Diversifying Your Assets with Real Estate

Diversifying your assets is very important in this day and age. With a diverse portfolio, one can ensure that their investments are not one-dimensional. This gives you some financial security since if one area of your investment fails it is not the end of the world, and your other investments can keep your financial situation afloat.

Real estate investing

One of the best ways to diversify your assets is to get into the real estate market. Getting into the real estate market may be tricky at first, and you will need to learn many new things about the market, but in the end it will be worth it.…

Continue reading

Why Your business Should Really Consider Operating Internationally

You have worked tremendously hard to start-up your business and elevate it to a level where you have built up a loyal consumer base as well as gained enough capital to make your next substantial investment. Before you distribute this capital on operations domestically, consider your current position. Can you gain more consumers? Are there more competitors than ever before? Are your products and services consistently selling well? Are your business costs going to be sustainable enough for the near future?

International business team meeting

If the answers are unfavourable to more than three of these questions, then you should really consider expanding to an international market – here are the top reasons for doing so:

New Customers

By entering a new market abroad, you open your business up to new customers.…

Continue reading

3 Methods Small Businesses are Using to Save Money

Bootstrapping a small business is difficult. Every penny that comes in and goes out needs to be properly managed to ensure your business stays afloat. The same money-saving savviness that business owners exhibit when they’re just opening their business seems to slowly fade over time.

save business money

Every industry has their own tips to save money, but there are options for every business owner to reduce their expenditures.

Sometimes, a few hundred dollars in savings is the difference between keeping the lights on and liquidating.

So, what methods are small businesses using to save money in 2018?

1. Co-working Spaces or Part-time Office Space

Startups are savvy because they have no problems with being mobile.…

Continue reading

How to Market Your New Business Like a Pro

In initially forming your business, you might have decided to hold off pouring a lot of your time and attention into marketing for the time being. However, this could be a surprisingly costly mistake; in fact, much research you have already carried out could feed directly into your marketing efforts.

Business marketing campaign

You might fear that learning how to market like a master could require extensive time and resources you simply don’t have – but that doesn’t strictly have to be the case if you follow these tips.

Weigh up your competition

Your company’s brand can be instrumental to its marketing success. The brand should effectively summarize what your business is about – but, before you can craft a brand capable of doing this, you should be thoroughly aware of rival companies’ brands, advises Startups.co.uk

Continue reading

Ecommerce Basics: Metrics of Success

As an ecommerce vendor, you face a common challenge with and brick-and-mortar stores, namely, how to measure the success of your marketing programs. You however, have a number of significant advantages in addressing this challenge. Online applications give you almost instantaneous feedback to track and adjust marketing campaigns.

Ecommerce metrics 101

In other words, you have a wide variety of metrics of success by which you can measure the effectiveness of marketing campaigns.

Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)

CAC is really a measure of the efficiency of a marketing program. A lower cost of acquisition means that the program is more efficient. Many ecommerce vendors simply divide their marketing campaign costs by the number of new customers drawn in by the campaign to determine CAC.…

Continue reading

SME Website Design: Are You Missing These Basics?

Website design is evolving. Hosting is cheaper. Design is faster. Screen sizes are many. And your visitors are expecting a lot more from your small business website than in the past. You need to be at the forefront of the industry.

Small business web design

Small businesses need a website that not only sells the potential customer but also informs them.

1. Customer Journey Basics

Your small business is all about the customer. There’s a message you want to send to the people that visit your site and are considering your service. You also need to consider the visitors’ journey in the buying cycle.

A plumber, for example, may craft content that:

  • Informs the reader through blog posts
  • Educates the reader
  • Offers a solution to the visitor

You have to consider that the visitor may be a residential person who has a leaking pipe that needs to be fixed.…

Continue reading

Small Business Success: Scaling Upwards, Outwards and into the Cloud This 2018

Challenging as it is, getting your small business off the ground can be one of the most rewarding endeavours, however, it is a never-ending race. Once you have found your footing, the next thing should be to grow outwards and upwards. While there are various directions you can go in terms of growth, there is one core technology that can help you scale as needed: the cloud.

Business cloud solutions

Are you using the cloud to its full potential?

The cloud has been around for a while, but many businesses haven’t yet used it to its full potential. By virtue of its nature, there is really no limit to how the technology can be deployed and by whom.…

Continue reading

Debt Settlement Dos & Don’ts

Are you barely staying above water making the minimum payments each month? This might seem like the only viable strategy available but in reality, you’re only spending more money in interest each month. Financial freedom is nowhere near. What are you to do? Sell all your things? Set a strict budget? Move in with family?

Debt settlement

All these measures are good ideas if your debt has gotten out of control, but depending on the amount you owe, they might not be enough to save you. While debt settlement certainly isn’t the wisest option for all debtors, it can be an effective last resort in dire situations.…

Continue reading

How to Motivate Your Employees to do More

Study after study seems to confirm that happier employees tend to perform better at their job. Beyond this, a happier employee is more likely to work harder at their job.

Busy employee working hard

There are plenty of books on personal motivation and success from Chet Holmes to Tony Robbins. But what about motivating your own employees to work harder?

As much as we hate to agree, some of us do bring our personal problems into work. Others tend to look at work as a retreat from their personal life and as a place of solace.

Regardless, the best managers always seem to be the best motivators and can get their employees to jump off a bridge with them if they ordered so.…

Continue reading

Is PPC Marketing Dead?

If you ask a hundred people when they think the world is going to end, you’ll get a hundred different answers. Nobody could possibly know, right? And, as the old saying goes “Opinions are like (insert expletive).”

Is pay-per-click (PPC) advertising dead? For some people, it definitely is. That’s because it’s no longer the set-and-forget marketing method that it was in the mid-to-late 2000s.

PPC marketing

In order to get online campaigns converting in 2018 and beyond, marketers need to be smart about how and what they choose to market on pay-per-click advertising platforms like AdWords, Yahoo, Bing, Facebook, Instagram, and the other numerous lesser-known ad networks out there like One by AOL.…

Continue reading