Refresh, reshape, and grow your business with these inspiring Summer reads for entrepreneurs.

As the Summer days warm up and the days move a bit more slowly,  you may have noticed the pace of your business slowing down as well. On a positive note, the “Summer slump” provides business owners a great opportunity to delve into personal and business growth, get inspired, try out a few new systems, and work out any kinks that may pop up so that you and your business are ready when things get busy again in the Fall.

One of my favorite ways to spend the slower Summer months is reading books that help me to look at my entrepreneur life and my business in a different way. There is more time to mull over new ideas and think of how I might positively transform different parts of my business.

Here are some of my favorite books to dive into during the slow Summer months that will have you ready to get back at it with fresh inspiration and new ideas in the Fall.

1. Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World by Cal Newport

An absolute personal favorite, I have it in audio (Audible – affiliate link) and paperback for all my notes. I read it thinking of my kids and the level of interruption they have in their lives due to all the electronics and social media, but it had a huge impact on me. I reviewed my relationship with time, the use of social media and of anything that could compromise the work I’ve set out to do in the world.

Cal Newport writes beautifully and is very compelling on his case for more focused time and less interruption in our lives, giving us easy to implement strategies to achieve it.

I can say it is a must for those who feel they are always busy but struggle to accomplish as much as they set out to during all of that “busy time.”

“Deep work is the ability to focus without distraction on a cognitively demanding task. It’s a skill that allows you to quickly master complicated information and produce better results in less time. Deep work will make you better at what you do and provide a sense of true fulfillment that comes from craftsmanship. In short, deep work is like a superpower in our increasingly competitive twenty-first-century economy. And yet, most people have lost the ability to go deep-spending their days instead in a frantic blur of e-mail and social media, not even realizing there’s a better way.”- Amazon Books

2. Breaking the Habit of Being You by Dr. Joe Dispenza

I truly believe this book can change your life. At least that’s what I feel it did for me.

Dr. Dispenza explains the science behind becoming who we are and how to create lasting change in any area of your life. If you’re ready for a big, bold move, this book will be your best friend.

Audible version (affiliate link)

Fans of this book love the actionable steps that Dispenza offers to really help you put into practice what you learn in the book and I can attest to that.

“In Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself, renowned author, speaker, researcher, and chiropractor Dr. Joe Dispenza combines the fields of quantum physics, neuroscience, brain chemistry, biology, and genetics to show you what is truly possible. Not only will you be given the necessary knowledge to change any aspect of yourself, but you will be taught the step-by-step tools to apply what you learn in order to make measurable changes in any area of your life.” – Amazon Books

3. Building a StoryBrand: Clarify Your Message so Customers will Listen by Donald Miller

An absolute diamond when it comes to clarifying your brand message and growing your customer base by giving your audience what they want. People have problems. You want to be the one to offer them the clearest and best solution.

“Donald Miller’s StoryBrand process is a proven solution to the struggle business leaders face when talking about their businesses. This revolutionary method for connecting with customers provides listeners with the ultimate competitive advantage, revealing the secret for helping their customers understand the compelling benefits of using their products, ideas, or services. Building a StoryBrand will forever transform the way you talk about who you are, what you do, and the unique value you bring to your customers.”- Amazon Books

4. Free to Focus- A Total Productivity System to Achieve More by Doing Less by Michael Hyatt

This book is a must-read for anyone who has ever felt like there are not possibly enough hours in the day to finish their work, let alone the truly important things in life, like family, friendships, our own personal health, relationships, and hobbies.

“In Free to Focus, New York Times bestselling author Michael Hyatt reveals to readers nine proven ways to win at work so they are finally free to succeed at the rest of life–their health, relationships, hobbies, and more. He helps readers redefine their goals, evaluate what’s working, cut out the non-essentials, focus on the most important tasks, manage their time and energy, and build momentum for a lifetime of success.”- Google Books

5. Do Less: A Revolutionary Approach to Time and Energy Management for Busy Moms by Kate Northrup

One of my favorite new releases, Do Less will transform the way women think about how they manage their time, but how they think about time in general. From natural cycles to the cyclical nature of time itself, Kate Northrup gives practical solutions for women who want to successfully and joyfully combine business and motherhood. I love the experiments that are included in this book that encourage you to work through the book.

“The addiction to busyness and the obsession with always trying to do more leads women, especially working mothers, to feel like they’re always failing their families, their careers, their spouses, and themselves. This book will give women the permission and tools to change the way they approach their lives and allow them to embrace living in tune with the cyclical nature of the feminine, cutting out the extraneous busyness from their lives so they have more satisfaction and joy, and letting themselves be more often instead of doing all the time.”

These books are gems in so many different ways. Some will inspire you to change your daily habits and some will give you amazing ideas to transform your brand and grow your business.

Have you read any of these titles? If you have let me know in the comments below! What titles are must-reads for you that I should check out? I’d love for you to share!

New post 5 Must Read Books For Entrepreneurs – The Summer List on A Personal Organizer by Helena Alkhas

A brand is made up of many elements, all of which come together to tell a cohesive and consistent visual story to your audience. By creating and communicating a clear brand message, you will be building trust, which is a key element for converting followers into customers. One of the best ways to create a consistent brand message is with a branding photoshoot.

Here are 5 tips that you can use to make your Branding Photoshoot a success

1. Hire or DIY

When you are getting ready to do a branding photoshoot, the first thing you will want to decide on is whether you are going to do the photoshoot yourself or you are going to hire a professional.

If you do want to hire a photographer for your photoshoot, check out fiverr for a great pool of talent available in price ranges for every budget.

Here Are a few things to consider when you are deciding:

You are a good candidate to DIY your Branding Photoshoot if:

• You are comfortable with a DSLR camera. While iPhones take amazing photos, you will want to use an actual camera for your branding photoshoot to get the most professional-looking results.
• You are comfortable creating backgrounds, flat lays, and setting up the subjects in your photos
• You are comfortable with editing photos
• You are on a tight budget. When considering budget, remember to keep in mind how much time and how much energy you will spend trying to do the photoshoot yourself in order to figure out the true cost of going with DIY.

You should hire a professional for your Branding Photoshoot if:

• You do not own or are unfamiliar with using a DSLR came
• You want help with creating the composition and layouts for your brand photos
• You are not familiar with, or adept at photo editing
• You can invest a little money to have your photos done by a professional

2. Be consistent across the board

Before you do any of the next steps to prepare for your branding photoshoot, you need to have a clear vision of what you want your photos to look like and achieve, and have a path and a plan to get you there.

We are always talking about consistency when it comes to branding and there’s a reason: people buy from businesses and people they know and trust. The best way to make that kind of connection with an audience or customer base is to deliver a clear and consistent message.

When you are getting ready to start your photoshoot you will want to have a very clear idea of the things that make up your brand. These can include things like your brand’s colors, fonts, images, taglines, headings, image formatting, logo, target audience, and packaging.

Depending on the type of business you are branding, what you include in your brand kit might be slightly different.

3. Know your end goal before you begin

Ask yourself what you want to achieve with your brand photoshoot. Is this photoshoot for a specific campaign, or are the photos intended to be used as a general stock of photos you will use in multiple situations for your brand? You will also want to think about where you will be using these photos.

Some popular uses for brand photos are Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, Websites or blogs, print, and/or video. It is so important to think of where you will be using the pictures from your branding photoshoot so that you will be creating images in the correct sizes, as well as photos that speak to the users of specific platforms.

Canva is a great tool to use as you are preparing for your branding photoshoot as it has all of the sizes you will need for both digital and print media as templates. Using templates to create different images from your photoshoot will save you loads and time and stress if you are not a pro at photoshop or other similar photo editing applications.

4. Collect inspiration

Before the day of your branding photoshoot begin collecting inspiration. Start this as early as you can to give yourself time to pull from creative sources and be open to inspiration in unexpected spaces.

You can keep all of your ideas together on a paper vision board, or on an app like Pinterest which makes gathering digital inspiration super simple and organized.

Gather a wide variety of inspiration from photos or specific items you want to include as well as photos that exemplify the theme you are going for. You can also gather inspiration from videos, quotes, and messaging styles.

As your shoot gets closer, go through and tighten up what your vision for the shoot is and make sure your design is cohesive with what you want your photos to achieve as an end result.

5. Gather your tools and schedule your Branded Photoshoot

Once you feel like you have everything together to create a clear and consistent branding photoshoot, you should schedule your shoot. If you are doing the photoshoot yourself, pick one date, or pick a few different dates for mini sessions.

You may also want to think about scheduling a refresher branding photoshoot once or twice a year to add seasonal, or specifically themed photos to your stock of images.

If you are having a photographer do your photoshoot, you can see if there are any special offers for mini sessions, or if it is a better deal to shoot everything all at once, and then maybe shoot the refresher pictures yourself to fill in.

Conclusion

One of the best investments of time or money that you can make in your business is to do a branding photoshoot. Your overall goal for your branding photoshoot should be to create a recognizable story through images that your customers can easily attach to your business.

When your audience sees your images they should immediately know they are yours. The consistent and high-quality photos created with a well-prepped and executed branding photoshoot will give you images that will elevate your brand and grow your business.

New post 5 Tips For A Successful Branding Photo Shoot on A Personal Organizer by Helena Alkhas

Now that you have taken the first, essential steps to growing your email list, you’ll want to keep them coming back for more and continue to gain new subscribers with some excellent free content.

One of the best ways to attract new subscribers to your growing email list is to create and offer valuable materials in exchange for the right to be included in their inbox.

By offering your readers or potential subscribers valuable information for free, you will be establishing trust and authority in your niche, so when the time comes to sell a product or service, your subscribers will be on board with what you are offering because they have already had a sampling of the high-quality things you have to offer.

So let’s get started today by first looking at five different kinds of freebies that you can create for your subscribers:

1. Checklists
2. Planners
3. Quick-guides
4. Short video tutorials
5. Free email training series

Now, let’s look at what types of free content might be best suited for your business or brand.

1. Product-based business freebies

If you offer a product or products through your business, certain types of content are best suited to your brand and will be most useful for your customers. The best free content you can offer your customers as a product-based business is:

• Quick Guides – Quick guides can be used to explain how you would use your product to solve various types of problems that your subscribers might encounter.
• Short video tutorials – Again, you can offer your customers free video tutorials to show your product in action. If customers like what they see, they will be excited to make a purchase from you.
• How–tos – Downloadable how-tos in the form of a checklist on how to solve a specific problem or achieve a goal that features your product as one of the essential steps to save time, energy, and/or money along the way is an excellent piece of free content to offer.

2. Service-Based Business Freebies

If you own a service-based business, you will want to focus on giving your potential customers free snippets that offer them ”quick wins” in the niche that you are working.

• Checklists and planners – For example, if you run an organizing business, like I do. You may be offering your organizing services or selling a planner or downloadable home management binder. You could provide a single room or routine organizing checklist as a freebie so your readers can see the value and expertise you offer.
• Free email training series – you can also offer a meatier freebie in the form of a free e-course designed to further give great value for free to your readers. The more you share freely of your knowledge, the more people will trust that you are confident in the expertise you have to offer in the services and products you provide.

Of course, you can and should mix and match these kinds of freebies up as offers in your business, depending on what your subscribers respond to, whether you have a product or service-based business.

Finally, you will want to create a plan for sharing this free content.

Once you have decided on the type of free content you want to create, you will want to approach it in a three-step process similar to this.

1. Plan and Design With The End Result In Mind

When planning and designing your free content, ensure you start with the end goal in mind. Consider where you would like this free content to take your subscribers. What are they interested in most that is related to a product you are charging for?

This way, when you ask them to purchase a product or service from you, they will know it is at least close to something they would need and want because they accepted a free offer that was very similar.

2. Share and Promote

Once your freebie is designed, you will want to share and promote it. You can add your freebie as a header email grab for people to leave their email in exchange for a free download or link.

Place this above the fold on your website for maximum impact.

You can also send out your freebie to your current email list. You will also want to promote your freebie offer on social media.

3. Follow Up

In the first two posts where we discussed email lists for your business, we emphasized the importance of consistency, and it’s reappearing here. Once people have given you their email in exchange for free content, you need to do something with those emails.

This is a straightforward way to utilize the new emails you have to convert subscribers into customers. Create a segmented list in your email marketing service, like ConvertKit. (affiliate link)

Send out an email asking people how they liked the free content and if they had any questions. Then offer them your product or service that is related to the free offer they accepted.

4. Conclusion

Providing free content in the form of ebooks, checklists, planners, video training, and more is a great way to build trust and confidence between you and your current and potential subscribers.

When people buy products or services, they tend to purchase from those they know, like, and trust.

By sharing content that is both valuable and free, you will be well on your way to achieving all three.

New post Grow Your List With These Email Subscriber Ideas on A Personal Organizer by Helena Alkhas