Mistakes to Avoid When Starting an Online Business
We are all bound to make a lot of mistakes when running our businesses.
However, there are mistakes that are unavoidable, and then there are ones that could have been easily avoided. You should do your best to minimize the latter because it’s a huge waste of time. But how can you avoid making the same mistakes as everyone else?
Well, for starters, here are 5 mistakes that almost all new entrepreneurs make.
#1 They don’t pay enough attention to web design
People often hear that content is king and assume that it means that design doesn’t matter. Nothing could be further from the truth! Think about it. When you visit a website that looks bad, do you stick around and explore it, or do you leave immediately? Well, guess what, your potential customers do the same thing!
And yes, I hear you, design is expensive. On the other side, when you think about designing the site yourself, it’s often scary to start from scratch. That’s where Elementor Theme Builder comes into play. It allows you to create your own WordPress theme using pre-made blocks, all without knowing how to code, in a very visual way.
And if you ever did something like this before, you know that there’s a bit of a chicken and egg problem with writing copy for your site and designing the site. If you wrote all the copy in advance — there’s no problem. But what if you start with the site design? Use lorem ipsum dummy text to add placeholder text in all sections of the new site.
Sooner or later when working on the site design, you’ll notice that picking the right font and pairing them successfully is quite a challenge. You’ll get a new appreciation for all designers out there. These design bundles from Fundle Bundle will help you experiment with new original fonts.
And voila! You have a beautiful website without having to code!
#2 They spend too much time on answering their emails
Now, don’t get me wrong, you should be answering emails from customers. However, you can greatly reduce the quantity and increase the quality of the emails you get by making a few small tweaks on your website.
First, add a FAQ’s section so simple questions can be answered (the best tool for that is WordPress FAQ Plugin). That way, you won’t have to spend time answering the same questions over and over again.
Second, build a chatbot. Questions will be answered directly through an automated messaging app. Think about it as a more interactive FAQ. This will help avoid answering the same repetitive questions from people who were too lazy to read FAQ and decided to contact you via chat instead. And don’t worry if you don’t know any coding. Botsify will help you create a chatbot without having to work with coding.
Third, add a contact form to your website and add specific questions to it. You know how every new email from a potential customer leads to a lot of back-and-forths, where you have to ask about their project, budget, etc.? Well, this is a huge waste of time! A simple WordPress form can help avoid all that. Simply ask those questions in advance!
#3 They don’t provide customers with the option to buy their services immediately
Do customers have to contact you via an online form in order to buy your services? This means you are losing opportunities with potential clients. Instead, jump straight into this relationship.
Why not add a Simple Shopping Cart to your website so that they can add your services/products to that cart?
#4 Their bookkeeping is a mess
There are parts of a business that are simply boring. Yes, I’m talking about bookkeeping. Where’s the fun in tracking time and sending invoices and paying taxes? There is none! Still, you have to do it, because, without it, your business will quickly turn into a mess.
There are a lot of software options, but I recommend Invoice Ninja, an open source platform that is beloved by both freelancers and small business owners worldwide. It has all the tools that you can possibly need, from time tracking software to customizable invoice templates.
#5 They don’t have a plan B
Look, I get it, you are 100% committed to your business, and you are completely sure that it will succeed. But guess what? Most people whose businesses failed had exactly the same attitude. The reality is that the business world is unpredictable and sometimes you can fail with even the best intentions. Then what?
When you are running a business, no matter how well it’s doing, you should absolutely make sure that you have plenty of savings and that your resume looks good (these resume templates can help you with that). You never know when you might need to close the shop and look for a job.
Conclusion
These mistakes look silly when written down, but thousands upon thousands of freshly minted entrepreneurs make them every year, simply because they haven’t done enough research into what it’s like to run their own business.
Don’t be one of them. Sure, you are going to make mistakes, but again, there’s no need to make easily avoidable ones. Don’t waste your time like that!
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