If you are thinking of starting up a business soon, then you are no doubt aware that there are many ways in which this is one of the most challenging times in recent history to be doing so. However, that’s not to say that you shouldn’t try to get your business off the ground now.
If you give it everything you’ve got, there is no reason why you won’t be able to get your business up and running and in a secure position in no time. Let’s take a look at some of the things you should keep in mind as you start your business in the new year.
Shape Your Business Idea
All businesses must start with an idea.
The most successful start with a very strong idea.
How do you know if your business idea is going to be a good one? In general, it needs to address a particular question in some way, providing a solution that is not currently there. Alternatively, you could be solving an old problem in a new way.
If you are unsure if you have a good business idea, it’s worth testing it out with a focus group first. This group can include people in your life whom you trust, general members of the public, or anyone in your industry who are willing to help. However, be careful not to share your idea around too widely before you build your business.
As you’re narrowing down your business idea, you’ll need a notebook to jot down all your amazing ideas. Buy a Moleskin notebook and get started!
Follow Marketing Trends
When there are big changes in the world (like a global pandemic), it affects marketing trends. Keep an eye out for how marketing changes over the next year or so to adapt to the new times we live in. Aligning yourself with the marketing trends can sink or swim your new business.
Of course, that means that you need to be fully aware of what those trends are. Consider hiring a marketing expert who can help you. That way, you are much more likely to be able to get that initial growth that your business needs.
When you hire someone to work for your business, you should post your job on ZipRecruiter. A cool feature of ZipRecruiter is that it has a section on its site reserved for small businesses to post their job openings. That means you don’t have to compete with large corporations for visibility. Learn more here.
Make Your Website Work For You
Few elements are quite as important for the starting business as the website. It is one of the central components of your marketing, and it’s where people are going to be able to go in order to get whatever information they might need about your business too. As long as you are ensuring that the website is working harder for you, your business is much more likely to have a good start in life. Remember: your website is your shop window, and it is also a repository of information, and you need to make sure that you are doing everything you can to make it as useful for you as possible.
One of the things to focus on here is that you need to make sure it is generating plenty of traffic. Generally, the way to do this is through SEO, and if you are focusing on doing this you should find that it really does help you out in a big way. Simple SEO tasks you can turn your attention to in order to get the ball rolling here include incorporating more keywords into the website, keeping a regularly updated blog, and ensuring that you are aiming for position 0 through the use of featured snippets. You should also ensure that you are linking back to your site from social media feeds as much as possible without spamming too.
As long as you make sure that your website is doing everything it should be doing, you are much more likely to get your business up and running in a strong way in 2021, so this really is one of the most important things to be thinking about.
Prepare For Remote Working
Although there is now a vaccine in place, that is not to say that things are suddenly about to get back to normal. Indeed, it still looks as though most of the next year is going to be in various forms of lockdown and different levels of control, so this is the major thing that you really need to be preparing for in the new year. While you are probably not going to be able to avoid this, as long as you plan for it, it shouldn’t really make too much of a difference to your company, and you should be able to make it work out for you.
One of the first things to focus on in order to get this right is how to actually organize and arrange a remote team. Most of this comes down to using technology in the right way. For instance, you are going to want to make sure that you are giving your team members all of the necessary communication tech that they might want to use to be in touch with one another, and it is going to work best if you put this into place, to begin with, and familiarise yourself with it before you do anything else. You can add a chat room to your website for your remote workers to use, you can use Google Hangouts, you can use Microsoft Team, or Whatsapp, or any other of the many solutions that exist. But the important thing is to make sure that you have something in place and planned for.
That’s not all you need to think about. It might be that you need to keep an eye on what your staff are doing, and you are going to want to make sure that they know you are aware of what they are up to – but without them feeling as though you are spying on them in their own homes. This simply comes down to ensuring that you are checking up on them frequently, perhaps via Zoom calls, to ensure that you know what is really going on.
As long as you bear all that in mind, you should find that you can pretty easily lead a remote team. Indeed, it has probably never been easier to do this than right now, and if you approach it with an open mind you should even be able to find some great ease in it, which you can carry forward for the sake of your business.
Know How to work In The Office During Covid-19
As well as having remote workers, you are also going to have the possibility of working in an office environment, but under strict COVID-19 rules. That means you might have to socially distance from one another, provide plenty of opportunities for people to sanitize their hands, and ensure that you are all wearing masks at all times. All of that can be a nuisance, though most of us are used to it by now. However, it’s a good idea to be prepared for this stuff, just in case you might need to put it into place. As the manager, you are going to have to enforce it, and that might prove difficult at times. Bear in mind that you might be in a position where you have to limit how many people can come into the office at any one time too, in which case you will need to think about how to work that out with the rota.
Find Financial Support
Most businesses need a good deal of financial help to get going. Even if you are starting up a fairly low-key kind of company, you are still probably going to need something in the way of support, so you do need to make sure that you are looking into this. There are many sources that you can look to when you are seeking financial support for a new business, but bear in mind that at the moment there are some new ones that have opened up as a response to covid. Of course, this is a very local thing, so you do need to make sure that you are checking in your local area for any funding opportunities which might have arisen. All in all, without the money, you are not going to get anywhere.
The post How To Get Your Business Off The Ground In The New Year appeared first on Miss Millennia Magazine.
from Miss Millennia Magazine
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