No matter where you are in your business career, there are a few strategies that will benefit you in the long-run. Even if these tips do not show immediate gains and add some extra hours to your work week, you will be thankful you took these extra steps months or years from now. What are these strategies?

Start Using a CRM and be Meticulous about Email Contacts

A CRM or Customer Relationship Management System is an effective method of keeping track of all your business contacts and communications. Salesforce and Hubspot are the top performers in this space, and some offer free plans. 

A CRM can allow you to anticipate your pipeline by assigning values to contacts and deals if you are working in a sales position. However, if you are not, there is still a great value in being meticulous about these contacts.

Email marketing still outperforms most other sales tools. A robust, well-kept email database that evolves over a career can be invaluable to you. While you may not be in a position to capitalize on those emails or contacts at the current moment, a future career change or business venture can make those contacts viable as prospects.

No matter where you are in your career, start valuing and being meticulous about all your email contacts. Don't spam your contacts with any unnecessary information or emails. Respect your contacts and their email addresses. Be aware that in the future you may or may not need their emails for a future venture.

Install an SEO Plugin or Application on Your Blog and Always Use It

If you have a website or blog, it's easy to bang out blog posts and hit publish. A lot of newer bloggers do so then head to Google and wait for their posts to magically appear in the search rankings. This is a foolhardy approach. 

No matter what you publish on your site, you must use an SEO application to make sure that your posts are structured for Google. Apps like Yoast for WordPress take a lot of the engineering out of your strategy for you so you can focus on the content of your site and make improvements to your posts.

These apps are constantly evolving to meet Google's standards. Very few business owners have the time to monitor Google and edit their blogs or websites accordingly. Apps like Yoast do that for you. They will update their standards accordingly and notify you to begin editing your posts.

If you have been blogging regularly and have never installed an app like Yoast, it could take weeks to backtrack and edit all your posts with the SEO. While you may not see immediate gains with this method, you will be thankful that you used these features in the long-run. And yes, it is possible to see immediate gains in your Google rankings by utilizing this feature.

Keep Notes on What You Learn So That You May Teach Others In the Future

Online courses are growing in popularity and entrepreneurs are eagerly seeking experts to study. Anyone can create an online course and sell what they have learned for hundreds or even thousands of dollars.

If you're on Facebook and in business, you have likely seen ads from business owners claiming to have succeeded and quit their day jobs to launch highly-profitable ventures. These entrepreneurs translate their work into courses and sell them online in the form of webinars or actual courses.

If you keep notes on what you are learning along the way, this will save you time on having to develop such a course in the future. When your business becomes phenomenally successful and everyone is asking you how you got there, you can return to your notes and create your own online course!

Keep notes now so when you're the next big business success you can help others as well!