6 Ways To Keep Work-Life Balance When WFH

When you work in the same physical space that you use for relaxation, finding the right balance between work and day-to-day life can be a challenge. All too often, the boundaries begin to blur, and we find ourselves torn between the two. Whether you’re in the field of digital marketing, web design, or development, it’s not unusual to find yourself working till late hours. The question is: How can we keep the right balance between our professional lives and our personal lives? How can we maintain it especially when working from home?

The road to a decent work-life balance may be hard, but the following ways can help you achieve your work-life balance goals. But first -

What is work-life balance, and why is it important?

Work-life balance refers to how people arrange their time and effort between professional and personal commitments. It’s about evenly distributing 24 hours to set a lifestyle in which you’re always in a healthy mental and physical state. Several factors could impact your work-life balance. Some of these are easier to control, whereas others maybe not due to many reasons. However, finding a healthy work-life balance is key to your overall well-being. It can reduce stress levels and the risk of exhaustion or creative block. In addition, both employees and employers who have healthy work-life balance are likely to be happier with each other, resulting in improved commitment. As a manager, promoting a healthy work-life balance within your team can be a good way to support team members while working remotely.

Ways to balance work and life:

• Set specific work hours
• Determine achievable goals
• Take proper breaks
• Create a designated work-space
• Be good to yourself
• Accept imperfection

Let's explore each of these now.

1. Set specific work hours

When working from home, one of the best time management advice is to set specific work hours - just like your office hours. This way, you’re less likely to receive emails, phone calls, and meeting proposals during your non-work hours. Choose when you want to start and end each day. Take breaks like you are in the office. Look after personal responsibilities during those breaks. This will lead to a more fruitful schedule, helping you stick to your work hours productively.

2. Set achievable goals

Take a look at your work plan and to-do list ahead. Ask yourself what your priorities are at work: any specific deadlines? Once you have a clear vision of what you need to work on today or the whole week, you’ll be able to set your goals and plan out your deliverables. Try to make your goals as realistic as possible. In turn, you’ll be more likely to adhere to deadlines and improve your productivity, focus on other aspects of your life and meet them, something that brings you joy.

3. Take proper breaks

When working from home taking proper breaks from work is equally required. Taking your eyes away from your computer monitor is important for your work and life balance. It will give you the breathing space you need to rejuvenate. You may also find that taking breaks will help you be more creative. Set aside time for your breaks, and do your best to disconnect from your professional duties during this time. So when you are back to work, you can fully concentrate on your work.

4. Create a designated work-space

Working from home isn’t always as desirable as it may look. If you really want to balance work and life, it’s probably the best idea to select an appropriate spot at home where you can set up your home office. If you have no dedicated spare space, do your best to create a temporary workspace that feels comfortable for you. Try to keep your workspace clean and organized to avoid distractions. Your home-based temporary office should get you in the right professional attitude, so to make your job easy.

5. Be good to yourself

With juggling so many responsibilities, being good to yourself is a must. Prioritizing your own well-being is important than many other professional and personal duties but without being selfish. If you feel pleased, the chances are you’ll serve well as an employee, a partner, parent, and so on. Some most common ways are, give yourself time to relax after work, proactively unplug yourself from the internet, disconnect yourself from the outside world, and let yourself be composed again. Allocate time for yourself and your loved ones. Maintain meaningful human relationships and engage yourself in something you enjoy.

6. Accept imperfection

While there are plenty of ways to maintain a work-life balance, the reality is that you can’t always expect your two worlds not to interfere with one another. Sometimes, even if you try hard, you need to accept that the division between work and life won’t always be ideal in the real world. You could find yourself having to answer a work call while playing with your children, or responding to an important email as you sit down for dinner with your partner.

Be realistic. Ask yourself where you can be flexible, without risking anything. For example, set boundaries with your potentially overworking manager. Accustomed to the way household tasks are done at home by your partner. Whatever agreements you come to with the people around you, being realistic with yourself is the key. A perfect work-life balance may not be within reach on the first attempt but the constant thrive for it, can allow you to achieve it sooner than later.

The 5 Steps To Digital Awareness

Digital marketing isn’t usually regarded as necessary for many businesses until the COVID-19 outbreak.

It’s mostly considered as an optional way of how you ought to be more successfully run the business. Thus it might seem like digital marketing isn’t really a necessity - rather just a choice.

The reason is the lack of digital awareness.

I think there is some common confusion about digital marketing’s omnipotence. These thoughts are pervasive, looming again and again. Even in the year 2020, their dominance still hinders progress.

In today’s post, we talk about how to build digital awareness in steps so all the entrepreneurs who still hesitate can go for digital marketing services with confidence.

The 5 steps to digital awareness

A checklist for starting your journey to opt for digital marketing service without any doubt.

1. Habits

Nearly all forms of self-awareness first require that you change your habit.

Habits, then, start forming your behavior.

For example, to get fit you need to have a habit of eating well and exercising. To get rich you need a habit of saving and investing. To expand your business you need to find new ways of communication with your potential customers; you need to penetrate deep into where they are.

I am not against any other form of marketing, but if your customers prefer online mediums, build marketing habits central to that theory, to serve them better. You wonder when you will see how the timely and contextually right digital marketing campaigns have impacts on business ROI.

2. Goal-setting

How can you trust a method if you don’t measure the outcome from it? Goal-setting not only help you decide what to do but also planning how to do it. It’s a common misconception, digital marketing is more about qualitative and less quantitative.

A good heuristic for goal-setting is that they should be SMART (specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound) which is absolutely feasible in digital marketing.

3. Systems

Systems implements structure in behavior. Any process is one type of system - in this case, aimed at helping you get work done by organizing the things that generate ROI.

The opposite of systems is a haphazard approach. Systems often encourage you to create and follow explicit rules or guidelines.

Digital marketing is also a system and is often built on applied productivity plans.

Digital marketing is spontaneous, intuitive, and creative with a touch of the emotional approach to generate ROI. Nonetheless, understanding systems, even if you choose to apply them selectively, is a core concept of digital awareness.

4. Learning

Learning here means studying new opportunities and gaining knowledge from experience, and get better at anything.

Learning is a core concept of digital awareness.

Learning is an important tool simply because it pours knowledge into your system that means you can understand which is a better way to reach the goals, even if others don’t.

5. Thoughts & Beliefs

Thoughts and beliefs are much mental than verbal, but our digital awareness is dependent heavily on both and act as an instrument for achieving things.

Regardless of the origin of thoughts and beliefs, they influence the degree of digital awareness for multiple reasons.

Since your thoughts and beliefs have a heavy impact on your behavior, and thus on your results, you may stay within a self-imposed mental boundary.

Thoughts and beliefs try to control our emotions by overpowering the rational mental state inside us as well.

The transformation of thoughts and beliefs is depending on how soon you want to get yourself out from comfort zone. Regardless of where you sit in this spectrum, the content of our thoughts and beliefs is central to true digital awareness.

To successfully employ any system, you have to keep faith in it by centering your thoughts and beliefs on it. Similarly, if your thoughts and beliefs powered by learning tell you to go for digital marketing, restricting yourself with lame excuses will hurt your business’s growth only. Or in fact, you haven’t learned. Else, you should have approach digital marketing differently.

Which step did I miss?

There certainly are other concepts in blossoming digital awareness inside you. I’ve skipped some here. Because though are important but didn’t seem as universal so I excluded them. If you have your own thought on digital awareness, please share them in the comments!

Solutions To 10 Google Ads Challenges For SMBs

Google Ads platform offers an enormous opportunity to all, but it also throws a lot of challenges especially to small businesses if not managed properly. In today’s post, I walk through 10 common Google Ads challenges for SMBs and their solutions.

Ten common Google Ads challenges for SMBs (and how to overcome them)

Optimum use of Google Ads (formerly Google AdWords) is easier said than done, especially if you’re new to online advertising.

If you are a small business owner, the situation is more overwhelming for you. But the good news is - these initial challenges are common and are possible to overcome even you are new to Google Ads. Nurturing effective ad campaigns requires study, optimization, and a whole lot of patience. But with proper guidance and courage, you’ll eventually generate ROI for your business consistently through running Google Ads campaigns successfully.

Getting started with Google Ads is easy, but getting results (i.e. real leads and sales) is typically hard.

This is true - I know from my decade of experience.

But I also know how to overcome these common challenges -

Challenge #1: Find the right audience for campaigns

A beginner-level slip-up when starting in Google Ads is to build out campaigns without knowing who your target audience is. Sure, you as a business owner have a fair idea but adding the right keywords to represent that same idea independently - is a challenge. In the worse case, you may end up with less than expected traffic or with lots of junk traffic!

Make sure that doesn’t happen by brainstorming with the free Keyword Planner tool found in Google Ads. You’ll find the suggestions for various relevant keyword terms along with supporting data for what you’ll pay per click.

Challenge #2: Overspending on clicks

Your competitors love making money from Google Ads just as much as you do. For new campaigns, I typically starting with high bids because I want to put my ads in a position to get more clicks, which leads to high CTR and ultimately, cheaper clicks. Bidding too high, sometimes though, exhaust your advertising budget which causes a negative return on your investment.

It’s a balancing act, but you can make it out with some simple calculation. Evaluate your maximum bid capacity with this formula:

Max CPC = (average profit per customer) x (conversion rate of your online customers) x (1 – desired advertising profit margin)

You’ll need to assess your business situation, market condition, and Google’s suggestions to estimate these numbers when you’re just starting out, but you can connect actual outcomes with the campaign’s data as you go. Consider leveraging the Google Keyword Planner tool and focus on keywords with projected costs below your planned Max CPC.

Challenge #3: Keeping pace with competitors

As you know, one of the secrets in business is to stay one step ahead of your competitors whenever is possible if not always. The same is true in Google Ads.

To keep an eye on what your competitors are doing, I recommend using tools like SpyFu and Ahrefs. Sure, there are many other powerful tools available for use like SEMrush and Moz. I have used all these along with many others. SpyFu is one of the best I have ever experienced. Using this tool, you’ll be able to “spying” on your competitors’ work like ad copy variations, keyword combinations, and many more insights on their ad campaigns. This is valuable information you can use to improve your own campaign’s performance and get a competitive advantage.

Challenge #4: Defining business USPs

Why should consumers click on your ad over all the others?

To answer this question is to outline what makes your offers special. That may not be challenging; but this is, when I say, you must summarize that uniqueness in a very limited space in your ads. Focus your ad on whatever it is your business does better than everyone else, and construct ads around those USPs.

By doing this, you will influence your ads’ quality score which is another essential ingredient like CTR to be successful on Google Ads. The more relevant your ads are with selected keywords and landing pages, the better chances to receive high QS which eventually leads to high CTR and ultimately conversions.

A few months back, in a Google Office Hours hangout, Google’s John Mueller answered a question about why a site lost rank. Yes, it’s about SEO. John’s answer centered on the power of being different and how this quality can help a site ranking better. I believe, this is relatable to PPC too. In fact, for any form of digital marketing and advertising.

Challenge #5: Limited characters space for ads

Your ads must be compelling enough to grab Google users’ attention, encourage them to clicks, and drive conversions. However, with standard text ads (one of the most used and most powerful ad formats), you only get 30 characters for your three headlines and 90 characters for your two description lines.

That’s not much space to work with, but not little too, especially when you are focused on:

• Convey unique selling points (USPs)
• Offer custom deals and discounts
• Add a call to action (CTA)

Like all writing, the main step is to start. Once you have a few drafts, then you can compare, edit, and refine them to find the best 2-3 variations you want to try out first. Remember, no one knows for sure which ad copy will perform best so always run multiple variations and let the data guide you. Also, I am encouraging you to test ad copies until you reach an optimum level in terms of their performance. But refrain from unnecessary experiments with Google Ads.

Challenge #6: Right landing page selection for ads

It’s comparatively easy for us to do adjustments in our ad copy but this is not the right approach especially when you only focus on your ad copy rather than reviewing your ads and landing pages together.

Your Google Ads quality score can tumble over poor landing page experiences, resulting in fewer conversions and more expensive clicks. Google can even stop showing your ads over what it deems to be inappropriate landing page content a.k.a. false advertising. On top of that, you’re likely to end up with a bad user experience (UX) that might have otherwise converted.

Before altering your ad copy, first make sure that your plan, is well aligned with your landing page. If your revised ad offers pay on delivery, then people who click that ad should found that offer too after landed on your web page. Those irresistible offers play a massive part in bringing people to your site and journey to goal conversion, but if you don’t follow through on your landing page, neither will your prospects.

It is okay to edit your ads here-n-there based on data (or sometimes your gut feeling) without touching the associated landing page. But when changes are critical (in most situations), good to maintain the alliance between your ads, landing page, and keyword.

Challenge #7: Targeting users on mobile

Most web developers today building websites that are equally functional on both mobile and desktop platforms. However, many small business websites are not mobile-friendly since were built before mobile took off.

Three things will happen if you advertise to mobile devices without a mobile-optimized website:

• Potential consumers will bounce because the page will not look or function properly on their mobile (a.k.a. you’ll lose sales)
• Your quality scores will suffer, which leads to higher costs and lower ad position
• Even if you are running campaigns and exclude handheld devices to display ads, you are missing out on a large portion of your probable customers which again adversely affect your ROI because your competitors are ON mobile

So choose to not advertise to mobile devices is not really a smart option anymore, especially if we know that an estimated 100 billion Google searches per month originate from smartphones and this number is growing!

Unfortunately, the world is now working from home due to the COVID-19 outbreak worldwide. So mobile searches are expected to grow rapidly in the future. Accordingly, businesses should tweak the Google Ads plan.

Challenge #8: Goal conversion tracking

Enabling goal conversion tracking is an absolute necessity. Without it, you won’t ever know which keyword, ad, the campaign is driving the most leads and sales.

Get your conversion tracking code from Google Ads and embed it within the landing page of your website that indicates a completed goal. If your goal is to drive sales, then embed the code on your delivery confirmation page.

If you want to drive leads, then embed the code on the page that shows after your contact form is submitted a.k.a. thank you page. This code allows Google Ads to track when prospects complete your forms so you can see exactly which ads and keywords result in more conversions.

Additionally, if phone calls are important for your business, then don’t forget to set up call conversion tracking so you can see which ads and keywords are driving leads/sales over phone calls.

Challenge #9: Using ad extensions

Extensions are additional components in your ads that can make your ads much more enticing to users - especially those who are searching for local merchandise and services. Ad extensions include call extensions, site link extensions, callout extensions, price extensions, and more.

Google does show some extensions automatically, but you’ll miss out on the most useful extensions if you don’t set them up by hand.

Start with this feature under the “Ad extensions” tab in Google Ads and follow the directions to set up each extension.

Challenge #10: Optimizing campaigns

Optimizing the campaigns is an ongoing struggle. From the day you launch the ads, you should always be split-testing ad copy, adjusting your bids, trying new keywords, stopping poor-performing keywords, analyze different targeting options, and split-testing landing pages - do all kinds of calculative experiemnts.

Successful campaigns eventually require less elevation and, like everything else with Google Ads, it gets much easier over time, and one of the prime reasons for that is from the learner, you also turn into an expert in due course.

When you attend my online/offline training, I’ll show you exactly how to profitably manage your Google Ads campaigns, so you minimize your ad costs, generate more leads and sales, and maximize your profits!

If you manage your own Google Ads campaigns, or if you manage Google Ads campaigns for clients or on behalf of others, you should definitely attend this program.