Today, we’re going to continue the conversation from last Friday, where in episode 276, I broke down what is a standard operating procedure or an SOP. This week we’re going to actually give you a standard operating procedures example.
IE 278:Standard Operating Procedures Example for a Blogger
For a blogger, we want to see how you can start looking at SOPs and really start to apply them to your business.
We’re going to break SOPs into systems, processes and tasks.
Back in episode, 276, we talked about standard operating procedures.
I explained exactly what they were and how I have been implementing them using Google drive.
Systems within SOPs
As a blogger you wear many hats within your business.
Those hats that you wear: photographer, photo editing, food stylist, email marketing, social media marketing, content creation, etc. All those hats are also known as your systems.
We are going to break down one of the systems into its processes and then tasks to show you how you’re going to create an SOP for that particular system.
We’re going to break down the system of email marketing as our example of an SOP within your business.
Processes of an SOP
Within the email marketing system are specific processes.
There is a growth process, which would be your opt-in.
A nurture process, which is going to be the actual emails that you send.
As well as a sales process, which are going to be the sales funnel that you set up.
Those are three processes right there within it.
And for some of those processes like growth, you may have multiple examples of how you can potentially grow your email list.
We’re actually talking about that this month inside my membership site, Mastering Your Influence, but we’re talking about different ways that you can grow your email list with a bundle giveaway.
For our standard operating procedures example, we’re going to use the process of nurturing your list.
I personally send three emails a week to give you most relevant information that I think that you need to have at that point in your blogging journey.
Within that nurture process, there are specific tasks that my team and I do in order to make sure that you get nurtured.
I don’t just go in and randomly send you a bunch of episodes.
Tasks within SOPs
Each week I go in on Monday and I take a look at what podcasts episodes are relevant to the week that is coming up because we are normally writing our emails at least 10 days ahead of time.
I’m looking to see what’s going to be relevant for you 10 days from now.
I add those links to a Google sheet within my drive that is connected to my team so that they know exactly what they’re doing.
It is called my master editorial email calendar.
We have it dating all the way back to 2019 and we create a new tab each month with Monday, Wednesday, Friday dates because those are the days that I send my emails.
My virtual assistant is able to go into the sheet and click on the links and create a subject line and three sentences that will entice my audience to read the full post.
Part of her tasks each week are also to send resends to those that didn’t open the previous week’s email.
There is continual nurturing happening.
No one ever receives an email from me and says, “Hey, I’ve never heard from this girl. I haven’t heard from her in three months. Don’t know who she is. Unsubscribe.”
Some may say, I don’t want three emails in a week. I’m going to unsubscribe. Here’s the thing: I’m okay with that!
If someone doesn’t want to hear from me when I’m giving them valuable information and content, then they should unsubscribe because I don’t want to pay for people that are on my list just sitting there.
It’s them self cleaning your list for you.
It’s less work.
You’re going to have a better open rate because now. I’m sitting there not opening. We’re clicking.
There is a video that walks her through exactly how I want her to write those emails.
My emails are short and sweet.
You all know that if you’re on my list, I’m going to give you three sentences and we’re going to have a button for you to be able to click.
We want people to click through so that when we refer to other episodes, like I did in this one, it is all connected.
You want to keep people on your website gaining more information and getting more knowledge from you and seeing you as the expert.
Creating SOPs is not something you’re going to do all in one day.
It is something that if you are just starting as a blogger you should start today because it’s going to make it that much simpler for you.
If you get this implemented now, rather than waiting five years and going, holy crap, I need to shut down for two weeks to get these systems, processes and tasks all in place so that I can start to hire because I’m totally overwhelmed and I’m making more money now, so I can hire, but it’s going to take me two weeks to actually get all these processes in place.
Action Steps:
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