7 Things To Do To Improve Your Handmade Business in 10 Minutes or Less

Good results don't always have to be the result of a ton of hard work. You can get some good results by doing little things that take hardly any time. Do one of these things each day for the next seven days and enjoy the improvements that come from taking the smallest action steps.

7 Quick Small Business Marketing Ideas

1. Survey Your Customers

Ask your customers to tell you what they like and don't like about how you serve them. Do they have a favorite product? What are their pain points? What would they like to see from you in 2017? You can use Survey Monkey (it's free) to ask 10 questions. Create one question a minute, and you're done in 10 minutes.

2. Share the Survey Results

Once you get feedback from your customers, review the feedback, and then take 10 minutes to share the feedback, and maybe get more. Post a short summary of the feedback at your blog, and in your newsletter, and ask for clarification on any points you want to follow up on. Your customers will appreciate that you are listening to them, and you'll probably get even more feedback from people who want to add to what they already said, or who missed the first request for feedback.

3. Request Testimonials from Customers and Colleagues

Ask your customers and colleagues to share their honest opinions about you and the products and services you offer. Take 10 minutes to draft an email request. Tweak it for individuals, and make it personal. You should be able to send out 15 to 20 requests in about 10 minutes.

4. Add the Testimonials to Your Website

Once you get the testimonials back, sprinkle them around your website. Some will be more appropriate for certain pages of your site than others. Take 10 minutes and add as many as you can, then schedule another 10 minutes later in the day to add more if you'd like. You can also create graphics out of them, and post them to Instagram, Facebook, etc.

5. Coordinate Your Cover Images for Consistent Branding

Take a look at your most popular social media outlets and coordinate the cover images so they present a clean and organized view of your brand. People should be able to go from one of your media outlets to another and see clear and consistent branding. Once you have a concept in mind, it should take no more than 10 minutes to design and upload these if you are good with graphics. If you are not (like me), it will take less than 10 minutes for your designer to create them for your approval.

6. Cross-Pollinate Your Social Followings

If most of your followers are on Facebook, but you'd like to build a Twitter following, make sure your Facebook fans know how to find you on Twitter - and vice versa. Do this with other social outlets like Snapchat and Instagram. Not all of you fans will follow you in two places, but some will. Additionally, people ted to move back and forth among a few different social media accounts, so make sure they know how to find you wherever you are. Give them the option, and let them decide.

7. Leverage Your Most Popular Blog Posts

Use your favorite social media scheduling tool (I like HootSuite) and cue up Tweets of your most popular posts for regular sharing on Twitter. Use 5 minutes to choose 10 posts, and then use the other 5 minutes to schedule Tweets. Your fans and followers will have access to content at your site that they may have never seen before, and you'll get increased visibility based on work you have done in the past. This is called leverage, and you need as much of it as you can get.

Pottery Wheel Photo via Shutterstock

This article, "7 Things To Do To Improve Your Handmade Business in 10 Minutes or Less" was first published on Small Business Trends