6 things to do for your business this summer to reap the rewards in fall

The summer is in full swing, half of your clients are on holidays, and the other half has just returned/ is about to go. The office feels empty, your phone is dead-silent, and you're almost missing the emails piling up in your mailbox... The lazy mood is rubbing off you and you don't feel like working on your business at all. But while your customers (and competitors!) are all on holiday, and you're not rushing to do your usual errands, it's the best time to prepare for fall and attack your goals with all guns blazing!

Here's a list of 6 things to do *NOW* to get a head start to the new season once the summer is over.

#1 Update your marketing stack

The long lazy summer is the best time to implement new marketing tools in your business so you have enough time to learn how to use them effectively.The areas of your business where you should be using tools to get better results. If you're still not using any - make sure you add them this summer. They are all free!

• Keyword research - creating random 'content bullets' simply doesn't work. For your blog posts to rank in Google, you need to do proper keyword research. The best free & easy to use tool for that is Ubersuggest - Neil Patel's tool allows you to check which keywords your target audience is searching for, what is the volume of searches, and how difficult it is to rank for this keyword on a scale from 0 to 100 (easy to very difficult).

• Content Creation/ SEO - What if you had a writing assistant that would tell you how exactly you should write your posts so you get to a high position in Google? Now you can! Yoast SEO is a WordPress plugin that gives you instant writing feedback on your posts as you write them. Yoast gives you feedback both on how well your post is optimised for the particular keyword you have chosen, and your texts readability score based on Flesh index:

• Social Media Marketing - do you know that 10 x-ing your traffic from social media can translate into 50% higher profits in just 5 months? We know, because we've done it ;) and it wasn't as difficult as it seems. All we did was 10 x the number of posts we published on social media. How can you post ten times more without going crazy though?! There are ways ;) first and foremost, you need a social media scheduler to batch your work and schedule posts to go out on all your social media platforms automatically in advance. If you're looking for a tool that is both cheap and really simple to implement and use, yet robust - I'm positive Postfity is the one you should go for.

• Email marketing - if you're not using email marketing tools in your business yet, it's really high time - according to a study done by McKinsey & Company, Email marketing is up to 40 times more effective than social media. Setting up sign-up forms and pop-ups on your website and blog will help you capture more leads, and then nurture them in a series of automated drip-campaigns. My absolute favourite tool for that is the dead-simple MailerLite - and it's free up to 1000 subscribers!

If you want to read more about the tools, read our guest post about them here.

#2 Automate your email campaigns

As I mentioned above, newsletters are a great way to nurture relationships with your potential clients. But just like with social media marketing, the key to success in email marketing is consistency. And let's face it - life happens, and you won't have time to write newsletters to your subscribers regularly in the hectic time before Christmas. That's why you should use the slow period this summer to write your newsletters in advance, and automate email sequences in your email marketing tool - so that when a new subscriber joins your list on your website, they get an email each week automatically.

#3 Automate your social media marketing

The same goes for your social media. Social media marketing really does work if you do it regularly - we boosted our revenue by 50% in just 5 months just by posting more authentic stuff *consistently*.How did we manage to post 5 times a day across all our platforms? We automated the process by scheduling all our posts for the week in advance.Since our marketing centred around the advice we share on our blog once a week, we just repurposed all the content we had on the blog into mini-nuggets of knowledge, which we then shared as posts with relevant graphics on all our social media platforms via our social media scheduler, Postfity:

That way, we could do all the work on our social media on just one day per week, and focus on other things such as creating content, reaching out to influencers and blogs accepting guest posts, and potential joint venture partners. This was especially important with our small team ;)

#4 Write all your social media posts for 3 months

If your summer is really slow, you could take it even further and write a whole post calendar...till the end of the year. If you have an agency version of Postfity, you can upload up to 10,000 posts at once using the 'import posts from file functionality':

This, again, will ensure that your social media marketing stays consistent throughout the busy period, even if some emergencies crop up and you won't have time to do marketing anymore.

#5 Write blog posts for 4 months

The same applies to writing blog posts: if you want to publish consistently - say- at least once per week - you should line up your posts for September, October, November and December in the summer already.That makes 4 x 4 = 16 blog posts. If you allocate 2 days to a quality, well-researched blog post of about 1200 words - you should be done with posts for the rest of the year by the end of August. That's about 32 working days, which can be easily accomplished in the 2 slow summer months.

# 6 Update your website

Last but not least, you should use the slower summer period to update your website. Here's a checklist of things you should look out for:

• price list - is your price list up-to-date?
• terms and conditions, privacy policy, cookies policy - are all your 'legal' pages updated and GDPR-compliant?
• subscription forms, popups - are all your newsletter subscription forms and popups working? Do you have an email marketing
• SEO - is your website SEO friendly? Maybe time you had an audit by a professional?

Conclusions + TO-DO list:

As you can see, there's a better way to use the slow summer months than binge-watching series on Netflix: here's a to-do list you can use to make most of the following 6 weeks:Week 1: Update your marketing stack + write 3 blog postsWeek 2: Automate 1 email drip campaign + write 2 blog postsWeek 3: Automate your social media marketing - schedule 7 posts using Postfity + write 2 blog postsWeek 4: Write 35 very short posts for social media based on the 7 blog posts you wrote in weeks 1-3 and schedule them for 7 weeks starting in September + write 1 blog postWeek 5: Do website audit and update your price list, terms and conditions, privacy and subscription forms if necessary. Write 2 blog posts.Week 6: Order SEO audit + write 2 blog posts.

Results: 12 blog posts (enough for 3 months - if you publish 1 post per week) + automated social media for almost 2 months + automated email marketing + improved and updated website :)