How To Survive Solopreneurship

Well, can’t say last week went according to plan. My plan to travel up to Maine was changed last minute because my dog hurt himself. Don’t worry… he’s fine. 🐶 But, for a day there, he was clearly in pain and I had to stay back and deal with him. I could never leave him with a sitter when he wasn’t 100%.

So, the family went up without me – and THEN this big winter storm was coming. So, they ended up flying back two days early to avoid all the flight hassles and a likely cancellation.

So, yeah… didn’t go according to plan. 🤪

But, all worked out fine. And I even had a nice lunch with one of my Concierge clients who was in town. 😎

So, let’s kick off the week here. Let’s talk about… solopreneur survival. And a strategy I have found puts a lot of order into the overwhelm that goes along with doing every job in your business yourself.

And, I’m also making a big change when it comes to tracking website stats. I’ll tell you about that below, too.

OK, let’s send it….

How To Survive As A Solopreneur

Working for yourself and being a solopreneur is a real mind job. It really is.

You’re responsible for – everything. You do – everything. If you’re not the one doing it, then it doesn’t happen.

When you sit down to “work”, you sometimes wonder what the best thing to spend your time on. It can seem confusing. Overwhelming, even. To the point where you may even just start doing the lowest-hanging fruit first. And before you know it, the days goes by and you were putting out fires all day. Or being “busy”, but not much to show for it.

Been there. Done that. Still do it sometimes, in fact. 😇 But, I’ve realized how NOT to do it. Takes structure and discipline, but here’s what helps for me.

Any business has certain roles – or hats – within it. Your business is a system of some kind – and there are certain hats that are part of making the whole thing work. In other words… imagine your business as a bigger operation and…. what job positions would need to be filled?

I believe most businesses – even small one-man shows – consist of certain “divisions”. Things like Communications, Promotion, Treasury, Production, Public Relations, and Executive.

These are different “divisions” within your business. Each with their own roles. And here’s the key…

Even though YOU are wearing every hat, you should not be wearing every hat at the same time.

Entrepreneurs often overwhelm themselves into a confusion because they’re doing everything – simultaneously.

While writing that blog article, you are also checking your email… writing an email reply… you get an idea and research it for a few minutes… then return to writing your blog post… then work on a deliverable for your client/customer… while replying to another email, while checking Facebook….

You get the idea. You’re wearing all the hats at the same time. And imagine how stupid you’d look if you were wearing a ton of different hats all at once! 🤪

So, the key here is to wear ONE hat at a time. And to divide your day – and your week – into pre-scheduled time periods where you’re wearing ONE particular hat.

When you are replying to your emails, you’re working in your Communications division.

When you’re writing a promotional email to your list, you’re working in your Promotions division.

When you’re doing your accounting, you’re being the accountant.

When you’re working on a client deliverable, you’re working in the Production division.

Get the idea?

And you should not being doing them all at once. When you are handling communications, then you are being your Communications Officer. That’s your role. You do no others. Perhaps you schedule in one hour during the day where that is your role. You do nothing but process incoming communications, file them as needed, route to other roles, etc. Even if that email entails a “to do” that you’d only do when wearing another hat, then you file/label that email for that other hat. You don’t do it right then ans there! You do it only when you take on THAT role later on.

Then, when you’re done… you STOP wearing that hat and you move onto the next planned one.

And realize… the Executive division is there, too. It is an actual job to be the manager and CEO of your one-man business. And when you’re doing that, you cannot be also wearing the other hats at the same time. So, schedule time to be the CEO. To look at the big picture. To come up with strategy. It is a separate action – and a separate role.

So, identify the divisions of your business. Identify what the job of each one is. Assign a responsible role to each.

And yes, the reality is…. you’re wearing all of those hats. You’re doing all of it. But, when you are being one of those roles, you are NOT being the other ones.

One post at a time.

And treating – and structuring – your business as if it were bigger than it is.

Right now, you’re wearing every hat. Eventually, you might not be.

Concierge Weekly Update

The migrations are done! So, ALL clients have been migrated out of Rocket.net and over to the new Concierge Cloud setup.

Also, let’s talk about the coming switch to Independent Analytics for website stats.

WordPress News & Updates

GTMetrix Price Increase. If you’re a user of GTMetrix for performance testing and have a paid account, a new (and higher) pricing setup goes into effect February 1st. Their Solo plan is going away and new plans (and new pricing goes into effect). People on the solo plan (like I use) are automatically moved to the new Advanced plan, bit with a discount in place that gets closer to the old solo rate.

FluentCart Update. FluentCart was updated yet again – this time to 1.3.8 It now has an instant modal checkout, enabling people to click and buy without ever leaving the page they’re on. Usable for single-offer landing pages, quick membership site add-ons or upgrades, etc. Numerous other fixes and enhancements as well, which you can read about in their latest release announcement.

SureContact Launched. Looks like the latest addition to the “Sure” line of products is out – SureContact. This is a new competitor to the likes of FluentCRM, which you know I am partial to. I have not tested it, so not sure what all it does that you can’t already do with FluentCRM. Judging by the screenshots, you can tell they’ve brought in some of the same design language as their other products, but it looks like it does all the usual things you would expect. I suspect this may be SaaS, but I don’t know. Mainly because, while the pricing is already high, they also impose contact limits. Frankly, I don’t know why anybody would want to use this versus something like FluentCRM, but I’ll wait to learn more.

SiteGround Wants To Be More Than A Web Host. Siteground has entered a new chapter – evolving from a web host to an “all in one platform for online success”. According to their announcement, they’re expanding their offerings beyond just web hosting…. now including a website builder, Coderick AI (for vibe coding), Siteground AI Studio, etc. I guess Siteground is trying to be your one stop shop now? Problem is, as I’ve always said, all in one products are rarely good at all of it because they spread themselves thin. I guess we’ll see.

Elementor One. The theme continues… with Elementor doing the same thing as Siteground by trying to be everything to everybody. Elementor One is their new subscription plan which provides unified access to everything they do now, including site creation, management, AI, accessibility, performance tools, etc. Clearly, Elementor wants to be way more than a page builder company.

February 3rd. February 3rd is the scheduled launch date for both WordPress 6.9.1 as well as WooCommerce 10.5. WordPress 6.9.1 will be a bug-fix release, so no major new features expected. Woo 10.5 focuses on performance and developer improvements, UI tweaks, and a new experimental caching feature.

Searcher & Filter – with Enhanced Search. The Search & Filter plugin has been updated to 3.2.0 and now includes a very fast search engine for your site. This is a proper search engine, with full indexing, support for custom fields, and more. This update also has a redesigned admin UI, 10X faster index for queries, and more. Looks like a heck of an update. Check out the full details here.

Most Hosts Aren’t Truly “Secure”. An experiment by Patchstack found that most web hosts don’t do an effective job of mitigating WordPress security issues. 74% of all attempted attacks across web hosts were successful. And most web hosting firewalls didn’t prevent these attacks.

FlyingPress Now Includes Image Optimization. FlyingPress 5.3 now adds the “missing piece” to performance optimization: Image Optimization. It is now built right into the FlyingPress plugin – and uses their cloud servers to process the images so there’s no load on your server. Based on what I can tell, there’s no additional cost for this service, but I will need to verify that for you. Certainly a convenient add, however you’ll still have way more flexibility using something like ShortPixel. (Note: Both are included with Concierge services).

The Case For Using A Plugin To Track Your Analytics

When it comes to web traffic analytics, the most common solution is Google Analytics. It seems like a standard – and it’s free. So, people don’t really question using it…. but they should.

Google Analytics is not really free. Not when you consider that they’re mainly making your website into a cog in their data mining and intelligence apparatus. They offer it for free because they want the data. They use the data. Think about it… why would they offer it for free for any other reason?

Google Analytics is also hard on performance, because it loads up a pretty big remote script. And, it is an overly complex piece of crap, as far as I’m concerned. Most people don’t even know how to use it because it is so over-engineered. They may track a few core metrics…. and the rest of it is just noise.

Now, there are numerous alternatives to Google Analytics. Tools like Fathom Analytics, Plausible, Umami and numerous others. Many of these other tools are actually better than Google Analytics because (a) they’re actually useful because they’re not difficult to understand, and (b) they’re not data mining you because you have an actual customer relationship with them.

But, even using ANY remotely hosted analytics service comes with it’s drawbacks.

For one, you don’t necessarily get that DEEP integration with WordPress. They are not WordPress-native tools, so your only real integration is to plop the code onto your site to track. Deeper integration (like tracking customer journeys into a WooCommerce sale) don’t work without a lot more setup.

Secondly, while they will tell you you own your own data, you don’t truly. That’s because if you were to export that data, what you’d end up with is usually raw CSV files. The data isn’t nearly as usable that way. So, yeah…. you own it, but you also just grossly limited how useful that data is because you removed it from the remotely hosted tool.

Which brings me to the idea of running your web analytics through a WordPress plugin. And doing it all locally.

It wasn’t long ago that this is the kind of thing I would immediately dismiss as a stupid idea. I though that the performance impact of making your web server do this would be too much. That it would slow down the site.

That is no longer the case.

A few months back, I started running AnalyticsWP on my own sites. Great tool. Zero performance impact. And I love the fact that all of my data – and the reports – are truly in my own possession. Even if I migrate the site to another host, all the stats go with it.

But, I found an even better tool.

Last week, on a tip from a subscriber, I looked again at a tool called Independent Analytics. I liked it so much…. I switched. In fact, I plan to ditch Fathom Analytics AND AnalyticsWP…. and solely run Independent Analytics.

This tool fills in the data holes that AnalyticsWP doesn’t track. It is a more robust tool. The data is all inside of WordPress. It integrates much deeper into WordPress itself – making it much more useful.

As for performance, it is a little beefier than AnalyticsWP because it tracks more. But, it still uses a locally hosted 12KB script. It loads asynchronously and records data via the REST API. Put simply… the impact on performance is pretty much nothing.

In the end, I think this may be the last analytics tool that I ever need.

Not only that, I think this will become my “go to” tool for Concierge clients needing web analytics. I think I will phase out usage of Fathom Analytics. Independent Analytics will be much simpler, more usable – AND it also increases digital sovereignty for my clients as well. Because, if they ever move their site away from Concierge and to other hosting, all their stats go with them. And I know if I were my own client…. I’d want the same thing.

A full review on Independent Analytics is forthcoming.