A simple way to push yourself to grow your online store

Being a small business owner, one thing that I find really important is to be self-motivated and disciplined. It’s all very well enjoying the fruits of one’s success; the freedom to take Friday afternoons off or slightly longer lunches or whatever – but if you don’t do the small boring things consistently well, then eventually that success will disappear.

I’ve noticed in my short business life that it’s the monotonous daily tasks that make or break many businesses.

For example, at Web Wise – I make a point of doing two things regularly: check my LinkedIn profile once a day and check our Google Analytics once a week. These little tasks – after 5 years – are boring to me personally, but every day they keep me focused on trying to make sales or new connections. But what can you do to force yourself to do this kind of mundane work?

Our favourite e-commerce platform: Shopify, has a neat way of helping store owners to push forward: challenges!

Right within the Shopify dashboard, we spotted this little challenge (above). What a great idea to encourage our clients to push forward with their marketing or achieve some incremental success! This feature looks new to me on Shopify as we only spotted it whilst helping a new customer launch their online shop recently. But I hope we’ll see multiple challenges like this, linked to the sites analytics, to encourage growth.

Set your own challenges

It is often said that incredible success can be achieved by making small improvements every day. I love the new “challenges” feature within the Shopify dashboard which forces store owners to try and make these improvements.

Even if you don’t use Shopify, try and set your own marketing or business development challenges daily or weekly. It is a simple way to push yourself to grow your online store! Make it like a game and let us know how you get on.

About the author

Dan Wiseman

Founder & director of Web Wise. He writes about web design, marketing, entrepreneurship, investing and games. Dan regularly speaks on these subjects and is available for coaching and consultancy.

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