Welcome back to my five day blog series. Today we’re going to keep it short and sweet and talk about another one of my favorite parts of building a successful business – strategy and execution.

One of the biggest issues I’ve seen with people trying to build a business is that they have an amazing strategy, but they fail to execute with no direction, or fail to execute their strategy altogether.

When it comes to your strategy, you need to assess what your budget is for getting in front of your audience. There’s organic marketing and paid advertising. Personally, I’ve done both. Paid advertising is amazing because it allows for automation, thus freeing up your time to scale your business and take on more clients. After you land more clients, you put more money into the paid advertising and the circle continues.

With organic marketing, you have to understand that your secret weapon is time. You need to utilize your time wisely while repeating yourself like a broken record. This is where your brand message is really important. If you decide to choose organic marketing as part of your strategy, you need to make sure that your message is clear. Make sure it resonates with your audience and speaks to their problems. I’d recommend giving it about 90 days to decide if your message is working. If your audience still isn’t engaging or resonating after the 90 days, evaluate your message and change it around.

With paid advertising, you can tweak it much faster than the method above. More people are seeing your advertising, so you can change it to resonate with the masses a lot quick because you have the handy analytics. Don’t be dissuaded either if you are getting crickets on your ads – it’s good research. It takes time to find what works and what doesn’t – don’t make the mistake of changing your path too early. You just want to make sure you’re being consistent.

Lastly, I just want you to know that this does NOT work right away. That’s the secret. Anyone who tells you it works like magic is lying. It takes a level of commitment and a mindset of perseverance to get to where you need to be.