In August, I wrote a post How to Accelerate Your Business Growth with an Audit where I reviewed the objectives for my business and my blog. If you’ve not thought about underaking a business audit yourself you should give it some serious thought, as it’s a good opportunity to look at what you do, how you do it and how you can make your business better.

Products

I’ve not launched any new products in the last couple of months although I will definitely be releasing my final eBook of the year in November…so watch this space!

I’m also looking to put an update out on How to Achieve your Dreams the Tomato Way – in time for December / January when many people look to setting thier goals for the next year.   But if you buy it before then, don’t worry updates are free for a year.

What I have done though is had a banner designed for a new ‘store’ where all our products are grouped together, rather than spread them out all over in the sidebar. I certainly think this looks a lot neater and hopefully this will translate into more sales.

Competition

I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about how I define the niche that this blog serves. I originally wanted to aim it at entrepreneurs whether they worked in organisations or owned their own business. But this is too broad. It’s still about entrepreneurship, but the focus is on ‘Business Growth Advice’. The site title has changed to reflect this.

In line with this, I’ve also been looking at creating a new tag line.  I wrote a post BRT: Tagline what do you think and was delighted with the feedback and pushback for not being ‘Tomato enough’. So, I’m back to the drawing board with that one…

Customers / Community

I talked above about the BRT Tagline, which was esentially an online poll (plus comments!) to choose the tag line readers preffered.   I’m pleased that we’re able to connect with the community/customers of the blog and I’m looking to take this forward with some focus groups/1:1 interviews.  Before the end of the year, I’m going to ask our newsletter subscribers to take part in a reader survey, which will hopefully be a great source of information for taking the blog and the business to the next level in the next 12 months.

From our 1st Birthday Post we got some great suggestions for areas to improve the blog. Thank you so much to everyone who contributed some excellent ideas.

Blog improvements

In the 1st anniversary post I mentioned that these were some of the technical changes that I wanted to make to the blog:

• The ability to tab to Previous post  at the bottom of the home page
• Swapping the Welcome text on the home page for a featured post
• Better access to archives relevant to the posts

Page numbering is now included at the bottom of each screen so you can more easily move to older  or newer posts.  Sadly I don’t know how to include a previous post / next post tab at the bottom of each post, but if you know a plugin to do this, please let me know in the comments section below.

Swapping the Welcome Text with a featured post hasn’t been done, as I’m trying to make new readers know the blog’s about Business Growth, so the section wording has changed and there’s less text, so new readers are more likely to read it.

As well as Yet Another Related Post (YARP) Plugin, I’ve now installed Linked Within to highlight related posts to the article you’re reading. This has proved very popular as the average number of page views per visit is consistently increasing.

We still have the bottom sidebar to update – what to include I haven’t fully decided, now that I’m getting more comfortable with using video, I may include a short ‘About’ Video taking Gines forward Gines suggestion.

Passive income Journey

A number of bloggers write very popular posts about how much they’re earning online and I’m very pleased for their progress. For a number of reasons, I don’t think this is a good idea, but I can see for sites that talk about making money online, it’s good for business.   So, you won’t get me talking about how much we’re making, but what I will say is that the performance measures that we have in place to track performance are moving in the right direction.

Within the next year we expect that 10% of The Big Red Tomato Company income will come from online sources, which is 10 times where we are now. A big hill? Yes, unachievale? No.  Small steps will get big results. Watch this space.

So, there we have it, not complete by any means but moving forward none the less.

What about you? Anything to Add?