money to spend what you want when you want.

This makes going to the gym and working out a breeze.

Mark Zuckerberg wrote about he always wears the same t-shirt every day because it’s one less decision he has to make.

He’s talking about the fact that decisions drain willpower and he is hacking his life and schedule, down to the very first decision he makes in the day.

Unfortunately, while we grind our way to success, we don’t have this same level of luxury, so what we need to do is kill friction and willpower draining exercises so that we can be consistent in our smart tasks and not get burned out doing stupid sh*t or busy work.

Don’t wake up at 5am if you’re not a morning person and this drains you completely.

Get up at 7, don’t be suckered in by everyone else’s advice. Give yourself your own advice. Go with your gut. If you do the same 8–10 hours work everyday, it doesn’t matter if you do it at 5 or 7.

If you get up at 5 and are so exhausted that you can barely manage 4 hours, that isn’t very productive now is it?

If you’re a morning person and this works for you great, if it doesn’t, don’t do it. The wake up at 5am thing is a myth. Look at Aaron Levies’s schedule.

Waking up at a normal time seems to work fine for Mark Zuckerberg too, and I’d say he’s doing pretty well.

Find a routine that is optimum for you and your body clock.

I wake up at 7, take a shower and I’m working by 7.30.

I then take a small break at 9 to eat and get ready for the day. I can maintain this routine consistently 5 days a week, and work weekends when I need to, because it doesn’t drain my willpower too much.

I make sure I give myself time to unwind in the evening. I’ll play a video-game for an hour, watch some TV, go for a walk with my partner, eat a good dinner and just relax.

Each day I’m working on hacking my schedule by just doing the tasks that drive my business forward or deliver results for my customers.

Key takeaway

The key takeaway from this article is:

• Self analyse to understand what works and what doesn’t in your routine
• Hack your life by only working on the tasks that yield 80% of the results, and cut out the busy work tasks that yield 20%, or no results.

You might also like this:

Why WordPress Is The BEST Platform To Build Your Business or Startup Website On

How To Build A Website — The Ultimate Guide

If you enjoyed this story, please click the 👏 button and follow me for the other 30 Days Of Medium.

This story is published in The Startup, Medium’s largest entrepreneurship publication followed by 338,320+ people.

Subscribe to receive our top stories here.

29. Why The Pareto Principle Is The World’s Biggest Hack — 30 Days Of Medium was originally published in The Startup on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Thank to you everyone who has been reading and following along to my 30 Days Of Medium posts so far.

Make sure you subscribe to my content using the little sign up box at the bottom to make sure I can email you each new post.

If you’re just discovering my posts, you can check out the other 30 Days Of Medium below.

0. 30 Days Of Medium

1. What do you need to build your own website? — 30 Days Of Medium

2. How to find a business you love — 30 Days Of Medium

3. How to build your own website — 30 Days Of Medium

4. How to measure your website’s performance — 30 Days Of Medium

5. How to get more customers by answering their questions -30 Days Of Medium

6. The successful business website cheat sheet — 30 Days Of Medium

7. How to measure success — 30 Days Of Medium

8. Understanding the Online Sales Funnel — 30 Days Of Medium

9. What is traffic and why is it important? — 30 Days Of Medium

10. What is Google URL Builder and why should you use it? — 30 Days Of Medium

11. Double your traffic by automating your social media schedule — 30 Days Of Medium

12. How to tell what sells — 30 Days Of Medium

13. How I grew my Medium following 6,500% — 30 Days Of Medium

14. How you look at things matters — 30 Days Of Medium

15. How to SELL services to small businesses — 30 Days Of Medium

16. How to win more deals with effective proposals — 30 Days Of Medium

17. How to setup an online store in 10 minutes — 30 Days Of Medium

18. How to work from anywhere — 30 Days Of Medium

19. Why your website is sabotaging your sales — 30 Days Of Medium

20. Where does your traffic come from? — 30 Days Of Medium

21. How to actually recognise burnout — 30 Days Of Medium

22. How to hack your schedule and get twice as much done — 30 Days Of Medium

23. Don’t copy your competitors — 30 Days Of Medium

24. How to SEO optimise a blog post — 30 Days Of Medium

25. Be unique or be forgotten — 30 Days Of Medium

26. Going with your gut — 30 Days Of Medium

27. People don’t pay for average — 30 Days Of Medium

28. How to do keyword research — 30 Days Of Medium

29. Why The Pareto Principle is the world’s biggest hack — 30 Days Of Medium

30. Your content is more profitable than your telephone — 30 Days Of Medium

What is keyword research?

Keyword research is the process of finding the stuff your customers are searching for on Google.

Using Google Keyword Planner, or AHREFS, you can see data directly from Google on what keywords people use, how many searches they get and how difficult they are to rank for.

For example, let’s say you run a WordPress & Woocommerce agency like me.

My customers are small businesses who need help building or growing their WordPress or Woocommerce sites.

I need to find keywords with commercial intent from the 3 parts of the inbound marketing funnel.

They search for things like:

1. ‘How to add posts to a page on WordPress’ — KD 0 (0–10)
2. ‘Setup PayPal in Woocommerce — KD 0 (0–10)
3. WordPress add photos — KD 0 (0–10)

How do I know this? Because they are from my actual long tail keyword research that I use to write my blog posts.

Why do keyword research

This is like asking why advertise?

Or probably more appropriately, why put a sign on the front of your store?

People are looking for what you can provide. They just don’t know you can do it yet.

Keyword research allows you to write smart. If you’re going to write good content, write it so it’s searchable and can bring your targeted organic traffic from Google.

What’s better — a well written article that no one reads, or a well written article that 100 people read over the year?

Out of those 10 people there might 1 or 2 customers for you.

This is why keyword research is so invaluable, as it allows you to write short well written pieces of long tail content (content written for a long keyword) that can generate leads for your business.

There is also the case of establishing thought leadership in your field.

One of the quickest ways to grow your business is to establish yourself as an authority for content marketing.

Your customers don’t know what you know, only you do.

So tell them! Show them how knowledgeable you are on your chosen topic and build trust with them. Over time this will convert into future business.

How to do keyword research

It’s actually really simple, follow this process.

1. Type your chosen keyword into AHREFS or Google Keyword Planner
2. Click on ‘Volume’ to show the lowest volume keywords.
3. Build a list of low volume, low competition keywords with commercial intent (you can see your customers typing these keywords into Google).

For the search term ‘WordPress’ there’s over 100 thousand low volume, low competition keywords. So I have a lot to chose from.

When doing my keyword research I need to make sure I use relevant, targeted keywords that future buyers might be using.

You need to do the same with your keyword research.

To rank for these keywords, write at least 300 word articles on each of these keywords that are well written and helpful.

I would recommend of building a list and planning out your content months in advance.

This helps me be productive and write my content at the same time every day with a minimum of effort.

Ranking for long tail keywords is a long term strategy that yields great results but takes time and consistent effort.

Don’t expect 1000 new visitors overnight. Consistently monitor your organic traffic using Google Analytics and the Acquisition Report I talked about in my previous article 20. Where Does Your Traffic Come From — 30 Days Of Medium

You might also like this:

Why WordPress Is The BEST Platform To Build Your Business or Startup Website On

How To Build A Website — The Ultimate Guide

If you enjoyed this story, please click the 👏 button and follow me for the other 30 Days Of Medium.

This story is published in The Startup, Medium’s largest entrepreneurship publication followed by 338,320+ people.

Subscribe to receive our top stories here.

28. How to do keyword research — 30 Days Of Medium was originally published in The Startup on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Thank to you everyone who has been reading and following along to my 30 Days Of Medium posts so far.

Make sure you subscribe to my content using the little sign up box at the bottom to make sure I can email you each new post.

If you’re just discovering my posts, you can check out the other 30 Days Of Medium below.

0. 30 Days Of Medium

1. What do you need to build your own website? — 30 Days Of Medium

2. How to find a business you love — 30 Days Of Medium

3. How to build your own website — 30 Days Of Medium

4. How to measure your website’s performance — 30 Days Of Medium

5. How to get more customers by answering their questions -30 Days Of Medium

6. The successful business website cheat sheet — 30 Days Of Medium

7. How to measure success — 30 Days Of Medium

8. Understanding the Online Sales Funnel — 30 Days Of Medium

9. What is traffic and why is it important? — 30 Days Of Medium

10. What is Google URL Builder and why should you use it? — 30 Days Of Medium

11. Double your traffic by automating your social media schedule — 30 Days Of Medium

12. How to tell what sells — 30 Days Of Medium

13. How I grew my Medium following 6,500% — 30 Days Of Medium

14. How you look at things matters — 30 Days Of Medium

15. How to SELL services to small businesses — 30 Days Of Medium

16. How to win more deals with effective proposals — 30 Days Of Medium

17. How to setup an online store in 10 minutes — 30 Days Of Medium

18. How to work from anywhere — 30 Days Of Medium

19. Why your website is sabotaging your sales — 30 Days Of Medium

20. Where does your traffic come from? — 30 Days Of Medium

21. How to actually recognise burnout — 30 Days Of Medium

22. How to hack your schedule and get twice as much done — 30 Days Of Medium

23. Don’t copy your competitors — 30 Days Of Medium

24. How to SEO optimise a blog post — 30 Days Of Medium

25. Be unique or be forgotten — 30 Days Of Medium

26. Going with your gut — 30 Days Of Medium

27. People don’t pay for average — 30 Days Of Medium

28. How to do keyword research — 30 Days Of Medium

29. Why The Pareto Principle is the world’s biggest hack — 30 Days Of Medium

30. Your content is more profitable than your telephone — 30 Days Of Medium

Have you ever paid for average?

Have you ever taken the time to go out and pay for something that wasn’t great?

When’s the last time you went out of your way to go to a restaurant and purchase a meal you thought was just o.k? Those are the restaurants you don’t go back to.

People don’t pay for average, and there’s a simple reason why.

Why average companies don’t grow

The expression ‘meh’ comes to mind.

An average company is a company that inspires a feeling of — o.k

Nobody pays for o.k. Nobody pays for average. As someone who runs a Norwich web design agency, which is a competitive space, I can tell you first hand that people only pay for above and beyond.

These companies don’t grow because they are trying to charge for mediocrity. I use the restaurant analogy above because I think its a simple one.

If you’ve ever watched Gordon Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares (I’ve watched them all) you’ll see he continuously tries to instil in the various owners that — “Average restaurants don’t last”.

Love him or hate him, he’s tremendously talented at what he does and a very strong leader.

Gordon tells the owners that they need to “Strive for excellence”. Which isn’t far from the mark.

In almost every single turnaround I’ve watched, the problem is the owners are accepting and serving up mediocrity in some form of another. Usually the food (the service offering).

This is why their businesses are failing and they desperately need Gordon’s help.

You don’t leave home to pay for average

Another common line from the show is — “Why would these people leave home if they could cook better and cheaper at home themselves?”.

This refers to the do it yourself approach.

If your customers could do it better, or the same, themselves, why would they pay you to do it?

Well, if you’re trading purely on price, they could use you to save time.

You would then have to wow them with your service and turnaround time.

There’s always a way to go beyond average in business.

So if the bottom line is that people don’t pay for average, you can’t expect to grow if that’s what you’re shipping.

Sure you can spend a fortune on sales and marketing and you will grow, but at what cost?

Sooner or later the average service and complacency will catch up to you. Just like the restaurants on Kitchen Nightmares.

Mostly they are 5–10 years into their business and the story is always the same.

The business was o.k to start with, then it started to flat line.

Taking an average audit

Business isn’t complicated. It’s hard and requires a ton of hard work, but it isn’t rocket science.

There are three key areas to look at if you want to shift your business away from an average one to an excellent one.

1. The product or service.
2. Customer service.
3. Sales and marketing.

Your product or service needs to be great consistent to the level of investment your customers spend.

Your customers need to love you (within reason, you can’t please absolutely everyone but try your best).

And you need to be consistent in your sales and marketing approach, not sporadic.

Good customer service is easy. It’s about going above and beyond and doing that little bit extra.

Take the onus off the customer wherever you can, be quick and friendly to answer any of their questions and most importantly exceed their expectations. Get the work done quickly and in full.

And wherever you can, give away some free value. People love stuff for free.

So the key takeaway from this article is, if you wouldn’t pay for average, how can you expect your customers to?

Give them what you’d pay for if the shoe was on the other foot.

You might also like this:

Why WordPress Is The BEST Platform To Build Your Business or Startup Website On

How To Build A Website — The Ultimate Guide

If you enjoyed this story, please click the 👏 button and follow me for the other 30 Days Of Medium.

This story is published in The Startup, Medium’s largest entrepreneurship publication followed by 338,320+ people.

Subscribe to receive our top stories here.

27. People don’t pay for average — 30 Days Of Medium was originally published in The Startup on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Thank to you everyone who has been reading and following along to my 30 Days Of Medium posts so far.

Make sure you subscribe to my content using the little sign up box at the bottom to make sure I can email you each new post.

If you’re just discovering my posts, you can check out the other 30 Days Of Medium below.

0. 30 Days Of Medium

1. What do you need to build your own website? — 30 Days Of Medium

2. How to find a business you love — 30 Days Of Medium

3. How to build your own website — 30 Days Of Medium

4. How to measure your website’s performance — 30 Days Of Medium

5. How to get more customers by answering their questions -30 Days Of Medium

6. The successful business website cheat sheet — 30 Days Of Medium

7. How to measure success — 30 Days Of Medium

8. Understanding the Online Sales Funnel — 30 Days Of Medium

9. What is traffic and why is it important? — 30 Days Of Medium

10. What is Google URL Builder and why should you use it? — 30 Days Of Medium

11. Double your traffic by automating your social media schedule — 30 Days Of Medium

12. How to tell what sells — 30 Days Of Medium

13. How I grew my Medium following 6,500% — 30 Days Of Medium

14. How you look at things matters — 30 Days Of Medium

15. How to SELL services to small businesses — 30 Days Of Medium

16. How to win more deals with effective proposals — 30 Days Of Medium

17. How to setup an online store in 10 minutes — 30 Days Of Medium

18. How to work from anywhere — 30 Days Of Medium

19. Why your website is sabotaging your sales — 30 Days Of Medium

20. Where does your traffic come from? — 30 Days Of Medium

21. How to actually recognise burnout — 30 Days Of Medium

22. How to hack your schedule and get twice as much done — 30 Days Of Medium

23. Don’t copy your competitors — 30 Days Of Medium

24. How to SEO optimise a blog post — 30 Days Of Medium

25. Be unique or be forgotten — 30 Days Of Medium

26. Going with your gut — 30 Days Of Medium

27. People don’t pay for average — 30 Days Of Medium

28. How to do keyword research — 30 Days Of Medium

29. Why The Pareto Principle is the world’s biggest hack — 30 Days Of Medium

30. Your content is more profitable than your telephone — 30 Days Of Medium

Have you ever…

Have you ever had a strong gut feeling about something and acted against it?

Did it go well?

I’ve made decisions and gone against my gut instincts plenty of times, the majority of these decisions haven’t worked out in my favour.

Your gut instinct isn’t something tangible and easy to describe like logic.

Your gut is a combination of learned experience, logic and a kind of 6th sense that we develop as humans.

Anytime we are faced with a decision, our brain performs an unconscious analysis behind the scenes.

Is this the right thing to do?

Will this turn out like last time?

I’m not a scientist, so I couldn’t give you the exact science behind acting on a gut instinct, but I can give you my own personal insight into how acting on my gut has helped me build and grow my businesses.

Your gut is your instinct + 1

Your gut is basically an advanced version of your instincts.

We all have inbuilt survival instincts that are triggered all the time, every single day.

Fight or flight, survival and replication. These are the most basic human instincts.

Your gut seems to be a built in database for your instincts. It learns from past experience and helps you unconsciously make better decisions in the future.

For example, why do you think it takes most entrepreneurs close to a decade to hit it big, with many of them failing a lot in the process and many more going bankrupt along the way?

Because humans weren’t built with business instincts. Evolution takes time, we’re still catching up. We don’t have these built in instincts yet, so we have to develop them over time, the hard way.

Our bodies and minds are still just trying to adapt to The X Factor and the fact that we aren’t likely to be clubbed to death by someone after our resources on our way to work (for the most part).

Whether or not to pump and dump Bitcoin is not something we’ve evolved to handle unconsciously.

On the plus side….

This means that we can develop a business or success instinct through learned experience and studying the right stuff.

The first year you start a business you are wet behind the ears. You might make a ton of mistakes. Some of these might stick in your subconscious helping develop a gut instinct, some might not.

The thing about business is, everyday is different.

There are a set of rules you can learn and apply, but they are very very basic. For example, the objective of a business is to make a profit. Hire good staff, work hard, make sales, keep customers happy etc etc.

However, these small simple rules will only take you so far.

There certainly aren’t a set of rules or a solid game plan you can take and apply to creating new markets, new products or deciding if something will sell or flop.

If these rules existed everyone would be millionaires.

If it was easy, wouldn’t everyone be a successful CEO?

But it isn’t, which is why business leaders are renowned for relying on their gut instincts when it comes to making decisions.

They have to use their gut instincts, because there are no purely logical answers available to them and no case study for every scenario they can apply to their own situation.

Look at Steve Jobs and Apple.

Jobs knew that Apple would be successful if they focused on the small things, sold a small amount of products and made those products absolutely unforgettable.

His competitors were doing the same old stuff. Churning out product after product, not making any real innovations.

Jobs knew that for computers to truly take off and become mainstream, the technology had to a natural extension of self, and easy enough for anyone to just pick it up and ‘get it’.

The entire business world and his board thought otherwise, which is why they fired him and he started NEXT.

The thing is, they were wrong and he was right.

Only Steve had the killer gut instinct on the right course of action, because it was his business and he had spent his entire life developing that gut instinct in the pursuit of one goal.

I run a small business, so I’m not a high flying CEO. But the same logic applies for me in my day to day decision making.

The times I go against my gut, it rarely works out, because my gut is my subconscious decision making process giving me the right answer based on learned experience combined with logic.

The takeaway from this article is, if you have a strong gut feeling about something, don’t ignore it.

It’s usually almost always right.

And a little tip. Your gut decision is usually the decision that pops straight into your head that you will second guess or choose to ignore.

Don’t second guess yourself and stick to your guns.

As Brian Tracy says — “The thing about decisions is to make a decision. And if that decision doesn’t work out, you make another decision. And then another, and then sooner or later the decisions start working.”

You might also like this:

Why WordPress Is The BEST Platform To Build Your Business or Startup Website On

How To Build A Website — The Ultimate Guide

If you enjoyed this story, please click the 👏 button and follow me for the other 30 Days Of Medium.

This story is published in The Startup, Medium’s largest entrepreneurship publication followed by 338,320+ people.

Subscribe to receive our top stories here.

26. Going with your gut — 30 Days Of Medium was originally published in The Startup on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Thank to you everyone who has been reading and following along to my 30 Days Of Medium posts so far.

Make sure you subscribe to my content using the little sign up box at the bottom to make sure I can email you each new post.

If you’re just discovering my posts, you can check out the other 30 Days Of Medium below.

0. 30 Days Of Medium

1. What do you need to build your own website? — 30 Days Of Medium

2. How to find a business you love — 30 Days Of Medium

3. How to build your own website — 30 Days Of Medium

4. How to measure your website’s performance — 30 Days Of Medium

5. How to get more customers by answering their questions -30 Days Of Medium

6. The successful business website cheat sheet — 30 Days Of Medium

7. How to measure success — 30 Days Of Medium

8. Understanding the Online Sales Funnel — 30 Days Of Medium

9. What is traffic and why is it important? — 30 Days Of Medium

10. What is Google URL Builder and why should you use it? — 30 Days Of Medium

11. Double your traffic by automating your social media schedule — 30 Days Of Medium

12. How to tell what sells — 30 Days Of Medium

13. How I grew my Medium following 6,500% — 30 Days Of Medium

14. How you look at things matters — 30 Days Of Medium

15. How to SELL services to small businesses — 30 Days Of Medium

16. How to win more deals with effective proposals — 30 Days Of Medium

17. How to setup an online store in 10 minutes — 30 Days Of Medium

18. How to work from anywhere — 30 Days Of Medium

19. Why your website is sabotaging your sales — 30 Days Of Medium

20. Where does your traffic come from? — 30 Days Of Medium

21. How to actually recognise burnout — 30 Days Of Medium

22. How to hack your schedule and get twice as much done — 30 Days Of Medium

23. Don’t copy your competitors — 30 Days Of Medium

24. How to SEO optimise a blog post — 30 Days Of Medium

25. Be unique or be forgotten — 30 Days Of Medium

26. Going with your gut — 30 Days Of Medium

27. People don’t pay for average — 30 Days Of Medium

28. How to do keyword research — 30 Days Of Medium

29. Why The Pareto Principle is the world’s biggest hack — 30 Days Of Medium

30. Your content is more profitable than your telephone — 30 Days Of Medium

Don’t be forgotten

There are two types of small businesses.

Those that grow and those that survive.

I’m a big believer in the expression — “If you’re not going forward, you’re going backwards”.

And if your small business isn’t always growing and improving incrementally, you are surviving and waiting for the business grim reaper to visit you at some point in your future.

Forgettable businesses, get forgotten

The majority of small businesses don’t generate any business online.

The reason for this is because they don’t have a distinct brand or any kind of purposeful marketing strategy, outside perhaps attending some training events and tweeting a bit.

These businesses grow through referrals and exist on their current customer base.

This is dangerous however, because at some point the referrals will dry up and that existing customer base could cease to be.

Many small businesses have to close when they lose a key customer who sustains their business.

Again this is very dangerous. Your revenue should never be tied up in just one customer or your entire business is at risk all the time and you are beholden to this one customer.

Why unique businesses thrive

This is marketing basics.

They stand out and have clearly defined unique selling points.

As I’ve said before, there is nothing new under the sun, but there are limitless combinations of service offering, marketing and branding ideas you can apply to small businesses.

The businesses that thrive have decided with purpose these things:

1. Who they are
2. What they do
3. How they do it

They most likely specialise in 1 or 2 things and make it their business to be excellent at these things, instead of average at 5 or 6 things.

Nobody pays for average.

People want to pay for specialism.

Making your business unique

There are a lot of ways you can make your business stand out, here are just some below:

1. Niche down and specialise in a specific area. For example, a specialist WordPress agency vs another local web design company.
2. Create a clear, consistent brand and apply it throughout all your marketing materials. For example, decide on fonts, colours and a brand style and use it religiously in everything you do.
3. Be a little different. I really like space. I think it’s super cool, so incorporated it into my brand through videos, visually stunning imagery and in my logo.
4. Don’t copy everyone else. If you like the colour yellow and love trains, make a brand that’s yellow and incorporate trains. Don’t copy what’s consistent locally, you’ll just be another boring generic brand. A genuine brand is far more interesting than one that is copied without any enthusiasm.

Some other simple things you can look at:

• Using technology (anything your competitors aren’t doing to give you an edge).
• Different marketing channels (if everyone is using Twitter, try video or Instagram).
• Working harder (if everyone else writes 1 blog post a week, write 5).
• Taking a contrasting viewpoint (if your competition say x is best, you say y is better then justify it).

Ultimately you don’t need to be hugely different, just different enough to stand out and be remembered as that company who does x, who who has a great brand.

You might also like this:

Why WordPress Is The BEST Platform To Build Your Business or Startup Website On

How To Build A Website — The Ultimate Guide

If you enjoyed this story, please click the 👏 button and follow me for the other 30 Days Of Medium.

This story is published in The Startup, Medium’s largest entrepreneurship publication followed by 337,320+ people.

Subscribe to receive our top stories here.

25. Be unique or be forgotten — 30 Days Of Medium was originally published in The Startup on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Thank to you everyone who has been reading and following along to my 30 Days Of Medium posts so far.

Make sure you subscribe to my content using the little sign up box at the bottom to make sure I can email you each new post.

If you’re just discovering my posts, you can check out the other 30 Days Of Medium below.

0. 30 Days Of Medium

1. What do you need to build your own website? — 30 Days Of Medium

2. How to find a business you love — 30 Days Of Medium

3. How to build your own website — 30 Days Of Medium

4. How to measure your website’s performance — 30 Days Of Medium

5. How to get more customers by answering their questions -30 Days Of Medium

6. The successful business website cheat sheet — 30 Days Of Medium

7. How to measure success — 30 Days Of Medium

8. Understanding the Online Sales Funnel — 30 Days Of Medium

9. What is traffic and why is it important? — 30 Days Of Medium

10. What is Google URL Builder and why should you use it? — 30 Days Of Medium

11. Double your traffic by automating your social media schedule — 30 Days Of Medium

12. How to tell what sells — 30 Days Of Medium

13. How I grew my Medium following 6,500% — 30 Days Of Medium

14. How you look at things matters — 30 Days Of Medium

15. How to SELL services to small businesses — 30 Days Of Medium

16. How to win more deals with effective proposals — 30 Days Of Medium

17. How to setup an online store in 10 minutes — 30 Days Of Medium

18. How to work from anywhere — 30 Days Of Medium

19. Why your website is sabotaging your sales — 30 Days Of Medium

20. Where does your traffic come from? — 30 Days Of Medium

21. How to actually recognise burnout — 30 Days Of Medium

22. How to hack your schedule and get twice as much done — 30 Days Of Medium

23. Don’t copy your competitors — 30 Days Of Medium

24. How to SEO optimise a blog post — 30 Days Of Medium

25. Be unique or be forgotten — 30 Days Of Medium

26. Going with your gut — 30 Days Of Medium

27. People don’t pay for average — 30 Days Of Medium

28. How to do keyword research — 30 Days Of Medium

29. Why The Pareto Principle is the world’s biggest hack — 30 Days Of Medium

30. Your content is more profitable than your telephone — 30 Days Of Medium

What does SEO optimise mean?

I thought I’d write a post about SEO today.

Starting with SEO optimising a blog post.

SEO optimisation means to optimise something for search engines, mainly Google as that where the bulk of traffic comes from.

To SEO optimise generally entails three things:

1. Keyword research
2. Meta data optimisation
3. Writing helpful content with the relevant keyword included

After studying online marketing for over 6 years, this is what it boils down to for a small business.

I’m no SEO expert, like my friend Richard Patey, there’s a ton I don’t know. However I don’t work with huge websites or need to be a technical SEO expert to drive traffic and convert it for my business.

Keyword research

There are two types of content.

Keyword driven content and other content.

A lot of the content on Medium would fall into the ‘other content’ category. I don’t do keyword research before I write my posts, I write content that will be helpful and appropriate for the publication I submit it to (which is always this one).

Keyword driven content uses keyword research to find out what people are searching for and give them what they want.

For example:

1. Using Google Keyword Planner to find out what sort of WordPress searches people are making in Google.
2. Finding a keyword with low search volume and low competition that has commercial intent.
3. Writing a blog post to answer this question, or provide insight on this topic, attracting this traffic to my website in the process.

Using AHREFS

AHREFS is an invaluable tool for keyword research. It’s twice as quick as Google Keyword Planner and much easier to use.

It’s a shame they don’t have an affiliate scheme, because I would love to get paid to talk about how great their software is all day.

AHREFS has an amazing tool called Keyword Explorer.

Using this tool, I can type in ‘WordPress’ as a starting point and find all the different keywords around WordPress, their search volumes and competitiveness.

I can also apply easy to use filters to find the most desirable keywords for my marketing plan.

For example, the other day I wrote an article on — How To Add Photos To WordPress.

It only gets 10 searches per month but has a 0 keyword difficulty score.

This means two things:

1. It’s a long tail keyword in search of a very specific answer (it has commercial intent).
2. It’s going to be easy to get on page 1 of Google for this keyword with little to no resources just by writing a good piece of content.

10 searches might not sound like a lot, but if I acquire even 1 customer over the course of a year from this article, I’ve generated a very good return on investment as the content didn’t take me long to write (because it’s a very basic function in WordPress for me).

Meta data optimisation

Meta data is this technical data that sits in the head of your pages and posts.

If you have WordPress install the Yoast plugin and just listen to what it says.

Every single blog post will have a Yoast box at the bottom of the page telling you what to do, to optimise your posts.

The steps you need to take are:

1. Set a focus keyword
2. Write at least a 300 word article around this keyword
3. Include the keyword between 0.5% — 1% keyword density (2–3 times)
4. Follow the rest of the Yoast optimisation tips

A correctly SEO optimised article will display a little green circle, like below.

Write good content

The most important part is to write good content.

Google doesn’t want people gaming the system which is why you can’t do half the black hat stuff you could 10 years ago.

The aim of the game is to write good, useful content that helps people.

Google wants to make it easy for people to find what they want easily and to find quality results.

If you follow these simple steps consistently and write lots of good, helpful, well optimised content, your traffic will build up steadily over time as will your leads and sales.

You might also like this:

Why WordPress Is The BEST Platform To Build Your Business or Startup Website On

How To Build A Website — The Ultimate Guide

If you enjoyed this story, please click the 👏 button and follow me for the other 30 Days Of Medium.

This story is published in The Startup, Medium’s largest entrepreneurship publication followed by 337,320+ people.

Subscribe to receive our top stories here.

24. How to SEO optimise a blog post — 30 Days Of Medium was originally published in The Startup on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Welcome back to 30 Days Of Medium.

Thanks to everyone who has been reading, clapping and commenting so far! Today’s topic is — Don’t copy your competitors.

You can catch up on the first 22 days of my 30 Days Of Medium challenge below if you missed them:

0. 30 Days Of Medium

1. What do you need to build your own website? — 30 Days Of Medium

2. How to find a business you love — 30 Days Of Medium

3. How to build your own website — 30 Days Of Medium

4. How to measure your website’s performance — 30 Days Of Medium

5. How to get more customers by answering their questions -30 Days Of Medium

6. The successful business website cheat sheet — 30 Days Of Medium

7. How to measure success — 30 Days Of Medium

8. Understanding the Online Sales Funnel — 30 Days Of Medium

9. What is traffic and why is it important? — 30 Days Of Medium

10. What is Google URL Builder and why should you use it? — 30 Days Of Medium

11. Double your traffic by automating your social media schedule — 30 Days Of Medium

12. How to tell what sells — 30 Days Of Medium

13. How I grew my Medium following 6,500% — 30 Days Of Medium

14. How you look at things matters — 30 Days Of Medium

15. How to SELL services to small businesses — 30 Days Of Medium

16. How to win more deals with effective proposals — 30 Days Of Medium

17. How to setup an online store in 10 minutes — 30 Days Of Medium

18. How to work from anywhere — 30 Days Of Medium

19. Why your website is sabotaging your sales — 30 Days Of Medium

20. Where does your traffic come from? — 30 Days Of Medium

21. How to actually recognise burnout — 30 Days Of Medium

22. How to hack your schedule and get twice as much done — 30 Days Of Medium

23. Don’t copy your competitors — 30 Days Of Medium

24. How to SEO optimise a blog post — 30 Days Of Medium

25. Be unique or be forgotten — 30 Days Of Medium

26. Going with your gut — 30 Days Of Medium

27. People don’t pay for average — 30 Days Of Medium

28. How to do keyword research — 30 Days Of Medium

29. Why The Pareto Principle is the world’s biggest hack — 30 Days Of Medium

30. Your content is more profitable than your telephone — 30 Days Of Medium

Nobody pays top dollar for a carbon copy

Lots of small businesses want to copy their competitors.

This is understandable, especially if your competitor is doing well but ultimately wrong.

Nobody pays good money for a copy of something.

Would you pay top dollar for a copy of something?

No, so why would your customers?

You are never going to be a better version of your competitor than they are. But you can be the best version of you that you can be.

Being unique is a competitive advantage

Now, there’s nothing new under the sun.

But that doesn’t mean you can’t be unique or stand out in your marketplace, whether it’s a local, national or global one.

If you’re trying to establish yourself in a local marketplace (your city for example) the worst thing you can do is try and copy an established competitor down to the font they use.

It gets harder to be unique the bigger the market you target.

But locally, you have every chance to be known as the go to business for a specific thing.

Or, that business with the cool brand.

I’ll tell you who doesn’t get the business locally — the business who is a carbon copy of a larger successful competitor.

How can you use this to your advantage?

I saw an accountant recently who had a huge digital slant to his business.

His whole brand was focused around the technology they used and how they are digitally savvy.

It was actually pretty clever, and it was genius.

Accountants are traditionally very conservative when it comes to marketing.

As a result, I’ve noticed it’s one of the industries where it is hardest to differentiate between providers.

Which seems crazy, because once you find an accountant you like and trust, you’ll likely stay with them for life.

I’ve had the same accountant my entire business career and don’t have any intention of changing, he is awesome.

So if a customer mostly sticks with their accountant for the long haul why make it so difficult to acquire new customers by not differentiating yourself?

When I initially went to look for an accountant, I turned to Google. There was nothing that really helped me decide who to call and try out. Thankfully, I met with the right accountant almost immediately.

The point I’m making is, this digitally savvy accountant has since stuck in my mind and captured mind-share with me. The first time this has happened with an accountancy practice (sorry though, I’m sticking with my guy).

By not copying every other accountant and having the same old conservative website and brand, this accountant has set himself apart from the rest of his competitors and this is probably a large part in why his business continues to grow.

Different = growth

If you want to grow, be different.

Don’t do everything, do something very well. People don’t pay for average.

If you need to do everything to start with, be different. If you are in a traditionally boring industry averse to innovation, innovate.

Come up with a catchy brand, marketing campaign or new way of looking at thing.

The easiest way to get noticed is do what the other businesses are not doing.

I’m not saying don’t copy small things from your competitors. As I said, there’s nothing new under the sun.

I’m saying don’t try to become a carbon copy of them.

Take small things you really like, then apply your own style and take on things to build a business that is unique to you.

It’s your business after all, not someone else’s.

You might also like this:

Why WordPress Is The BEST Platform To Build Your Business or Startup Website On

How To Build A Website — The Ultimate Guide

If you enjoyed this story, please click the 👏 button and follow me for the other 30 Days Of Medium.

This story is published in The Startup, Medium’s largest entrepreneurship publication followed by 336,210+ people.

Subscribe to receive our top stories here.

23. Don’t copy your competitors — 30 Days Of Medium was originally published in The Startup on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Welcome back to 30 Days Of Medium.

Thanks to everyone who has been reading, clapping and commenting so far! Today’s topic is — Where does your traffic come from?

You can catch up on the first 21 days of my 30 Days Of Medium challenge below if you missed them:

0. 30 Days Of Medium

1. What do you need to build your own website? — 30 Days Of Medium

2. How to find a business you love — 30 Days Of Medium

3. How to build your own website — 30 Days Of Medium

4. How to measure your website’s performance — 30 Days Of Medium

5. How to get more customers by answering their questions -30 Days Of Medium

6. The successful business website cheat sheet — 30 Days Of Medium

7. How to measure success — 30 Days Of Medium

8. Understanding the Online Sales Funnel — 30 Days Of Medium

9. What is traffic and why is it important? — 30 Days Of Medium

10. What is Google URL Builder and why should you use it? — 30 Days Of Medium

11. Double your traffic by automating your social media schedule — 30 Days Of Medium

12. How to tell what sells — 30 Days Of Medium

13. How I grew my Medium following 6,500% — 30 Days Of Medium

14. How you look at things matters — 30 Days Of Medium

15. How to SELL services to small businesses — 30 Days Of Medium

16. How to win more deals with effective proposals — 30 Days Of Medium

17. How to setup an online store in 10 minutes — 30 Days Of Medium

18. How to work from anywhere — 30 Days Of Medium

19. Why your website is sabotaging your sales — 30 Days Of Medium

20. Where does your traffic come from? — 30 Days Of Medium

21. How to actually recognise burnout — 30 Days Of Medium

22. How to hack your schedule and get twice as much done — 30 Days Of Medium

23. Don’t copy your competitors — 30 Days Of Medium

24. How to SEO optimise a blog post — 30 Days Of Medium

25. Be unique or be forgotten — 30 Days Of Medium

26. Going with your gut — 30 Days Of Medium

27. People don’t pay for average — 30 Days Of Medium

28. How to do keyword research — 30 Days Of Medium

29. Why The Pareto Principle is the world’s biggest hack — 30 Days Of Medium

30. Your content is more profitable than your telephone — 30 Days Of Medium

Not all time is productive time

After my article on burnout yesterday I wanted to write a follow up on hacking your schedule.

Let me start off by saying that not all time is productive time.

At some points of the day, you are more productive than others.

You’ll also find that you are better at certain tasks at certain times of the day.

So how do you use this to your advantage and get twice as much done?

Analyse your productivity

One of the good things about Medium is how freely available information is from entrepreneurs and people doing the same thing you want to do.

If I had knew about Medium when I first started maybe I would have saved myself a lot of hassle. Maybe not. Entrepreneurs are stubborn after all.

Anyhow, to hack your schedule I’ve found that you need to analyse your productivity by task.

For example:

• At what time is writing content easiest? For me it’s between 7–9am every morning.
• At what time is your client work or customer work easiest? I generally get the bulk of this done after 9 before 1pm every day. Depending on how busy I am, this might take all day some days.
• Are you more productive if you get up at specific times? I hate mornings, but unfortunately, I’m super productive if I get up and start work by 7.30am. I’ve tried various schedules, including getting up and starting later, but nothing seems to beat this for me.
• Make a note of when you are best at certain tasks. There are things you’ll have to do at certain times regardless, but this is the path to getting twice as much done.

Schedule everything

I’ve always hated planning and scheduling.

I don’t know why. Maybe it comes from childhood, hating the school experience where you are told at what time to do everything and how to do it.

My to do list has always been my best friend.

Using the Bucket Method & Next Actions method advocated by David Allen.

Beyond that I’ve hated the idea of scheduling everything in advance.

Over the past year though, I’ve seen the value in automation and scheduling more and more.

Recently, I scheduled my next 90 pieces of content in advance.

It didn’t take long, I jotted down the titles and in some instances 1 small bullet point summary.

For my website blog articles I matched them up with a long tail keyword.

As I become busier this scheduling in advance allows me to be ultra productive with my time.

I also created a daily schedule (subject to anything changing urgently with a client, or anything out of my control) where each day I’ve blocked out my time accordingly, on the tasks I need to work on.

Only work on what you absolutely have to

First time entrepreneurs or new business owners are notorious for wasting time on unnecessary tasks (believe me, I was one of them 6 years ago).

Only work on anything that will grow your business or improve the customer experience.

The rest is junk. Until you are at the point you can comfortably start hiring people or outsourcing major tasks.

For example, your time split should look something like this:

• 25% of your day should be spent on sales & marketing
• 25% should be spent on servicing your clients/customers
• 25% should be spent on scheduling, research, processes and improving your business
• 25% of the time should be ‘floating free time’ that can be allocated to one of the above 3 areas, depending on whatever needs most attention that particular day.

The trick is analysing everything you do.

Pinpoint what specifically gets you new business. Then just do that, drop the things that don’t work.

And figure out what makes your customers love you.

If you’re able to figure out the specific tasks that generate you new business and how to keep your existing customers happy, that is the winning formula for a small business with longevity and that can be scaled comfortably in the future.

It will also allow you to do focused work for 8 hours a day and enjoy a healthy work life balance, while getting twice as much done.

You might also like this:

Why WordPress Is The BEST Platform To Build Your Business or Startup Website On

How To Build A Website — The Ultimate Guide

If you enjoyed this story, please click the 👏 button and follow me for the other 30 Days Of Medium.

This story is published in The Startup, Medium’s largest entrepreneurship publication followed by 336,210+ people.

Subscribe to receive our top stories here.

22. How to hack your schedule and get twice as much done — 30 Days Of Medium was originally published in The Startup on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.