apna.live
Getting online is a project. Staying useful online is a habit, and it is a much smaller one than people expect.
Here is the whole monthly job. Thirty minutes, first of the month, same time every month.
1. Reply to every review (10 minutes)
The most important item, which is why it is first.
Open your Google Business Profile and reply to every review since last month. Good ones and bad ones.
Two lines each. Use their name. Mention what they came for.
If there is a bad one: apologise once, do not argue, give a phone number, move it offline.
2. Check your review count (2 minutes)
Write down the number. Compare it to last month.
If it has not moved, that is the finding. Reviews do not arrive by themselves — somebody has to ask. Fix the asking, not the number.
Target: at least eight to ten new reviews a month for a business seeing decent footfall. If you are at one or two, the QR is missing, or nobody is saying the sentence.
3. Add three photographs (5 minutes)
Three real photographs from the last month's work. Upload to your Google listing and your website.
Take them as the month goes along, on your phone, so this is choosing rather than hunting.
A profile that gains photographs every month outperforms one that was filled once.
4. Set next month's hours (3 minutes)
Look at the calendar for the coming month. Any festivals? Any days you will be closed? Any extended hours?
Set special hours on your Google profile for each one, in advance.
This is the item people skip, and it is the one that costs the most when it goes wrong.
5. Publish one post (3 minutes)
One Google post. A photograph of last month's work, an answer to a question customers keep asking, an offer with real dates, or something practical about the coming month.
Two sentences and a picture.
6. Check your own website on your phone (5 minutes)
Not on a laptop. On your phone, on mobile data, in a private tab.
- Does it load in under three seconds?
- Is a Call button visible without scrolling?
- Does tapping your number open the dialler?
- Does the WhatsApp button work?
- Are the prices still correct?
- Is anything listed that you no longer offer?
- Fill in your own contact form and check it arrives. A silently broken form is one of the most expensive faults there is.
7. Check your details still match (2 minutes)
Name, address, phone — the same on your website, your Google listing, your Instagram bio and your board?
If anything changed this month, work the list of every place you are listed.
Twice a year, add these
Search for yourself. Your business name plus your area, in a private tab. Look for duplicate listings, old listings at previous addresses, and directory entries with wrong details.
Check your domain renewal. Is auto-renew on? Is the card still valid? Is it in your name?
Read your own website as a stranger. All of it. You will find something that has quietly become untrue.
Check your primary Google category. Has what you mainly do shifted since you set it?
Once a year
Refresh your photographs. If your gallery is two years old, the shop in it is not the shop you have.
Review your prices on the site against what you actually charge.
Update your About page. New staff, new equipment, new years-in-business number.
Set the whole year's festival hours in one sitting.
Why this works
None of this is clever. It is the same handful of things, done every month, forever.
The advantage comes from the fact that almost nobody does it. Most listings are filled once and abandoned. A business that adds photographs, replies to reviews, sets its hours and publishes a post every single month is, within a year, visibly more alive than every competitor around it — and both customers and Google can tell.
Thirty minutes a month. Put it in the calendar for the first of the month, and treat it like a bill that has to be paid.
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