Most businesses don’t fail through lack of effort; they fail because their online business strategy was not focused on the right target.

Call it what you like – “working smarter, not harder” is often used – but there is no substitute for getting your own strategy focusing on the things that will give you the best Return on Investment (ROI).

Or to put it another way – a day’s work going in the right direction is worth infinitely more than a week’s work going in the wrong direction!

How To Focus Your Business Strategy

Sometimes it’s a question of challenging your beliefs, especially if you’ve been taking your business in one direction, only to find that it’s not really working.

A good example of what it takes can be illustrated by the co-founder of NLP (Neuro-Linguistic Programming), who taught me how a change of vision or focus can make a world of difference to any situation in life.

We all receive the same stimuli from our surroundings but we all process those stimuli differently, as illustrated by a couple of examples from my NLP training.

The Spelling Test!

With the subject of spelling, the best spellers can visualise the word in front of their eyes and they can spell it forwards or backwards. Poor spellers will sound out the word syllable by syllable which can sometimes work, but only for the simpler words.

It’s a question of how they are looking at it that decides how successful they are.

Finding The Right Aim!

When a group of Olympic shooters were asked how they hit the target so accurately they replied that they imagine a laser pointer on top of the gun and when they shoot they line up the dot with the target. It was this process of visualisation that helped get results. When this technique was introduced to the US military it improved accuracy greatly.

Your online business strategy should hit the target.

So, bearing these lessons in mind, how do you ensure your business is aiming at the right target?

Here are some pointers:

• Question your own business paradigm – is there a new way to look at things that will improve the chances of success, like the speller and the shooter?
• Map out your short-term goals and longer-term goals and have them clearly defined in your business plan.
• Work out how you will generate cash-flow in the short-term to help reach the longer-term goals
• Think about products and services that involve less time and effort, but higher and longer-lasting returns for you. For example, if you run workshops, can you film them so that you are creating extra product opportunities with the footage?

Following the above lessons and tips should point you in the direction of developing business strategies that produce a good ROI – the name of the game with any business!

Working smarter on your online business strategy is easier if you use all the great web resources available to you; one of those is the Competition Crusher Workshop which you can view completely FREE here: www.CrusherWorkshop.com.