5 Easy Steps on How to Create Work Life Balance

It’s a New Year; Hope you have a successful 2022. Did you get the needed rest over the festive period? Now that you have hopefully relaxed a bit, there is another heavy year ahead (as always). So how do we make sure we get the work done, but also have time to relax and spend focused time with family and friends. I’m sure you’ve heard it before, work life balance. So, let’s see how we can create work life balance.

What is Work Life Balance?

Work life balance is really making sure you fit in all the work and social activities into your 16 hour day. (Of course, we need 8 hours to sleep). This includes eating, hobbies, time with friends and family, reading, work, exercise, playing with your dog, etc. But if you put all the things you want to get done into a calendar, you’ll often find you won’t have time to do them all. At least not at once. And this is where the balancing and trade-offs begin.

Why is Work Life Balance Important?

By not paying attention to your work life balance, you could either focus too much on the fun activities, and achieve nothing, or you could focus too much on work and burn out! If you are spending too much time on your PC without breaks, eating while working, and checking in at work when you are spending time with family, you are probably on the road to burnout. Humans just can’t do more than one thing at a time. If you keep trying to, it will feel like you are always working and getting nothing done. Let’s see some key aspects we can look at to increase our chance of this work life balance.

How to create a Work Life Balance Program

Whenever I find myself losing the work life balance, I force myself to sit back and do nothing for a moment. Breathe a little, and maybe meditate to empty my mind. It’s usually important at this time to go through the following five steps. Probably because I am doing things that I should NOT be doing.

What are the five steps to work life balance?

1. Find Your True Values

If you know your true values it will help you focus only on the things that make you happy right now. There are many values that we would like to have, but they are all too often not our current values. For example, I was part of a chess club and enjoyed it for years. But after time, I was just going out of habit and not getting enough from it. Even though I love chess, it’s just not a value right now. So I eliminated it from my schedule.

2. Plan the Time for your Values

Once you have your current list of values, make sure you eliminate all the non-values from your schedule. Every time you schedule your fun activities, make sure they are in line with your values. You’ll feel a lot better only doing the things you like to do. Make sure you schedule at least one fun activity per week or as often as you think you need it. (Of course if one of your values is family, you need to nurture that daily)

3. Ensure you make time for Stress Relief and Exercise

There will always be stress, but we simply need to find ways to eliminate it after a hard day’s work. For some this may be a conversation with friends, others it might be a glass of wine. For me, there is nothing better than getting on my running shoes and hitting the road. It seems to clear my mind and prepare me for the fun events ahead (Because we scheduled them remember!) It also has a good side effect of keeping me fit.

4. Use Important/Urgent to access a task

This is an important step that is aimed at your vocational work. Whether it is a job or a business, you need to eliminate unimportant tasks. Outsource or delegate anything that takes you away from the important. The way it works, place each task into the relevant grid spot below. If it’s important and urgent, you need to DO IT NOW! If it’s important but not urgent, schedule it for a time you can focus on this. If you are a morning person like me, schedule it in the morning. If the task is not important but is urgent, get someone else to do it. If you can, pay someone. And finally, if the task is both unimportant and not urgent, DON’T DO IT!

Also, schedule focus time in your calendar. A time where you will undertake important tasks each day. In this focus time, you have to remove all distractions. This includes phone, email, meeting requests, people. Only work on the important task at this time.

You can learn more about focus time here.

What is focus time? (5 ways on how to achieve more!)

5. Learn to say NO

By nature, most of us are people pleasers. We have an insatiable need to help others. But if this helping others is taking us away from our work and our values, we need to say NO.

Some tips on how to say no:

  • Say it in clear terms
  • Be assertive and polite
  • Be honest in your reasoning

Conclusion

Next time you feel trapped, as if you can’t escape what you are doing, just breathe and follow the steps above. You’ll start to realize you have more control than you think. Focus on your values.

Get ready to Launch into CyberSpace!

With a Step-By-Step Blueprint to Guide You to Success.

Your Business. Your Terms. Online. Anywhere.

8 Components of Digital Marketing (In the Affiliate Space)

My journey into online business has brought me to the conclusion that there are many components of digital marketing that need attention when it comes to online business. Some areas need work at the beginning, some of them need work consistently, and others can come later. Each aspect can require specialised sets of skills. Even if you must do all of them at the beginning, which is a good thing, you will be better placed in outsourcing them one at a time as you start to earn money. (Re-invest into your business)

You don’t need all areas running at once, but you do need to get started. I’ll order them in the way I think is best to get started.

So, let’s get into the areas.

Product, image, brand, and primary message.

If you need to define your vision and values it can help to utilise a professional. A virtual meeting can go a long way. Try Tricia Jones, she helped me really become clear about what I wanted from my business. I’ll touch more on creating your vision and values in a future post.

The following components house your values, vision, and mission.

Sales Funnel

A Sales Funnel is essentially a page on the internet that has some marketing of your products or services. Its primary function is to get the user to perform an action. Normally it’s to get a name and email address.

To get someone to enter a name and email, you often need to entice them to do so. Perhaps offering them access to a free webinar or a free PDF that has extreme value to that person. Getting the name and email is key to your online business. This person might not buy today, but because you have their email, you can provide them with value and offers until such time as the person decides to buy or unsubscribe.

Email Marketing

We have an email address now (Hopefully many!)

The cool thing about online business is you can automate your email. Write once and send it to your subscribers as they join up. Over time, your email sequence can grow. If you write 1 email a week for 1 year, you have a decent sequence. (You can go back and modify when needed)

You can also send them broadcast messages too from time to time. These can be used to push special offers or updates to your subscribers.

A great product I use is Aweber. They make it easy to create, publish and monitor.

Website

If you can push traffic to your funnel, and implement the email marketing aspect, you are essentially in business. You can market and try to make sales.

But supplementing the funnel with context builds trust in your target audience. This is done with a website the houses your Vision, Mission and Values. It provides valuable content to show that there is a real person (or business) behind the scenes.

Another key aspect of the site is a contact page. You need to be contactable and converse with your potential buyers. The more you engage with your audience and show a willingness to assist, the more trust you build. And in the end, all business is done on trust. (Launch Digital Freedom Privacy Policy)

Aspects that drive traffic

What drives an audience to your funnel, website, and email list? There are a few ways you can target your audience. Some of them cost money, the others will cost you time (consistent time)

SEO

In short, it is the skill of structuring your website, content and building authority for your website. It includes both content related techniques and technical aspects that can enhance the content of your website for search engines and help you rank higher.

It includes your keyword research. The words your audience will be looking for in the search engine. For example, if you are selling Canon Cameras online your audience might search:

  • High-Quality Cameras
  • Canon camera for a far distance shot
  • What camera should I use?

Your site and content will need to target these keywords and phrases. With time, consistency and quality content, your site will show up in search engines higher up and more often.

SEO also includes making sure you link to internal and external sites for reference. If you want to know more about search engine optimisation, visit this post, How to get Started with Search Engine Optimization?

Content

On the side of not spending money, you would have to create quality content over time. Consistency is key. The more you produce, the more quality you have, time will bring you internet traffic.

Types of content online include

  • Blogs
  • Listicles
  • Ebooks
  • Infographics
  • Videos
  • Podcasts
  • Guides
  • Case studies and many more.

Begin with one and stick with it for 3 – 5 years. Become an expert.

The content shows search engines that you are committed to producing value, and your reward will be traffic. This together with your keyword strategy is key to your online success without spending money.

Learn how to Promote Affiliate Links On Your Blog

Social Media

With your Sales Funnel, Email marketing, and content in place, we can find other ways to bring traffic to your products. Once again, there are a whole lot of options available. Don’t try and market on all of these at once. Rather, find out where your audience hangs out and target them.

In my SFM business, my audience is full-time employees that know there is a better way to make a living. And so, LinkedIn provides the best opportunity for me to find my audience. Do a little research on how to use your social media platform effectively and be consistent.

Find out which platforms you might be able to find your customers. 8 Social Media Platforms to Promote Your Business

Find out more about: The Best Ways to Learn Digital Marketing Online?

Online Ads

If you have the cash flow to run ads, it’s the perfect way to bring a targeted audience to your sales funnel. Most of these platforms allow you to pick specific details of your audience. Age, job title, interests and much more.

It helps to be very specific in your audience and speak directly to that person (Your avatar). If your Ad images and content appeal to your target, it will interest them, and they will click your ad. It will take them to your sales funnel, and you can get their email.

Once you have a list of emails, you can nurture that list over time and generate commissions.

Monitoring

An overriding aspect of digital marketing is measuring what you are doing. If you can measure it, you can adjust what’s not working. Most of the components mentioned above have metrics that you can measure over time.

For example, your email marketing lets you know how many emails were opened, how many people clicked your link and even if emails were not delivered. When you run ads on LinkedIn and Facebook, it measures the success of your ad. In fact, the more successful your ad the cheaper the cost to you! They allow you to measure impressions, clicks and even the position of ads on platforms that were successful.

To Finish

As you can see, there is lots to consider in an online business, but you don’t have to have to all running in 1 day! Take your time to learn and implement each aspect one at a time. There is plenty of support on the internet on how to do everything, but don’t fall into the habit of overlearning. It’s something I still catch myself doing from time to time. The best way to learn is to do.

Get ready to Launch into CyberSpace!

With a Step-By-Step Blueprint to Guide You to Success.

Your Business. Your Terms. Online. Anywhere.

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