Sunday, April 28, 2024

4 Cornerstones You Must Have For Your Small Business

To succeed in your new small business, having a great product or service is essential. Also, even if it’s a brick-and-mortar business, you must have a website presence. Some of the crucial cornerstones you will need when you launch your business will be securing sufficient business funding, getting enough traffic to your website, building a great computer infrastructure, and taking charge of your productivity with high-quality software.

Small Business

Here is a quick look at why these four essential features make such a big difference:

  1. Funding your business.

Starting a new business on a shoestring budget is not always necessary or desirable. The more capital you have available when you launch your business, the easier it will be to get everything you need to build a solid foundation for your company. However, it is not easy to get a bank loan, particularly if this is your first new business or an untested business idea. It is much easier to look for alternative lenders regarding small business loans. With the right lender, you can secure all the money you need upfront, get easy one- to five-year terms, and only have to deal with fixed monthly payments.

  1. Driving traffic to your website. 

You should use free and paid methods when getting people to visit your website. Free methods, like search engine optimization (SEO), will take some time to work, but once they do, the traffic will begin to flow automatically. Like Google Pay, Per Click (PPC) advertising, Paid methods will get you to traffic within an hour or a day, but as soon as you stop advertising, the traffic will dry up as fast. So, a simple, effective strategy is to use paid traffic to get some immediate traffic and, simultaneously, master the art of researching and applying the best keywords for your content so that your website will get ranked higher in the major search engines.

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  1. Building your computer infrastructure.

In the past, your small business would have to build a small computer network consisting of a server connecting to your desktop or laptop computers. This could be expensive if you needed a rather sophisticated network. However, now you have another choice—rent the services of a cloud provider and use remote servers to access your software and store all your data. There are many advantages to using cloud computing. Here, for example, are three good reasons why you might want to consider this option:

  • Business continuity. Your business data is safely stored on a remote computer. You are not vulnerable to natural disasters, like a fire, flood, or hurricane, from destroying your server.
  • Flexibility. You can increase or decrease your computer resources depending on how busy or slow your business might be.
  • Accessibility. You can access your data from any device and anywhere in the world with Internet access.
  1. Increasing your productivity with high-quality software. 

The better your choice of software, the more productive your business will be. Besides getting a hosting account for your website and blog and antivirus software, you will need an office suite for the day-to-day organization, accounting software to keep on top of your finances, and collaboration software to help you coordinate projects with your in-house team or your work with outsourcers. You may also need special software for your particular line of work. For instance, if you are a website designer, you will need Photoshop or an equivalent.

While you can buy your software from a box and install it, this expensive software will be creeping towards obsolescence after a few years. A smarter decision is to use SaaS, or Software as a Service, which means paying an affordable monthly or annual fee to access your software from the cloud. This way, you will always get the latest version and not worry about installation, maintenance, and repair issues.

Starting your own small business is always an exciting idea. If this is your first business venture, you’ll find it a huge lifestyle shift from being a college student or an employee. Instead of simply following directions, you must create everything from scratch. This will be easy to do if you have enough funding, get a steady traffic flow to your website, and have a robust hardware and software solution to run your business like a boss.

William M. Alberts
William M. Alberts
Unable to type with boxing gloves on. Professional beer scholar. Problem solver. Extreme pop culture fan. Fixie owner, shiba-inu lover, band member, International Swiss style practitioner and holistic designer. Acting at the intersection of design and mathematics to save the world from bad design. I'm a designer and this is my work.

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