Contributed Post | Mike McRitchie | Resume and LinkedIn Profile Writer | Telecom Marketing Content Writer

3 Ways Small Businesses Waste Money On Digital Marketing

August 9, 2018 by Contributed Post Leave a Comment

Managing your money properly is essential in any business, especially when you’re just starting out. Finding ways to cut back on costs is important, but there are some areas where you’ll need to spend money if you’re ever going to get the business off the ground. Marketing is one of those areas, digital marketing in particular. It’s the best tool you have to generate sales and start making a profit. Most business owners know that and they’ll invest a lot of money into their online marketing campaigns. What they don’t often realise is that they’re wasting a lot of money because they aren’t getting it right. These are the most common ways that new businesses waste money in digital marketing.

Small business digital marketing

Building A Brand

There’s a lot of advice online about how important it is to build a brand. You want your company to be instantly recognisable and for customers to have a good impression of your business. But the problem is, people often get it backwards. They think that they have to put a lot of time and money into creating a popular brand and then the sales will follow. In reality, it’s sales that create a brand, not the other way around. Big companies that are instantly recognisable managed to get to that position because people loved their products and bought a lot of them. You can’t create a successful brand by telling people that you’re great, you need to prove it by selling them products they love. Small businesses often waste a lot of money here because they put all of their cash into creating branding materials and don’t focus on more direct marketing methods that will get them the sales they need. If you really want to create a strong brand, let your products speak for themselves and it’ll all fall into place.

Website Hosting

Having a good website hosting service is important, otherwise, your website will run slowly and nobody will want to use it. The problem is, there are a lot of bad ones out there and you can easily end up wasting money on one if you don’t pick right. One of the best is InMotion Hosting; Jerry from WHSR loves this host and he runs a site about web hosting so he knows what he’s talking about. Your site will run well and they’ve got great support with a live chat function so if you’ve got any problems, they’ll sort them out straight away. If you end up paying for a terrible hosting service, that’s just money down the drain.

Not Tracking Results

Tracking the results of your online marketing campaign is probably the most important thing. If you don’t, you won’t know whether a strategy is actually working or not and you could end up pumping money into it for ages, even though you aren’t seeing any return from it. But if you are tracking results, you’ll know pretty quickly if a certain part of your campaign isn’t effective and you can stop wasting money on it right away and redivert those funds to a part of the campaign that is generating sales.

Avoid these 3 pitfalls and you won’t end up wasting loads of money on your digital marketing campaigns.

Keeping Your Side Hustle Legit

August 9, 2018 by Contributed Post Leave a Comment

We’ve all been fed a lie. Well, perhaps not so much a lie as an anachronism. We were raised to believe that if we worked hard, learned our craft, dedicated ourselves to our studies and paid our dues that the path to success would be laid bare before us. While this may have rung true for previous generations it certainly doesn’t bear scrutiny in the current job market or economic climate. This is the age of wage repression, of zero hours contracts and career stagnation. It’s an era in which an entire generation of well educated and hard working women and men are languishing in jobs that offer neither the pay, the opportunities nor the challenge that’s worthy of their talents. In an era where their best never seems to be enough, it’s no surprise that these enterprising people turn to side hustles in their free time to achieve economic balance and take their future into their own hands. There are a plethora of ways in which you can make money from home outside of working hours, many of which could eventually become thriving businesses.

Side hustle legal

But if your side hustle is to be your passport to financial freedom and possibly even the start of a lucrative new career in entrepreneurship, it’s essential that you do it right and keep it legit. Your side hustle is a business, and that means you have certain obligations…

Tax… It’s not optional

However much money you make from your side hustle, you need to know that it is taxable income. If you fail to declare it to the IRS and are found out, the consequences may be serious and could at the very least torpedo your nascent business and your chances of financial freedom. And if you’re advertising your services online to gain custom, there’s a pretty good chance you’ll be caught out.

The rule of thumb is that when in doubt you should always declare your income. The IRS is far more understanding when it comes to income they know about than income that is kept from them. Be sure to enlist the aid of a tax specialist to help with your tax preparation. They’ll help you stay on the right side of the IRS while also ensuring that you declare any tax deductible expenses incurred in the running of your side hustle.

Incorporate your business

While not a legal necessity in your early days, this is still a good idea, for your own protection. Incorporating your business will allow you to stay on the right side of financial compliance by keeping your business and personal finances separate. This will also insulate your personal finances should something go awry with your business. It can also help to protect you from intellectual property theft. If someone steals your ideas it can be difficult to prove in a court of law and you need to afford yourself whatever advantages you can.

Whatever you do… Don’t use work time or resources

Even if you hate your day job, there’s a good chance you rely on the income it brings you. So keep your side hustle on the side! If you dedicate your workplace’s resources like computers, telephones, stationery, photocopier or office space to for running your side hustle, this could land you in real trouble. This kind of activity may be seen as a breach of contract by your employer that could get you fired. Work on your side hustle on your own time.

If you do it right and protect yourself, your side hustle could be your golden ticket to a brighter tomorrow.

It’s All About The Aesthetics Of Your Website

August 9, 2018 by Contributed Post Leave a Comment

Your website is going to be a big selling point of your business. In fact, we would definitely say that it is the biggest selling point. Your customers no longer like to roam the shops for anything other than groceries, your customers are looking for a fast and effective way to get what they want, and that’s done through websites. So, now you see how much power yours holds, and how much effort you should put into it. But, we believe that one area of a website that companies seem to fail at, is the aesthetics of the said website. There is more of a focus on how to sell the products, rather than how your website is actually going to look. So, here’s what we think you can change or add to the aesthetics of your website, and how much of an effect that it will have on your sales.

Drawing People In At First Glance

First impressions are everything, no matter what we’re talking about in life. But with your website, first impressions can mean the difference between a customer exploring, and a customer clicking off quicker than they clicked it. So, think about what your homepage is lacking at the minute. Things need to stand out in your customers face, and one of the best ways to do that is by learning how to make a banner. A banner is a form of display that you can put anywhere on the front page, and is designed to capture the attention of the user away from the writing. Although the writing on your front page is probably very important, a banner gives you the opportunity to advertise something that you really want your customers to see. If you want to draw them in at first glance, it’s going to have to be something like a sale, or a discount that a new customer or returning customer can receive.

Never Go Too Colourful

You don’t want to blind the customers, and you don’t want your website to look tacky. Granted, you want to try and make your company stand out, but doing it by overloading your website with colours really isn’t the way forward with this one. So, you need to think about subtle colours, and colours that are going to make your website more appealing. Try and follow the colours on your logo somewhat, but throw in some light greens, blues, pinks, or any colour that just isn’t going to be too bold.

It’s All About The Layout

The layout is so important if you’re going to keep your customers coming back. If things are all over the place, and the website is hard to navigate, then obviously people are going to divert right away from your website. Keep everything fluid, and get yourself a web developer to help you do it. Even if it means completely changing the layout and approach of your whole website, it might benefit you more if more customers are staying due to the ease of use of it all.

Business On The Go: Everything You Need To Know

August 7, 2018 by Contributed Post Leave a Comment

There are plenty of companies operating almost entirely on the road. Portable businesses are popular because they provide a massive level of flexibility and are fairly cheap to run. However, that doesn’t mean that you won’t run into blockages and hit potholes if you’re not careful. So, let’s look at some of the issues you need to be aware of with a mobile business or a business that operates with mobile employees.

Staying In Touch

A key thing to remember is that you need to stay in touch with your employees. As they are likely to be in different places all the time, you need to be able to keep in contact with them at all times. This is for safety reasons as well as keeping your business running in an efficient manner. A good way to do this is to set up a group chat on an app like Whatsapp. This way, everyone has access to each other, and you can check in to see what’s happening if you need to. Or, you can set up a Google Hangouts account and get all of your employees to do the same. Google Hangouts is a good way to keep in touch with your employees and keeps the contact to a professional manner.

Handling Rural Environments

If you are a mobile business that operates using heavy equipment in a rural environment, you need to prepare each new environment before your employees can start work. You need to ensure that the land is as safe as is physically possible and to do this you may need to hire or purchase some equipment. You are going to need things like steel framed mats/rig mats so that you can store heavy equipment over the environment without any issues. You can look at sites like https://northernmat.ca/products/rig-mats/ to find out how much a purchase like this can cost. As well as this, your team is going to need all the necessary safety equipment for rural environments.

Tracking

One of the biggest issues that mobile businesses have is keeping things efficient. Logistics is the classic example where you’ll have countless employees out on the roads, delivering products to the doors of customers and clients. How do you make sure that they are remaining speedy with their deliveries? How do you keep check on the level of breaks that they might be taking while on the road? The answer is tracking. Sophisticated tracking tech mixed with cloud technology will allow you to keep track of all your employees out on the go.

Keeping Things Cost Efficient

Last but not least, a business on the go is only going to be cost effective if you make the right decisions with your business model. There are a few ways to do this, but when you buy equipment, you do need to make sure that you purchase from a supplier who is offering the right price. Of course, with a business on the go, it’s also all about the vehicles. It is worth looking into hybrids to cut those fuel costs right down, and as always, there are tax deductions to consider. Learn about how to deduct costs from your tax on https://www.mileiq.com/en-gb/blog/self-employed-expenses-claim/.

Looking For a Smarter Way to Earn Money

August 7, 2018 by Contributed Post Leave a Comment

Smarter Way To Earn Money

Throughout the world, the majority of people simply trade their time for money in a linear and transactional way; just with different dollar amounts attributed to each hour.

This does, however, mean their income is restricted to the amount of hours they work, and a further limiting factor is that there’s a ceiling to how much a person can charge for a unit of their time. Plus, there’s the consideration of having enough time to enjoy life rather than spend all of it working.

This article encourages you to think a little differently about earning money, and suggests a smarter way.

If we look at the career of a programmer, for example, typically, they can earn quite a lot of money each hour, yet they invest a large amount of time developing an app using a variety of CI/CD tools, meaning they come out with a decent compensation for their time at the end of a project, but, and it’s a big but… there’s no future return on all that effort and time they invested into the app or software.

They have limited themselves, in financial terms, as a result of swapping their time for a fixed amount of money.

Think of it this way, would you prefer to be paid $1,000 an hour for 100 hours work ($100,000) or would you prefer to work yourself silly and be paid zero for double the amount of work… but then share 50% of the profits of an app that uses a subscription model such as Spotify or Netflix to generate revenue long after you’ve finished working on the app?

There is of course the risk, of it not working, which is why most people would prefer to play it safe and continue trading units of time for units of money, but let’s say the app has a user base of just 10,000 people, who are all paying $10 per month – that’s $100,000 per month!

Furthermore, due to the scalable nature of apps, this 10,000 user base could quickly become 100,000 regular subscribers – meaning you would be making half of $1,000,000 per month!

This is the power of financial leverage, which is what happens when we stop trading our time for money and start leveraging systems and processes to generate money in an automated way.

Admittedly, it takes some effort, but just like building a house or writing a book, once it’s build or written you have an asset for life.

The “average person” has never been in a better position to become a millionaire – indeed, you could be a fifteen year old sat in your bedroom and come up with an app, or a new magazine that goes on to be successful and make you a heap of income in just a few years.

Essentially, the only way to make a serious amount of money is to break free from the paradigm of swapping an hour of time for an amount of money, as time is your most precious and depleting resource. After all, your time is probably worth a lot more than you are selling it for!