Starting a New Business and Want to Make It Look Professional? Here Are Some Steps You Should Take

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Turning a start-up into a professional business requires all sorts of different actions, approaches, and outlooks. You certainly need to be good with your use of financial resources, and you obviously need a strong work ethic. Networking with other people in your industry certainly doesn’t hurt either.

But, it’s one of those interesting facts of life that no matter how good your service or product may be, and no matter how much work you put in, it can all be made pretty much redundant by poor presentation.

We all know that, in principle, we shouldn’t judge a book by its cover, and yet that is precisely what we all do to some degree or another.

Having a professional presentation is extremely important if you want your new business to be successful. Businesses that look amateurish in any obvious way present a red flag to prospective clients or customers, and this can be fatal for start-ups in particular.

Here are a few steps you should take in order to ensure that your business looks as professional as possible.

Get a high-quality logo to use in your marketing materials

Have you ever noticed how the biggest and most successful brands out there have logos that they display prominently, at every possible opportunity? This might not be the kind of thing that you necessarily think of a lot, but that’s just because those logos are so ubiquitous that they almost fade into the background after a while.

Still, everyone knows what the McDonald’s arches represent, or the Apple apple, or any number of other professional logos.

At the earliest possible opportunity upon starting a business, you’ll want to have an effective professional logo in place. That’s because, as you start marketing and putting yourself out there, your logo will serve as a shorthand psychological trigger to bring awareness to your business, and to help people to identify with who you are.

Images stick in people’s minds in a pretty profound way, and on a pretty deep level. So, look into using a service such as Instalogo.org in order to obtain a logo for your business, today.

Ideally, your logo will be something quite unique, and won’t be easily confused with any other logo that can be commonly found out there in society. At the same time, however, your logo should be quite simple and elegant. Simple logos stick in people’s minds well. Highly complex logos often seem like “clutter” and get forgotten about.

Host your own domain name, and set up a WordPress site (hire a web designer if needs be)

In the digital age, you absolutely need to have a high-quality website up and running in order to look professional, and even just to be on people’s radar at all.

An unfortunate mistake that some new entrepreneurs make, however, is to host their websites off free domains, which then make the fact that they are free openly known through their generic URLs and watermarks.

Instead, host your own domain name. This is achieved in mere moments with any number of online domain management services, such as GoDaddy.

The next step is to subscribe to hosting plan, and create your own website using WordPress or a similar platform. WordPress tends to be ideal for a number of reasons, not least of all the fact that it includes a huge number of potential plug-ins and themes that allow you to build your own website from scratch, with no real coding skills required.

Experiment with this for a while, until you’ve got a professional and appealing website up and running. If you struggle with this, however, hire a professional web designer. It will be well worth the investment down the line.

Get some professional head shots taken – it’s really a big deal

Prospective clients and customers look for certain markers of professionalism and authority when they’re browsing the market and weighing up their options.

If your website is going to include any photos of yourself (and there’s a good argument that it should) it’s imperative that those should be professional head shots, taken by an expert photographer.

People really can tell when you’ve just skimmed selfies from your Instagram profile, and this is an immediate red flag that screams that you’re an amateur who may be there today and gone tomorrow.

Including photos of yourself on your site, along with a well-curated “Our Story” or “About Me” section will help to build rapport, and make you seem like a real person rather than just an algorithm.

5 Simple Solutions That Will Make Your Business Bloom

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StrategyDriven Entrepreneurship Article | Managing Your Business | 5 Simple Solutions That Will Make Your Business BloomWe all know that starting a business is a big deal. It’s something that will change your life, your career, and even your bank balance. But, to get there, and to make that happen, you need to create a killer plan to get you there. And while we’re not going to delve into the basics on creating a business plan in this post, we are doing to consider five things that you can do, or use, or turn to, to support and encourage your growth. Whether you know that you need more website visitors, more time to work on your business, or you just need to make your first sale, you may find that one or more of these five points will help you to do exactly that.

1. Get To Know Your Audience Better

The very first thing that you’ll want to do here, is to make sure that you know your audience incredibly well. Because the more you know your audience and you understand their needs, it will be easier for you to create a product or service that they need to have in their lives.

2. Solidify Your Strategy

The next thing that you’ll want to do here is to make sure that you have a solid social media marketing plan in place. Because if you want more visitors, or to grow an email list, or to make more sales, you need to harness all of the tools you have. And social media can be vital for this. So creating a set plan or having a clearer vision on what you’re trying to achieve, will help you to get those results.

StrategyDriven Entrepreneurship Article | Managing Your Business | 5 Simple Solutions That Will Make Your Business Bloom3. Outsource

Then next thing that might help your business to blossom, is to consider outsourcing some of the areas of the business that you’re not all that experienced with. Maybe you’re not great at finance or IT? Then why spend your time on it? Instead, you might want to read more about this here so that you can see if doing so will benefit you. Because if you can free up time, and get more work done, it’s definitely worthwhile.

4. Line Everything Up

But then also, if you know that you need to boost your business, you have to be really objective and look at your daily tasks. At what you’re focusing on and prioritizing. Because if your actions do not match your business goals – there’s your missing link. But when you align your actions to your goals, you’ll start to see better results.

5. Bring In Experts

And finally, if you’re thinking about hiring, or when you do, you’re going to find that it really works in your favor for you to hire people that have a certain level of expertise in their area. Sometimes, it’s easy to believe that you ought to hire novices, or trainees, or just cheap labor – but really, what will they bring to your business? Experts can really add value. And it’s smart to hire people that challenge you or that are more knowledgeable than you.

Inbound Strategy Vs Outbound Strategy: Which Is Better For Your Business?

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StrategyDriven Entrepreneurship Article | Inbound Marketing |Inbound Strategy Vs Outbound Strategy: Which Is Better For Your Business?When it comes to marketing your business, your strategy will depend on so many things, but ultimately it can be separated in to two types of strategies – both of which are great for business, but are implemented in different ways and usually at different times in your business.

These strategies are inbound marketing and outbound marketing, and before we go into the benefits of each strategies, we’re going to explain a little about what each is and and overview of how they work.

An inbound strategy is typically what you’d call a long-game strategy in that it can be implemented right at the beginning of your business, but it can take a while to see results and it’s something that’s going to continue to be implemented throughout the duration of you running your business.

Examples of an inbound marketing strategy in action would include things like content marketing, your website and social media – these are all things you have out there that allow people to come to you by finding your marketing material, so it’s obviously something that takes a little time to build up.

An outbound strategy on the other hand is something that tends to see quicker results and is usually not something that will be implemented consistently in your business, but will be something that you’ll do every once in a while or especially at the beginning of your business.

Examples of outbound strategy in action would be something like you’ve just started a service-based company where you provide professional writing services for the medical industry and since your first priority is to get clients then part of your outbound strategy is to create a cold outreach campaign to places like hospitals, medical credentialing companies, and other medical industry companies that you could write for.

As mentioned above, each strategy works great, but they both have their time and place, and each also is better to implemented depending on how much time you have in your business to spend on marketing. Outbound is going to see faster results over a shorter period, but inbound will see consistent results over a longer period and can be a great way to plan your growth in terms of customers and revenue, so below we’re going to list some of the benefits of each strategy to help you see which one is best suited to your needs right now.

Inbound:

  • Helps you establish trust and credibility with your audience over a longer time;
  • Is usually great for SEO and organic reach since you’ll be creating a lot of content;
  • Can be automated to run over longer periods of time, so it doesn’t require so much attention.

Outboud:

  • Great for getting yourself known quickly;
  • A great way to build confidence when selling;
  • One of the fastest and most effective ways to get new clients fast.

Hopefully this post has provided you with a little clarity on the differences between these two strategies and helped you see which one could potentially be best for you depending on your business needs right now.

3 Reasons Why Simplicity Is King in Business

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StrategyDriven Entrepreneurship Article |Streamlining | 3 Reasons Why Simplicity Is King in BusinessWe live in an age of unprecedented technological innovation, where simply spending a little bit of time online researching the different tools available for “streamlining” your professional life is enough to make your head spin.

Many an ambitious entrepreneur begins the journey down the self-employment path filled with optimism and inspiration, only to be completely quagmired by the unlimited amount of competing narratives, tips, and strategies out there.

What’s more, many professionals – entrepreneurs and otherwise – come to believe that in such a sophisticated working environment, the key to success is to rely on systems and strategies of the utmost complexity, in order to gain an advantage over the competition.

Yet, many established professionals in many fields still argue the time honoured case that “simplicity is king.”

Here are some reasons why that may just be true.

Simple systems withstand chaos and upheaval

The more complex a system is, the more “working parts” there are that can break or become dysfunctional when placed under abnormal amounts of chaos, upheaval, and stress.

This is true in the case of literal machines, and also in the case of business strategies. And when complex systems do go wrong, they often require a huge amount of work in order to be set back on the right track.

If, for example, you have a large bureaucratic structure within your company which is responsible for signing off on certain agreements, the structure will naturally be vulnerable to disaster when confronted by the loss of a key member of the team, or a circumstance that requires an immediate reaction.

Simple systems are more robust than complex systems, and that’s a point in their favour.

Simplicity reduces confusion and minimises irritation

The former U.S. Navy SEALs Jocko Willink and Leif Babin, who now coach businesses on leadership principles via their company Echelon Front, mention an anecdote in one of their books about a business that employed an incentive scheme so multifaceted that none of the company’s employees understood it in the slightest, or felt motivated by it.

And yet the originators of the scheme were very eager to defend its merits, as it took so many variables into account.

The moral of the story here is that complexity can lead to confusion, and confusion can fundamentally undermine the supposed “good” inherent in that system in the first place.

The same is true with regards to potential clients and customers. If you’re so keen on upselling via the “checkout” screens of your website that you force the visitor to click through five different sales pages to get to the point of payment, they are very likely to lose interest and give up in frustration.

By contrast, the simple add to cart button, prominently displayed, is timeless and gets the job done well.

Simplicity forces you to identify and distill the most important area of focus at any given time

We are all vulnerable to the illusion that we can do an unlimited number of things at once.

In reality, however, time is our most essential resource in life and business alike, and there’s only so much to go around. Not only that, but trying to do too many things is also a great way of squandering more tangible resources, not least of them being money.

Simplicity forces you to identify and distill the most important area of focus at any given time. Instead of trying to finesse 25 different intricate systems to drag the client in, you focus on the one or two that are most likely to yield benefit, and then work hard to excel beyond the competition in those areas.

Have You Got What it Takes to be a Successful Entrepreneur?

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StrategyDriven Entrepreneurship Article |Entrepreneurship| Have You Got What it Takes to be a Successful Entrepreneur?If you are starting a new venture, you are entering the heady world of entrepreneurship. Your focus will be on your business’s bottom line, and how you can exploit your chosen market to make it as healthy, buoyant and sustainable as possible.

Being a successful entrepreneur is more than being good with figures, it requires you to sometimes dig deep and challenge the status quo. Here are some key traits that successful entrepreneurs share, have you personally got what it takes?

Passion

This is perhaps the most influential trait of successful entrepreneurs. They live and breathe by their business’s mission statement to provide the products and services that they know the public need. Their success is built on their passion; they love what they do, and their passion is contagious, inspiring and motivating.

Work Ethic

Successful entrepreneurs are the people who have an exceptional work ethic. They are the first ones in the office and the last ones to leave. Even when they are out of the office, and having free time, they will be thinking about how to benefit their business venture, whether expanding their knowledge through research or mentally refining strategies to boost their business – the business is always at the forefront of their mind.

Resilience

During the lifecycle of every business, there will be decisions that paid off, and less fruitful ones. Successful entrepreneurs are not deflated by, what some would consider, failures. Rather they see challenges as a learning opportunity so that the next time the obstacle occurs, they can get over it and conquer.

Risk-taker

Successful entrepreneurs are prepared to take risks where other people may falter. They don’t take the safe and well-worn path. They’ll be the ones that bet on the outsider team rather than the safety of fixed odds sports betting but succeed because they know the market and the risks that they have taken are calculated and not reckless.

People skills

Excellent communication skills are a pre-requisite for the successful entrepreneur. They need to be able to sell their products or services to a target audience who are also in the sights of their competition. Consumers often base their purchasing decisions on the personality of the business that they are dealing with; the products and pricing may be similar to those of competitors.

However, strong people skills are not only important for attracting customers and clients, entrepreneurs also need to be able to surround themselves with a team who share their vision. This means that they need to be able to recruit the right people to drive their business forward and grow.

If you are embarking on the entrepreneurial journey or have already started a venture but have not yet achieved the success that you expected, think about whether you share any of these traits. People often say that entrepreneurs are born and not made, but that is not necessarily true. You have an opportunity to finely tune your character so that you too can adopt these traits so that you can make your business thrive. Good luck!