So, when we think about a CEO day or CEO time, we’re really talking about that time that you’re spending on your business and not in it. This is really going to be the time where you’re dedicated to thinking about your business as a whole thinking about what’s next for your business, and really trying to make decisions to push your business forward. This can be an hour every week, it can be a full day a few times a quarter. Let’s go over the three things that I feel like are some of the essential items you should be spending your time on when you have a CEO day. These are the things that you should be doing and the things that are going to move your business forward at the fastest rate.

Reviewing Your Goals

The first thing to spend your time on is reviewing goals that you have set, or setting goals if you haven’t set them. I encourage you to go back to last week’s episode, Episode 90, to dig into what that next level really is for your business. Because once you figure that out, then you’re able to start to set goals that will help you to reach that level in your business. When you start to think about your goals, you can start to plan around that. Now your goals could also be things like a monthly goal of how many pieces of content you want to produce, or maybe you have the goal to hire a new VA. These are a couple of examples of goals that you could set and it is important to review them regularly to see your progress and keep moving things forward.

I find that for a lot of people, myself included, it is difficult to review my goals often enough, to be able to even know or remember what they are or to know if I’ve done anything to move them forward. So having this anchor weekly or monthly to be able to review your goals is really going to help you to figure out if you are setting goals that are unachievable or just too unrealistic or if you’re setting goals that are too easy and you maybe need to step it up a level to help you to take your blog to the next level. So this is a great time to just see where you’re at with those goals and to be able to just make some adjustments, or maybe you’ll even find that to reach a goal you need to hire somebody else like a VA or a coach to help you with it. Whatever it is that you have for your goals, if you’ve been putting them off for a long time, maybe it’s time to rethink how you are trying to achieve that goal on your own.

Planning for Income

The second thing that you can spend time on during a CEO day is planning for income. So this could be a combination of reviewing any sponsored work that you already have on your calendar and just making sure that you know when those payments are coming in and when the deliverables are due. You can also review your expenses to make sure you know what payments are coming up and ensure that you have those payments set up or that you have a plan for how to pay them.

When it comes to the income for your blog, you really want to look at what is coming up in the next 30 to 60 days and identify whether there is an area where you need to increase your income somehow. Now if you rely 100% on ad revenue, this may be difficult and you may not really have options to increase your income. But at least you’re able to look at what ad payments are going to be coming up over the next 120 days and then you’re able to make your game plan from there. Another thing that I always like to loop into planning for income, is to pay any outstanding invoices that are due to external contractors during this time.

The third part of planning for income is that you can start to think about how you can bring money into your business. It may not be tomorrow or this month that you’re doing that, but maybe you decide that in six months you want to either launch a product, establish a brand partnership, or just be more proactive as opposed to being reactive.

Invest in Your Business in the Form of Education

The last thing that you can do on your CEO days,  is to spend time investing into your business by going through education. So, I can’t tell you how many times I have bought a course, done 20% of it and then never came back to it and I’m sure that you are not that different from me in that. So if you have courses that you have invested into through your business and you haven’t finished them, carve out 30 minutes to an hour during your CEO day to catch up on that content. The important thing is that this time is carved out every week or every month to work on that course, so you can make sure to have time to finish that course. You’re going to get through that much faster, and probably be more excited about coming back to it week after week than if you were to just not do it for months and months at a time, and then try to binge going through it all at once.

So speaking of education, and investing into your business, the third round of the Food Blogger Summit is open and I would love to invite you to join us for this virtual event. So this is the third round of this virtual event and in this round, I really wanted to focus on the intermediate to advanced blogger who is really struggling to take their business to that next level. I want for attendees to walk away from this event, really having an action plan on how to make that next level happen for their business. So we are covering all sorts of topics that are for that advanced blogger like marketing, monetization, SEO, food photography, and taking your blog from just being a blogger to really a CEO of your business. We have guest speakers lined up like Emily Perron, Megan Porta from EatBlogTalk, Andrew Wilder from Nerd Press, Cynthia Samanian from Hidden Rhythm and the Experiential Table Podcast, Pete McPherson from Do You Even Blog, and Jenny Melrose from the Influencer Entrepreneurs Podcast just to name a few. I cannot wait for you to hear each and every one of their presentations.

The summit is free to join and you will be able to access presentations for 24 hours after they go live. You can also upgrade to the All-Access Pass to get lifetime access to the presentations, as well as some other amazing bonus offers from our speakers and fun events that you can pop into. All presentations will run from October 25 to October 29, 2021, so you can sign up for your free ticket and to access the all access pass at the foodbloggersummit.com. It’s going to be a really fun time and I hope that you will join us and be a part of this amazing event. I promise you that you are going to walk away from this event with so many ideas and strategies as well as an action plan to implement and take your business to the next level and become the CEO of your business.