Business

Owning and operating a local business, or any business for that matter, is not an easy thing. But especially for small local businesses, it can be hard for you to get people to take you as seriously as your big competitors. But luckily, there are some things you can do to legitimize your business in the eyes of your customers and clients.

To help you see how this can be done, here are three ways to get your local business taken seriously.

Understand How You And Your Business Appear

One of the best ways to get your business taken seriously is to look like a business that takes itself seriously. To do this, you might have to work on your image.

According to the editor of HomeBusinessMag.com, you’ll want to be sure that whenever you’re functioning in a business role, you look clean, well dressed, and like a good representation of your business. But your image doesn’t stop with just how you look. You also will need to look professional in the car you drive, which can be done by branding your vehicle with your company name and ensuring that it’s a vehicle you’d be proud to drive when out on business.

Make Yourself Knowledgeable About All Aspects Of Your Industry

Part of what can help you be on a more even playing field with the older or bigger companies in your industry is to become just as knowledgeable, if not more knowledgeable, about the industry that you work in.

Especially if you have specific things that you’ll be offering to your customers or clients personally, Nellie Akalp, a contributor to Score.org, advises that you really study up before meeting with your customers or clients. Then, they’ll be able to see that you have the personal touch of a small, local business with the expertise of a bigger institution.

Spend More Time Online

For most consumers, a lot of their decision-making process takes place online. Knowing this, you’ve got to work on your online presence if you want to be taken seriously.

According to Susan Ward, a contributor to The Balance Small Business, having a beautiful and well-working business website is the first step in this process. Along with this, you also want to be active on social media platforms and keep an eye on the reviews you get on various websites or directories, as all of these things can have a big impact on how customers perceive you even before they have their own interactions with you.

If you’re ready to have your small, local business be taken more seriously by customers, clients, and other businesses, consider using the tips mentioned above to help you solidify yourself in the professional space.

 

Whether you’re seriously contemplating resigning from your current job or looking for ways to earn extra income, you enjoy a higher level of freedom and flexibility as a professional when you opt for self-employment than if you were working for a company.

One major advantage that comes with being self-employed is that you can create and grow your own opportunities. Sounds like an enticing prospect? Let’s look at the top five online jobs you can explore when you take the leap from 9-5 to self-employment.

1. Life Coach or Mentor

You are your own boss as a life coach. You can provide people with practical business coaching in your area of specialisation.

You may also choose to mentor professionals and organisations on how to maximise available resources best to create outstanding values that can help get them ahead in their market or niche industries.

But it’s important you have achieved considerable success in your field before being a guide and mentor to other people. Your records of achievement will attract young professionals. Work teams and organisations seek you out for business or professional training.

2. Blogging

Gone are the days when blogs are basically about telling your life stories to random people on the web. Now, you can make a good living quitting your day job to become a full-time blogger. You just have to find and concentrate on a niche that comes naturally to you and you find fun writing on – from food to parenting, home decor to technology, sports to music etc.

Once your target audiences are able to connect with your blog content and general style and gain wide traffic, you’re likely to start earning lots of money as a blogger from targeted advertisements.

3. Freelancing

As a freelancer, you can select jobs that suit your skills and schedules best. This means you pick only those jobs that interest you and you’re comfortable with. If you’re a great writer or graphic artist, for example, you can just register or log in to a freelancing site and find jobs that match your skills online. It is important that you first get all the basics on how to start working freelance.

However, note that building a great profile and trust with clients don’t come overnight. You need to work hard at consistently delivering quality jobs and on time too. You may even need to start with low hourly rates and scale up gradually as you expand your profile and gain wider experience and clientele.

4. Digital Marketing

If you’ve got a background in digital marketing, then you should seriously consider venturing into Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) when you decide to go solo.

Businesses are constantly in need of SEO experts to help them increase web presence in today’s digitally driven world. The Bureau of Labor Statistics pegs the average pay for a digital marketer at $132,000 per annum.

In addition to helping businesses set up and implement effective SEO strategies, as an SEO specialist, you can also help them market their business on social media (social media marketing).

5. Online Surveys and Product Research

Online surveys and product research is one of the easiest ways to make money fast today. While payments by survey companies and sites vary, the fact is you earn money by simply answering a few questions, surfing the web or some other requested online activities.

You can find and complete different surveys all through the day from your computer, phone or other connected digital mobile device and get rewarded for sharing your opinions.

Conclusion

There are several ways you can be self-employed. The chance to earn from the web could just be what you need to work for yourself.

Whether you want to devote just a part of your weekdays or weekends to it as a side gig to earn extra savings or you want to become a fully engaged, work-from-home professional, you’ll find that online jobs give you that level of freedom and flexibility that traditional workers cannot experience.

Every small business owner or entrepreneur knows how vital it is to spend their money wisely. Especially when it’s such a fine line between having enough money to keep everything moving and running into the red, knowing how to prioritize your money is key. So when you know that you need to devote some money to marketing but you don’t have much to go around, prioritization is going to be your lifeline.

To help you in figuring all of this out for your organization, here are three tips for prioritizing your marketing budget when funds are limited.

Work From Your Goals

When trying to prioritize how to spend your money on marketing, the best way to get your head around things and figure out where your money will have the biggest impact for you is to really nail down what your goals are for your marketing in general.

According to Brian Morris, a contributor to Business2Community.com, businesses like law firms might want to attract new clients. For other businesses, getting repeat business or making more sales could be the goal of their marketing. But until you’re able to clearly understand and define what you want your marketing efforts to achieve, you can’t hope to be able to prioritize where you’re putting your money in order to most effectively reach your goals.

Learn How To Best Run Campaigns

Just throwing your money into the category of marketing won’t do you a lot of good, especially if you don’t have a lot of money to go around. In this situation, you’ll want to be very strategic about where you’re putting your money and what’s going to give you the best return on your investment.

To help you with this, Keith Bendes, a contributor to Forbes Communications Council, advises that you allocate your marketing money to whatever is going to give you the biggest impact. Usually, this will mean putting your money only into one channel for any given campaign. So whatever area or platform you think will most resonate with your target audience for that specific campaign is where you should be putting your funds.

Invest Time Rather Than Money

When money is low, there are still ways that you can get your marketing going by investing your time rather than your dollars.

One great way to do this, according to Helen Pollit, a contributor to Search Engine Journal, is to get creative with your online marketing. While you may know the best practices for things like SEO, nitpicking all the little technicalities may not be the best use of your time. Instead, do what you can to set yourself apart from your competitors and make a splash with your audience.

If your marketing budget is small, consider using the tips mentioned above to learn how to prioritize your efforts and investment.

Reviews are a critical assessment of works or businesses. They are essential for the success of every business as it doesn’t only give the business credibility, but also go a long way to influence the consumers decisions about the company. The active collection of reviews from consumers will also go a long way in making your satisfied consumers turn to your brand ambassadors without you even trying. US Reviews, for instance, deal with not just reviews but also experiences, opinions, and ratings both from the consumers and also for the consumers. They focus on companies that offer different services ranging from repairs, technical, communications, and so on. The following are the benefits you stand to gain through the collection of reviews from consumers:

• Reviews Influence Potential Consumers’ Decision

Active collection of reviews go a long way in influencing potential consumers decision to buy things or engage your services. Review collection is a perfect marketing strategy. It is an ideal strategy because it is a way for you to get more customers without intentionally going out to look for them yourself.

• Credibility

The collection of consumers reviews will also help you to save face and, in turn, make you credible enough to increase sales.

• Feedbacks Keep You on the Alert

Consumers feedback will not only build trust, and for a good relationship, they will also help to keep you on your toes. Being alert means that after you must have actively collected reviews from consumers, you tend to be on alert and try to take steps on working on the areas that you are still lagging.

• Boosts Trust in Your Services

When potential consumers read the reviews written about your products from other consumers, they tend to trust your services as much as they trust personal recommendations from their friends.

• Fosters Producer-Consumer Interaction

Your active collection of reviews from consumers will go a long way to help you move closer with your consumers enough to understand their needs and provide adequately.

• Helps you Measure Consumer Satisfaction

Through consumers reviews, you will have the opportunity to measure the satisfaction rate of your consumers. Measuring the satisfaction rate will, in turn, help you in knowing the methods to keep using and those you need to change for the realization of optimal satisfaction. Another benefit this will bring is the increase in sales as a happy customer will keep patronizing you.

• They Serve as a Source for Information to Other Consumers

Through reviews, consumers come to realize that they are not alone in the journey of this purchase. They each read about other people’s thoughts on a particular service you render. It may, in turn, boost the level of trust they will have in your products or services.

Conclusion

It is a good thing that you now understand the importance of the active collection of reviews from consumers. However, it is equally crucial that you know the benefits attached to making the most of the feedback gathered from the consumers.

When it comes to spending, it is vital to keep track of what you spend both as an individual and as an organization. Tracking your spending as an individual might be easier since you are majorly responsible for most of the spending. However, when it comes to organizational spending, it might be a bit more difficult. Different people are heading different departments who have to make expenses for their department. Even in the case of small businesses, your one or two other staff might sometimes have to run expenses when you are not around. Keeping tab of them could be very difficult and disastrous. Here are some of the best ways to keep track of your business spending.

Expenses could be submitted ahead of time
It is often best to have a system where every department submits the expenses they hope to make in advance for approval before they are implementing it. This is why budgeting is very important even at national levels. Towards the end of every month or year, every department should submit expected expenses for the next month or year. This would be properly vetted by the accounts department and subsequently forwarded to the MD or CEO, who would finally approve the amount that was approved to be disbursed to the different departments.

All records of expenses should be kept
There can sometimes be changes in the spending of the department. They could sometimes not end up buying some particular products or they could buy at a lower or higher price. Based on this, it is still important for every department to properly fill out every single expense they make. Once this is done, it would be possible to reconcile how much was approved for the department and how much was spent. If there are excesses, it would be expected that the excesses be returned to the organization.

Emphasize on receipts
Encourage the collection of receipts for every single expense made where possible. Every expense listed should be followed by a receipt number and photocopies of the receipts added when the reports are being submitted, with the option that the original could be requested where necessary. This would help to ensure that figures are not inflated. You could occasionally visit the stores or call numbers on the receipts to confirm the purchase and the cost of the products.

Being mindful of what you want to buy
If you run a small business, it is important to always be mindful of what you want to buy. Do not go into impulse buying as you might end up buying a lot of things that your organization does not need. The implication is that when there are actual needs, it might be difficult meeting up with them.

Balancing quality and price
When buying items as an organization, you do not always have to go for premium-priced items except your organization can comfortably afford it and your clientele is dependent on such types of item. Otherwise, you should concentrate more on balancing quality and price when you are buying items. High prices do not often automatically mean higher quality. Sometimes, it might just be a matter of the brand name.

Using apps to keep tracks of purchases
You could introduce the use of apps such as Pleo to further help with keeping track of your business spending. The apps go a long way to help you create a soft copy that could be backed up and retrieved more easily even years later.

 

If you are a business owner or you are thinking about launching a business, there is no doubt that you have realized that having a presence online is important. Having an online business may sound easier than one that exists in a physical location, but it takes just as much work to keep up. If you want to succeed in your online business, you need to stay organized, provide excellent customer service, and communicate with customers and clients successfully.

There are many software programs and websites available to business owners of all types. Whether you run a large or a small online business, this software can be extremely beneficial to your business strategy and operations. If you run an online business and want to ensure your success, here are the three types of software that can help you get there.

Software To Your Assets and Departments

If you are a business owner, you know how important it is to keep everything organized, across all departments. There is software available that will allow you to track IT assets and manage IT tasks. An IT asset management software will allow you to close the gaps between your departments and keep track of all your assets in one place. This will give your team the clarity and ease to complete their jobs with precision and confidence.

You can also attach each asset to action, making task flow simple and easy for all team members. In an online business, IT is an all-important department, so it is critical that you manage your IT assets and keep everything running smoothly so that you can keep your business up and running and growing.

Software To Provide Great Customer Service

Many will say that customer service is one of the most important parts of a business. Providing high-quality customer service is a proven way to boost your company’s bottom line and ensure success and upward growth. Additionally, good customer service is one of the top ways to ensure your customers keep coming back to your online business and that they encourage their networks to patronize your business as well.

Word of mouth is highly beneficial. One way to make sure you’re making your customers’ lives easier is by investing in a high-quality customer service omnichannel software that will connect across assets to create a seamless customer service experience. You can even combine this software with an existing CRM such as Salesforce to create a truly unified portal for customer interaction. Salesforce call center software will make your customer service team’s lives easier as well as your customers, which is something everyone can be thankful for.

Software To Manage Communications

Do not underestimate the power of newsletters and email blasts. These types of communications, in conjunction with a nice quality CRM software, can be a key to success for your online business. Sending newsletters is cost-effective and could even be free if you are looking to send sparse or simple ones. They are great ways to publish your business’s successes, current promotions, and otherwise increase your brand awareness among clients and potential clients. You can provide updates on your business and potentially entice older customers to come back and patronize your business. Additionally, newsletters can be customized based on the audience they are being sent to, so you can reach niche groups more easily.

Keeping your brand’s name in someone’s inbox is a great way to increase the probability that you will make a sale or otherwise stay top of mind in someone’s head. All of this can increase business performance by boosting sales and reputation.