Author: Pamela Swift

Categories
Starting Up

Essential Things You Need To Do Once You Open A Business

Starting your own business, whether it’s one that you start from home, a small commercial office space or a retail store can be a dream come true. Rather than working to buy your boss a better vacation, you now get to build your own wealth and do things your own way. 

Your biggest challenge will be how to set up your business in the best possible way so that you can compete in your niche. Fortunately, you’re on a well-traveled road and there is a lot of information available about how to start and run a successful business.  

Let’s take a look at some of the basic things that all entrepreneurs need to do once they open up a business. 

Create an Online Presence 

If you have opened up a virtual business, then you have already done this. However, if you have opened up a brick-and-mortar business, then this is something you need to do as soon as you open your doors. Don’t just rely on walk-in traffic or the ad you placed in your local newspaper or in the Yellow Pages. You will also need an online presence to market your business.   

Here are 3 tips to develop an online presence: 

1. Get fast internet:  

You will need fast internet to build and maintain your online infrastructure. If you work with one that crawls and has customer service that hangs up on you, you’ll get frustrated. Work that should take five minutes of work could take up to a half hour to get done because most of the time will be spent waiting for pages to load.  

Don’t make the mistake of simply picking any internet provider that you may be familiar with because they advertise heavily in your area. Although many broadband internet providers can give you fast speed, you will definitely get your money’s worth if you do some research and find an i3 broadband provider who can deliver up to 1 Gb of speed. 

2. Use cloud computing: 

You don’t need to worry about buying a server and setting up a small network. Nor do you need to shop for software. A cloud service provider can help you meet your hardware and software needs without the cost of setting up your own computer network or hiring an IT professional. What’s more, you will have the same functionality as a large business in your niche. 

3. Build your website presence: 

First, build a website so customers can learn more about your business and even buy products or place service orders online.  

Next, create a blog so that you can regularly create content to establish your authority in your field.  

Finally, develop a social media presence so that you can build relationships with other business owners and your customers. 

Consistently Improve Your Product or Service 

Although you already have a product or service when you start your business, use the idea of Kaizen, a Japanese management philosophy of improvement. 

This common Japanese word itself simply means “good change.” However, it has been adopted by Japanese management philosophers to discuss a mindset that focuses on making continuous improvement. 

So, if you sell your own product, be on the lookout for ways to improve it. If you sell other people’s products, find ways to expand your product line or how you sell products. And if you provide services, think of tweaks you can make based on feedback that will help you deliver an even better service. 

Develop a Budget 

Whether you do your own finances or outsource all your bookkeeping and accounting, you need to create a budget so that you avoid cash flow problems by overspending. 

You will also need a budget for specific aspects of your business. For instance, you will need an advertising budget to consistently market and promote your business. While there are free ways to grow your business, these usually take a long time to work. You will get faster results by also paying for ways to get customers.

In closing, it’s important to remember that any business is fragile. Things fluctuate. Sometimes, you will be having magnificent sales; and at other times, you may worry about how to keep the doors open. You can’t simply set it up and have it run perfectly once you’ve figured out your main business processes. You have to stay on top of your goals and consistently solve all business problems that arise. 

Categories
Branding

Entrepreneur Priorities – Reputation Beats Money Every Time

There are five currencies and money is the least important of the five.

The other four currencies are; time, knowledge, reputation and contacts.

Employees’ Priorities

Employees exchange their time for money. The employer pays the employee $20 per hour, and in that hour the employee earns $50 for the company. Everyone’s happy.

Entrepreneurs’ Priorities

Entrepreneurs don’t sell their time for cash. Time is much too valuable to be sold for a depreciating currency. Entrepreneurs spend their time learning and building their reputations.

Reputation is the precursor to acquiring contacts and earning money. A client earned through a good reputation could be worth millions over the next five years. You could never buy connections like that.

The 5 Currencies Explained

Time is limited. There are 24 hours in a day, and that’s it. You can’t put time into a savings account, but you can exchange it for knowledge.

Sometimes you can sell your knowledge directly, but it is more common to use what you know to grow your reputation.

As you share your knowledge and use it to help others, your reputation grows, and people start to take notice of you – Your contact list grows.

Some contacts will buy your products and increase your bank balance.

Reputation is the crucial step.

Growing Your Reputation

In 2018, you can’t make anyone buy your services. The days of push-marketing are over, and if you even try it, you come across as a snake-oil salesman.

Social Media Marketing

Social media alone will grow your rep as much as buying new socks.

You need to use your knowledge to help people in a visible format, and social media channels can be used to amplify what you are doing. However, people use Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook to be sociable and they are not tuned into business mode, and only a few will click to visit your website and learn more.

Website Marketing

Your website is your crucial marketing channel. It’s where people find out about you and what you can do for them. Only on your site can interested visitors sign up to receive email. You own your site, whereas you can never own a Facebook page. Your domain name and website are the basis of your online credibility and reputation.

You can share your knowledge in blog posts to establish your credentials. Share everything you know. You will be the person who is seen as the expert, and even if someone reads your blog from end to end, you will still know more than they do.

How to Set Up Your First Website

There are three steps to getting your site live:

  1. Choose a URL/web address
  2. Choose your web hosting company and package
  3. Install and set up WordPress

When you have a few pages up is the time to think about social media and other promotional strategies.

1.       Choosing Your Web Address

Your web address must be easy to remember. Aim for two words run together or a unique word you can use in your branding like Lyft or Viber.

Many sites let you search for available names and then sell your search data on to domain speculators so they can buy the address you are interested in an attempt to sell it to you at an inflated price.

When you are buying a domain name, you should only search for available names on a site that guarantees they will not sell on your search details.

Screenshot source

The screenshot above is from LCN, a UK company that offers free privacy protection (You have to pay for your domain each year). If you pay for your web address for ten years, you get ten years privacy protection as well as a discount on the domain name itself.

2.       Choose Your Web Hosting

Basic shared hosting will suffice initially, but choose a reputable hosting company and avoid the big names because they have poor customer satisfaction ratings. Look at InMotion or Siteground shared hosting plans for a reliable hosting package. Check out these Suitcase Entrepreneur tips on web hosting.

3.       Install WordPress

Almost every host has a one-click install facility that lets you install WordPress on your domain name in a few seconds. Read this guide on setting up WordPress from Neil Patel.

The Short Version

You are no longer an employee, and you have new priorities. Your reputation in the years ahead is more important than cash in your pocket today.

You **need** a website to establish your entrepreneurial credibility and then to grow your reputation among your future clients.

You can use social channels to reach more people, but the value there is in having a website to direct those interested parties to.

Categories
Entrepreneurship

The Gender Pay Gap Is Narrowing Among Freelancers And The Self-Employed

 

New research by an online services marketplace has found that the gender pay gap is virtually non-existent among self employed and freelance workers in the UK. The research found that women bidding for freelance and self-employed opportunities and jobs in sectors such as tutoring, photography and personal training earned virtually the same as men and in some cases more throughout the site.

The study, commissioned by Bidvine.com, an online local services marketplace where users can post jobs and ask local service professionals to bid for the work found that within their top five industry categories there was little to no gender pay gap between average rates of pay over the last 12 months. The study polled 150 men and 150 women from each of the top five sectors on the website, asking participants to provide their average hourly wages over the last 12 months, the results are below:

  • Personal training (Male – £36 per hour / Female – £33 per hour)
  • Wedding photography (Male – £650 per wedding / Female – £680 per wedding)
  • Cleaners (Male – £11 per hour / Female – £12 per hour)
  • Plumbers (Male – £73 per hour / Female – £70 per hour)
  • Music teachers (Male – £28 per hour / Female – £28 per hour)
  • Gardeners (Male – £21 per hour / Female – £19 per hour)
  • Language teachers (Male – £25 per hour / Female – £28 per hour)
  • Electricians (Male – £70 per hour / Female – £68 per hour)
  • Singing teachers (Male – £30 per hour / Female – £35 per hour)

Although the results of the Bidvine study show that the gender pay gap is narrowing among the self employed and freelance workers, the latest figures from the Office for National Statistics puts the average gender pay gap at 14.1% across all sectors and age groups, a figure which has stayed the same since 2014. Co-founder of Bidvine.com Russ Morgan talked about the research saying:

“It’s great to see that, at least among the skilled professionals on our site, the gender pay gap is virtually extinct. The explosion of freelance and self-employed workers has seen a shift in how people value the work they do, and what their customers see as value for money for a job well-done.

Because Bidvine connects customers with professionals that can meet their exact needs, perhaps gender has become less of an issue.

We’re looking forward to the next 12 months, and hopefully, a significant change to the ONS figures this time next year.”

Categories
Finance & Capital

What Role Do Financial Institutions Play In The Economy?

Building and sign bank (done in 3d)

Financial institutions are critical organizations that have an important role to play in the economy. Such institutions include commercial banks, savings and credit societies as well as investment institutions and together they help individuals, businesses and other organizations use their finances properly. Before such institutions came to the scene, individuals and business didn’t have a secure place to store their excess cash and this caused a lot of chaos. There were no licensed lenders at that time as well and this resulted in a lot of exploitation. Financial institutions, therefore, brought a lot of order in the financial sector and this article takes a look at some of the roles such institutions play in the economy.

1. Holding cash deposits.

Individuals and businesses with more cash than they need at a given time can use financial institutions like banks to store the extra cash. Commercial banks provide individuals and businesses with a safe platform to store their cash and other valuables and this has gone a long way to reduce the instances of insecurity. Walking around with a lot of cash or having it stored in a drawer in the office makes individuals and businesses a target for burglars and by offering them a safe storage solution, financial institutions have enhanced the safety and security of people, organizations and their money. The institutions have easy cash withdrawal mechanisms and this allows the individuals and the organizations to access their cash reserves when they need them.

2. The provision of credit facilities.

Sometimes, individuals and business enterprises may not have all the resources they need to start new ventures or to finance business expansion. This, however, is not a challenge anymore since there are financial institutions that offer cash advances to their members. All you need to do access such facilities to prove that you can pay the advance back and the institutions will offer you as much cash as you need. Loans have helped launched multi-million dollar businesses and this speaks to the power of credit facilities. If you are looking to secure a loan for your personal or business needs, you’d be wise to shop around so as to find the agencies with the best rates. Click here to find out more about what you need to find the best loan company for your cash advance needs.

3. Offering investment advice.

Most financial institutions have an active investment desk for advising their members on the best ways invest their cash. Investment is one of the best ways of ensuring the financial future for both individuals and businesses but without the right information, people and businesses may lose all their cash by picking un-bankable investment options. Financial institutions are aware of the best investment options for businesses and individuals and they would gladly share this information should you visit their investment desk.

Conclusion.

Financial institutions play an important role to play in improving the lives of individuals and business entities and above are some of the ways they go about doing that.

Categories
Sales & Marketing

Marketing with Facebook and Google Adwords Custom Audiences

Article Contributed by Gerardo Hyde

Online marketing in today’s world can take some serious time, effort, and money too. Engaging in online marketing is often a multifaceted approach, with the aim to target as many people as possible with advertisements for goods and services. However, such broad approaches to online marketing do often have their drawbacks, with a huge costs and low click rates being some of the biggest ones. Broad marketing campaigns usually do not do a great job at targeting specific custom audiences with the highest chance of being interested in what is being advertised. However, if you really want to create brand awareness, sell a service, or move a product, targeting custom audiences is exactly what you need to do. This is especially true when it comes to being efficient with your marketing dollars. Today we are here to talk about marketing with Facebook Ads and Google Adwords in relation to custom audiences.

Facebook Ads Custom Audiences

Facebook “target audiences” is a pretty neat tool to use when it comes to advertising your goods and services on Facebook. To be clear, Facebook custom audiences do not consist of new customers which you do not have yet. This is not like marketing to a whole group of people which you have never seen or met. These custom audiences are audiences which you can create from a list of already existing customers or followers of your Facebook page, your website, contacts, and your products being sold on Facebook. The real aim of these custom audiences is for you to be able to market specific goods or services to specific groups of people which already follow your page, brand, or who have already bought things from you previously.

Using Facebook Ads in combination with custom audiences is definitely a great way to engage in online social media marketing. Heck, there are over 1.5 billion regular users of Facebook, so it only makes sense to market your products on this huge social media platform. However, like we said before, a broad marketing campaign is not that ideal because your advertisements might inadvertently target people who have zero interest in you or your products. It ends up being a monumental waste of money, paying for ads which most of the broad audience won’t even look at. This is where custom audiences come into play. All you need to do is use the Facebook Ads manager to create a custom audience list from your pre-existing contacts.

There are actually different kinds of custom audiences that you can target with your advertisements. These custom audiences include the following.

  • You can create a customer list or standard custom audiences where you upload customer emails, phone numbers, and Facebook user IDs.
  • You can create website custom audiences where you target Facebook users who visited a specific page on your website.
  • You can create custom audiences based on people who have used a specific app or service of yours.

What is really neat is that you can then create lookalike audiences, which is a type of audience that Facebook will create for you. This type of audience will include people with similar ages, styles, gender, interests, and so on as the people who are already in specific custom audiences of yours. In other words, these broader custom audiences are people who are not yet your customers, but have similar characteristics to already existing ones, thus increasing the chances of them buying your goods or services. Facebook will find these people based on your already existing custom audiences and their similarities to those people.

This is a really effective and efficient way to market your products and services to people. What is also pretty neat is that you can then use an automated marketing and customer retention tools to send emails, newsletters, and other such things to people in your Facebook custom audience. It’s a really good customer retention tool to use in combination with Facebook custom audiences.

Google Adwords Customer Match

Now, to be perfectly clear, this so called Google Adwords “customer match” is more or less the same feature as Facebook custom audiences, but with a different name and location. Customer match is designed to help you reach and target your highest valued customers on platforms like Google Search, YouTube, Gmail, and other online entities that are a part of or related to Google. It is very similar to custom audiences in the sense that you upload a list of customer data, whether from a website, YouTube channel, and eCommerce site, or other such things, which will then be your customer match list, AKA your custom audience.

In fact, Google’s customer match was a response to Facebook’s custom audiences. Google saw how good this going for Facebook and decided to create a so called custom audience feature of its own, and simply renamed in customer match. You create your custom audience or customer match audience, as Google calls it, which will then be the targets for your advertisements. Once again, online advertising, whether on YouTube, Gmail, Google Search, and other such things, is very expensive, so being able to target pre-existing customers is a big deal. Customers who bought something from you the first time around are way more likely to buy goods or services from you the second time, much more so than people who have never bought a good or service from you.

Whether people are searching, looking at displayed search results, on YouTube, or in their email, when people look up or are known to have an interest in a certain product of yours, your advertisements will be displayed or sent to them thanks to this customer match application.

Google Customer Match vs Facebook Custom Audience

Google does have an advantage over Facebook here because the combined services of Search, Display, YouTube, and Gmail together have a far higher amount of users than Facebook. Therefore, using Google customer match allows you to reach a far higher amount of people than Facebook allows for. This is even truer when you consider that Google also has something called “similar audiences”, which is just like Facebook’s lookalike audiences.

Google’s similar audiences feature has the ability to larger lists of people than Facebook, but there is also a drawback. Facebook is much more in tune with the age, gender, likes, dislikes, and other characteristics of the people on your list, as well as potential people for the lookalike lists. In other words, Facebook does a much better job here at creating lookalike custom audience lists where the people have a lot in common with each other, thus increasing the chances of people being interested in your advertisement.

Google’s similar audiences may be able to put together huge lists, but they lack a large and concise pool of customer data in terms of their defining characteristics and likes. Therefore, Google’s “similar lists” may not actually be all that similar to the Google customer match lists which you have created.

Below is a great illustration which captures the intricacies and everything you must consider when choosing between Facebook’s custom audiences and Google’s customer match.

Conclusion

The bottom line is that both Google and Facebook have developed great ways for you to target specific audiences based on pre-existing customer lists and contact details you have. Both customer match and custom audiences are great tools you can use to narrow the scope of a specific marketing campaign or even for a single advertisement. These tools can help you target already existing customers or visitors with the highest chances of being interested in what you are offering. The big takeaway here is that both are good ways to engage in online marketing with existing platforms while allowing you to save a whole lot of money.

Author’s Bio: Gerardo Hyde is a marketer and writer with 8 more years of experience in analytics customer marketing and SEO. His passion for powerful technologies is what always keeps his writing up-to-date. He currently works for StackTome, an advanced customer retention tool.