5 Tips for Generating Momentum As a New Home-Based Entrepreneur

Home-based digital entrepreneurship has been growing in popularity for a number of years now. It allows individuals from different backgrounds to begin exploring the world of entrepreneurship in a direct and approachable manner.

With the global pandemic having forced many people into a prolonged work-from-home situation, the trend in the growth of home-based entrepreneurship has only accelerated. More and more people start looking for ways to enjoy a greater degree of professional autonomy, while adjusting their professional ambitions to face the forever changing terrain of the professional landscape.

For a home-based entrepreneur, there are a number of different things to get right, and challenges to overcome. Effective marketing, for example, will require commitment to developing communication skills. Efficiently managing a successful startup business will call for learning how to maintain a mindful of a budget.

Ultimately, one of the major areas where home-based entrepreneurs can end up stumbling is within the first few days, in regards to what could be called “professional momentum.”

If you have recently started up a home-based business and are sensing a lack of direction, having difficulty identifying the best ways to take effective action, and feeling disorganization. Then you are coming across some significant stumbling blocks.

Here are a few tips for generating momentum as a home-based entrepreneur, so that you can begin making headway and developing your business and your professional acumen without delay.

Establish a daily routine that mirrors working in an office

One of the reasons why many people are initially driven to becoming home-based entrepreneurs in the first place, is because of the the relative freedom that this kind of professional path can offer.  It provides opportunities such as setting your own schedule, working in a range of different locations, and exercising your personal autonomy in a number of different ways.

Partly for this reason, it’s not uncommon for new entrepreneurs in this category to make the mistake of having generally haphazard or disorganized routines. Often the lines that separate personal from professional life become blurred.

If you work at irregular times each day, stay in your pajamas until noon, and try to work on a complicated professional project from the sofa, it is highly likely that you will find yourself struggling to maintain focus and motivation.

When it comes to generating a good level of professional momentum, one important step to take is to establish a daily routine that essentially mirrors what you would do if you were going to work in an office.

Among other things, this means that you should start work at the same time each day, get dressed in a professional manner for work even if you aren’t leaving the house. You should work from a home office space or at least a tidy and well-organized desk. These things will ensure that you can “get into the zone” as quickly as possible each day.

Always look for ways to establish personal connection and rapport with your prospective customers

Many businesses utilize private office spaces particularly for occasions such as interviewing and recruiting candidates, or having important business meetings with contractors or prospective contacts. This kind of face-to-face interaction in a professional environment helps facilitate effective communication and rapport.

The same general principle should be applied to your marketing efforts as well. The degree to which you can communicate effectively and establish a personal connection with customers, will have a direct link to whether or not you can get them on board to try out your products or services.

A big part of professional momentum comes down to communicating frequently with your prospective customers, and looking for ways to refine and improve those communications on a regular basis.

In particular, you should be mindful of some of the innate differences between effective web-based communication and communication through more traditional channels.

For example, people online tend to have significantly shorter attention spans, and respond more to concise, catchy, and visual content.

Set yourself weekly targets 

Having certain professional targets in place to keep you focused and driven to continue moving forward, day by day, can be extremely important for home-based entrepreneurs. A lack of direction or clarity of purpose can often end up side-tracking new businesses.

Start by assigning yourself weekly targets for things like the number of marketing emails you send out, particular website updates you have to do, and so on.

Particularly in the early days, setting goals on a much longer timeline may be inefficient. There will often be too many variables to effectively account for. Resulting in your attention, energy, and professional resources being stretched quite thin.

Nonetheless, weekly targets tend to be a very good sweet spot for keeping yourself focused and on point when it comes to developing momentum with your start-up. Setting goals and making a check list will keep you feeling motivated and engaged.

Look for external methods of adding extra accountability to your workday routine

Professional accountability is one thing that often ends up becoming a significant issue for new entrepreneurs. This is even problem for individuals in more traditional job roles who are just working remotely.

When you are largely responsible for managing your own routine and workflow, it can be helpful having individuals and systems that help keep you accountable. This can help boost your motivation and to ensure that you develop and maintain momentum.

For this reason, you should look for external methods of adding extra accountability to your professional routine. Some methods include things like the “accountability contracts” service StickK, or whether it involves joining an entrepreneurial accountability group, and number of other things.

Where inspiration fails, rely on daily habits that facilitate incremental advancement and improvement

It goes without saying that you won’t always be motivated to keep things moving forward when building up your own business. No matter how invested you are in the success of your business, we all have off days, and in many cases it can be difficult to even know which course of action to take when you are feeling relatively burned out.

When inspiration fails, you should be able to rely on daily habits that you have established, that facilitate incremental advancement and improvement in your professional life.

Utilizing a habit tracker or the "Kaizen" method are some ways to help maintain momentum and continuous improvement.

If you have a daily habit of sending out marketing emails, for example, then remaining consistent with that habit will help you to maintain momentum. Even when you feel unclear about how else you should proceed, or organize things, in a bigger picture sense.

Importantly, simply remaining consistent with these small aspects of professional productivity can help to keep things moving for your business at large, and can help to restore your sense of motivation and direction.