Bookkeeping
One of the best things about having your own business is the extra cash flow but it can be easy to lose track where is coming and going.
If you are using methods like Apple Pay, Cash App or cash for transactions, it may be a good idea to sign up for some type payment platform like Stripe, PayPal Business, Vistaprint, Square or Shopify to make keeping record of your clients easy. They all keep track of clients name, email and order history, which can help improve decisions made about marketing and customer experience.
Bookkeeping is more than just keeping track of your clients payments. Think of what you spend on raw materials, marketing or business development. Maybe you had to pay someone to complete a specific, business related task or had to fill your gas tank up to meet a clients needs. All of these things need to be accounted for and doing so will help tremendously as you scale up. For more information on bookkeeping, click here!
You could consider an account with Quickbooks, Freshbooks or Xero to keep track of invoices, payments, business transactions, car mileage and more all in one app. Quickbooks is connected to TurboTax, making easy to use the data you collect on yearly taxes. In the app, you have the ability to put in past transactions as well, just incase you sign up in the middle of the year.
Additionally; it’s important to do extra research and/or talk to a registered CPA like Mr. Curt Mencer, when it comes time to do your businesses taxes. They often are up to date on laws and regulations that could greatly effect your industry and are worth the financial investment.
Marketing
Marketing can be one of the most exciting and creative areas of your business! If you haven’t invested considerable time on how your business will advertise itself, consider the following;
If you are interested in detailed learning from top leaders in the industry, consider courses offered by like HubSpot Academy, Google Analytics Academy and HootSuite Academy.
These “at your own pace” programs will give you insight on what, why, when, where and to who you should be promoting you business, through pre-recorded videos and interactive quizzes. (We personally used tips and tricks from the mentioned platforms when updating this website!)
What Is A Buyer Persona?
A buyer persona is character type that represents your perfect customer(s). To create a buyer persona, think about everything that goes into your customers decision making process.
Things to consider:
Buyer personas are important because if we can understands the perspective and needs of our customers, we can reverse engineer that information to create an amazing customer experience.
The more you know about your clients the easier it is for you to inform, entertain, relate to and ultimately service them. So don't be afraid to use questionnaires through email marketing, text message and social media- these can be very informative and show your customers that you carve about their opinion.
What Is SEO?
In more general terms; Search Engine Optimization, is the practice of increasing the quality and frequency of website traffic, using search engines that our customers use daily.
Because Google wants to help users find the most relevant and useful information, they have imposed ever updating algorithms to automate this process.
SEO gives you the power to increase the number of people who see your site pop up as a recommendation. And because you these people searched a certain key word or phrase, you can be sure they are interested in what you have to say.
Coursera and Hubspot Academy offers beginner to expert courses on understanding and implementing SEO to improve your websites overall traffic and conversion rates, click here to visit their site!
Creating A Content Strategy
As a company that provides social media management services, let us be the first to tell you that posting with no plan, is like trying to hit a target blindfolded.
When beginning to develop your personal strategy, think long term. Use information and data you collected when developing your brands values, buyer persona(s) and financial goals, and create broad topics that relate to both you and your clientele.
For Example:
AJ owns a t-shirt company.
This company sells shirts with AJ’s logo as well as provides printing services to other t-shirt companies.
Aj has been posting to his Facebook and Instagram accounts for a year but doesn’t plan his posts or know which perform the best.
After creating his buyer personas, AJ created this new content strategy, focused on the following;
Now that AJ has planned broad topics he and his customers can appreciate, he can create all types of informative content without overloading your customers with fluff information.
Types of content can be:
If you need help creating your long term content strategy feel free to schedule a consultation with us by clicking here!
