If your business is currently struggling during the COVID-19 pandemic, you are not alone. Around the world, the fallout from this pandemic has been devastating, particularly for small businesses who are vulnerable to collapse in their first years. Your business’ next steps are crucial to its survival; this crisis is far from over, and unfortunately, many more companies will suffer at the hands of it.
So what does this have to do with SEO? SEO, standing for Search Engine Optimisation, is a helpful set of tools which increases your website’s chance of being at the top of the search list. Search engines like Google present hundreds of thousands of results for popular searches, and as a small or new business, it can be very difficult to be noticed at all. If your website is fully functioning, well designed and perfect for users, all that is missing is a boost in visibility. SEO helps attach more meaning, definition and importance to your website in the search engine’s algorithm, helping to promote your site to the top of the page. So how can you get started with SEO?
Get Started With SEO
If you have never used SEO or even heard of it, there are many different ways to get started. Basic SEO tools include using the right keywords and backlinks on your website to help Google’s algorithm associate it with more categories, thereby listing your site on more searches. Here are a few different avenues to get you started with SEO.
Using an SEO Agency
SEO Agencies are run by professionals who understand the ins and outs of search engine algorithms, and use this knowledge to help your website improve its standing on search engine results. They might connect you with bloggers who use their expertise to write readable content with the right keywords and links integrated seamlessly into the text. Using an SEO Agency is an affordable way to increase traffic to your site, without paying advertisers to do so.
Learning SEO in your free time
If you want to get to grips with SEO on your own, there are ways to cultivate the skills used to achieve SEO. You can use free YouTube tutorials and guidance articles like this one to understand how SEO works and teach yourself the skills needed to implement it on your site. This is time consuming work, but with patience, it is achievable.
Understanding Keywords
In order to use SEO service successfully, you will need to understand and research how keywords function on your site. The more useful keywords you use, the better Google’s algorithm will understand what your site is for and why it is important, and the more you can drive footfall on your site.
Times have been hard for businesses this year, but with an SEO strategy in place, your website could be the turning of the tide your business needs. Start today by learning about SEO and how it can be a game changer for your site.
Paying tax is an essential role individuals need to play in society. Paying taxes on time is not easy for everyone. Most importantly, if they live on a hand to mouth basis. Only rich people are the ones who do not have a hard time paying taxes. However, anyone can pay tax on time, like how the rich do without any problem. It is possible if they have self-discipline and dedication. If they have a plan and commit themselves to it, paying taxes on time won’t become a hassle and problem to them. Quarterly taxes is one of the known taxes individuals need to pay, which is common among freelancers. It is how these self-employed individuals pay for their taxes. Wherein it varies on their income. There, estimating it ahead of time is essential for them. If you are also a freelancer and you want to know more about how you can pay your tax on time, the following are ways of how you can do it.
Calculate
Every year or every month, inflation takes place in all countries around the world. If you are a taxpayer, you must be aware of the inflation rate the country you live in has. It will help you with this step that you must do, which is calculation. You must calculate estimated taxes you need to pay depending on the inflation rate to know how you will divide your money. If you are having a hard time in math, you can use an online application that can help you calculate your quarterly taxes. It will make your life easier, and if you have a business, it is going to be on your advantage.
Budget
If you do not have overflowing money, learning to budget your money is essential. It is a vital skill that everyone needs to learn and practice. Hence, teach your kids to budget money while they are young. It will teach them accountability, responsibility, and the value of money. And when they are old, they will not have a hard time budgeting their money to pay their taxes. If they don’t know how to budget, there is a tendency for them to have money problems in the future. They might drown themselves in debts and loans. It is the same with freelancers when they do not dedicate themselves to estimating their taxes ahead of time. Wherein they can have debt and loan problems. Therefore, if you are a parent, practice the modeling of budgeting money. It is for your family’s financial stability and security. It is also a way of influencing your kids.
Schedule
The art of scheduling is also essential in paying your quarterly taxes. You must be aware of your scheduled paying of the tax you owe. If you know the schedule, you must not have any expensive activities for that week or month of paying taxes to avoid spending the payment for your tax. People who do not have any schedule of activities often end up spending their saved money on their taxes. Therefore, if you have a hard time scheduling, practice it because it is a vital part of life.
Early Notification
Being notified a week or month because your scheduled paying of taxes is an ideal way to remind yourself. If the company does not inform and send notifications to you early, you should find ways to do it yourself. Use the technological advances society has, there are many ways of doing this. If you do not receive notifications before the scheduled date of paying your taxes, there might be additional charges for you. Most importantly, if you realized it late and weeks or months passed by already.
Tracking
To not lose track of paying your quarterly estimated tax on time, you must keep track of it. Through having a record of everything by tracking your taxes, you can also ensure that your tax refund is accurate and complete. You will have proof of payment whenever something goes wrong. Through this, you can also learn to track your expenses. You will have an idea of where your finances go the most, and you can decide if it is essential in your life. If you are spending on something that you need, and not you want. Remember, everything you spend your money to has taxes. Therefore, you should spend your money wisely.
The following shows that paying your estimated quarterly taxes is hard if you do not practice any process for it. Without records, estimations, and schedules, you can encounter problems. You might pay overdue, forget to pay, have interests, and more. Also, if you do not have any record of your expenses, you might spend money on unnecessary things that you do not need. If you are not crazy rich, you must use and spend your money wisely. You should make sure that your taxes are a part of your budget, and you must always have an extra for emergencies and savings.
Building an online presence often means you going out on your own and starting from scratch. There’s a high chance that you won’t have any IT department to set up your email and you won’t have a design guru to make your logo either. All of this ultimately means that you may end up handling a lot of the work yourself, which is great, but you still need to make sure that your image is as professional as possible at all times. Want to find out more? Simply take a look below.
Get a Dedicated Phone Number
Having a phone number that is completely dedicated to your business is a no-brainer to say the least. The great thing about having a dedicated phone number is that it gives you the chance to share your contact information without having to give out your personal phone number. You can probably go down the old-fashioned route and get a dedicated cell phone number for your company but it’s probably just easier and cheaper for you to take out a Google Voice number instead. First of all, it’s free, and secondly, you have the option to route all of your voicemails. If you are looking for that professional shine, then you may want to boost your social media presence too. An Instagram like bot can help you to get a good start.
PO Box
Again, it’s now time for you to separate the professional from the personal. If you have a PO box, then this will give you the chance to set up a mailing address for your suppliers without you having to worry about giving away where you live. Plus, if you do this then you know that any packages you receive will be safe as opposed to sitting on your doorstep in the pouring rain. If you want to take things a step further, then why not use a service? This way you can get a full address rather than just a PO box. When you invest in something like this, you can get packages from all major couriers without having to worry about a thing. Another plus to getting an actual address would be that you can appeal to your local customers. A lot of the time seeing a local business can invoke a sense of loyalty, so keep that in mind.
Get a Domain Name
You need a very quick way for people to find you. A lot of services offer a free domain name whenever you sign up. This means having a long, wordy and very impersonal URL. Sure, this may work for getting things up and running super quickly, but it won’t work for the long-term. Ideally, you need to switch to your private domain as soon as you possibly can. When you choose your domain name, it’s helpful for you to make sure that it is short and sweet where possible. At the end of the day, people are much likely to remember a simple domain as opposed to one that is complicated.
Cryptocurrency is a popular currency in the digital age. It is a huge investment opportunity for many and has been trending over the last several years in popularity. But before you jump on the hype train and invest your own money into something like bitcoin, take some time to consider a few things before you hit the trading floor.
What is Crypto?
Before you get into learning different tips about crypto trading, you have to first understand what cryptocurrency is. Without getting into specifics or complexities, crypto is a reference for digital assets. It is a virtual currency that can be traded for goods or services, essentially acting as its own form of currency.
Of course, because there is no physical currency, you have to attain crypto somehow, and in most cases, have to trade your own currency for cryptocurrencies to be able to then utilize that in your transactions. There are thousands of options, but the major one is bitcoin, while etherium and ripple are lesser known, but popular forms of cryptocurrency. Crypto uses blockchain technology, and is not restricted to government regulations.
Benefits of Crypto
There is no central economy when it comes to cryptocurrency as well. This means that no banks or institutions are able to control and change the values that are associated with its financial value. This is contrasted by banks and how they dictate your money with different prices, fees, costs and valuations. This makes cryptocurrency more enticing to others as you don’t have to rely on the banks to hold and value your money. You can also use it internationally, as long as others have the resources to process these transactions. This also allows you the ability to trade 24 hours in a day.
The fact that crypto is fully digital ensures that you do not have to carry anything around and be secure on your person. Of course, you need to ensure that your digital security is in place to keep your accounts and passwords safe, but that is the same with anything online.
Investing in Crypto
When investing in cryptocurrency, it is important to understand that it is not something that is easy to invest in, and the issue lies in that there is no actual asset you are investing in. The value associated with it is a created value, based on the perception of the market. Buying and selling with crypto is comparable to gambling or speculating, as these markets and values tend to fluctuate much more than other investments such as stocks in different companies. However, just because these titles of “investments” are debatable, this is not to say you cannot make money off cryptocurrency. There are many cases of people making millions. But with such success stories, you must be aware of the number of unsuccessful ones, and those that have lost substantial amounts of money.
One of the key points to consider when investing is to do your research. There are so many intricacies when it comes to cryptocurrency that you want to understand different aspects such as which currency should you consider, or what platform is best for your investments and budgets. Bitcoin is the most popular, for example, but that also means it is the most expensive. Advice from the insidebitcoins team is to do as much research as possible. With crypto investing, risks, just as much as the rewards, have a significantly larger impact.
Another point of emphasis that you should take to heart if you are considering investing in any sort of cryptocurrency is that you want to have extra income to invest. The reason you want to invest with more than you have, as emphasized by this, is because it is extremely volatile. As mentioned, there is no physical asset, and the value tied to the currency is that of the rest of the market. Unlike companies where you can monitor different technologies and statistics like sales and profit margins, you don’t have that same data available that creates more consistent and stable fluctuations. If you make the wrong decision on your crypto investment and either buy or sell at the wrong time, you could lose a lot of money. This makes investing in crypto extremely risky, and should be done when you do not necessarily rely on the money of this investment.
Cannot Be Duplicated
One of the unique aspects of cryptocurrency is that it cannot be duplicated. This means that, unlike physical money, you cannot create counterfeits. This means that it is more secure in its existence, and thus, translates to strong value that is not impacted by counterfeit markets and practices.
Limited Supply
Another aspect that makes cryptocurrency stand out is that there is only a limited availability of coins in the market. More coins cannot be created. Of course, you’ll wonder what it means by mining for crypto, and that just means that there are coins in existence, but are not accounted for yet. This finite quantity ensures that cryptocurrency is not susceptible to fluctuations and changes of market value due to inflation the same way other currencies are since governments cannot create more.
Impact of Changing Times
Some of the things that have impacted the recent changes and valuations of cryptocurrency is the pandemic that has hit economies hard in the year 2020. Jobs and incomes have been impacted and governments have resorted to providing financial assistance with stimulus packages. As discussed, this creates inconsistencies in the value of certain currencies. With how the markets have heavily fluctuated during the year, it is no wonder that people are looking for more stable economies to keep their money and hold value. Many have resorted and considered different cryptos such as bitcoin, which have then seen an increase in their value.
With all the attention brought to cryptocurrency, it can be difficult to understand it is still a good time to invest in it or not. Which way will it trend? Are you even in the right place to invest at the moment? You must do your research and understand what your best options are. Whether it is the next couple years or further down the road, you want to be able to know if your investment choices on cryptocurrency were the right ones.
Starting a small business is a wonderful experience that can give you financial freedom if your venture thrives. To achieve this, you need to find effective means of funding your business so that it can expand. This in turn will help generate more revenue for your venture. However, many small business operators often experience hurdles in sourcing funding for their businesses. The good news is that there are different options they can consider to get money for developing their businesses.
Here are some efficient ways to fund your small business expansion.
Get A Loan
Loans are the most common form of funding businesses by different people. There are different types of loans that you can consider for your business. For instance, small business administration loans (SBA) can offer you great relief when you want to expand your business. It is essential to check their requirements first to see if you qualify to get funding. You can also consider bank loans where some funds are set aside for small businesses.
There are also different sources where you can access funding for your small business. It is important to shop around for the right lender that can satisfy your needs. When you apply for a loan, it is essential to understand the terms and conditions so that you will not experience challenges when it comes to repayment of the money. You also need to know the interest rate and the period for repaying the money. In case you delay making your payment, you should know the penalties and fees if any so that your business will not suffer a lot.
Get The Right Insurance
Every business is supposed to have insurance to protect it against eventualities that can impact its operations. However, choosing the right policy for your small business can be challenging since the insurance industry is characterized by still competition. Additionally, some policies may be expensive for the size of your business. This useful site can give you insight into different insurance policies available on the market. You must get quotes from different insurance companies so that you can come up with the best deal that can suit the needs of your venture. You also need to choose insurance for your cars wisely so that you will not spend a fortune on vehicles. You can use part of the money to fund your business if you choose your vehicle insurance wisely.
Crowdfunding
Crowdfunding is another efficient way of raising money for your business. This method involves small amounts of money to different people that are used to finance a small business. Social media and crowdfunding websites are used to create a network of entrepreneurs and investors together. Business owners create profile pages that outline their business and fundraising goals. The individuals who make donations are promised something once the business becomes viable. Crowdfunding also presents an opportunity for anyone with a good business idea to pitch up and it helps generate thousands of dollars for a variety of business ventures. You need to reach your fundraising goals otherwise the donors can take their money back if you fail to raise sufficient money.
Small Business Grants
You can consider getting small business grants to fund your entity. There are several types of small business grants offered by the government or other organizations concerned about developing small businesses. You need to put your documentation in order so that you can increase the chances of getting the grant. However, you should know that there is usually a cap for different types of grants that you can get. Therefore, you should also seek additional funding for your business and not rely on grants alone.
Get Funding From Friends And Relatives
The other effective way of funding your small business expansion involves money that you can get from friends and relatives. The advantage of this method is that it does not involve a lot of paperwork and approval is based on mutual understanding. Once you agree on different terms and conditions, you can easily get the money that you can invest in your business. However, you need to know that this kind of loan can spoil your relationship if you fail to repay the loan as agreed. Once you get money from friends and colleagues, make sure you invest it in your business so that it can generate more revenue.
Sell Assets That You Can Do Away With
You can also consider selling assets that you can do away with to raise money to fund the operations of your business. For instance, you can sell items like electricals and jewelry that you can do away with. If you have many cars, you can consider selling one so that you can fund your business venture. This will also help you to reduce the expenses in terms of paying premiums for each vehicle’s insurance.
Equity
If you have a home, then you can consider getting an equity loan that you can use for expanding your business. This loan is relatively cheaper compared to other forms of credit since you use your home as collateral. The lenders offer favorable conditions if they realize that you are not higher risk than borrowers without collateral. With this kind of loan, you can quickly boost your business such that you can repay the loan gradually when your venture begins to generate more revenue.
Use A Credit Card
You can also use your credit card to fund the operations of your small business. However, you need to be very careful with this option since it can trap you in credit which can worsen your financial future. The moment you delay in repaying the money you owe, your credit history is impacted and this can affect you in the future when you want to secure loans for different purposes.
Many small businesses fail due to a lack of funding. If you own a small business and you want to find ways of funding it, there are many options that you can consider. While these options can give you relief, you should honor your obligation and do the right thing about repaying the loans. You should also avoid mixing personal funds and business money.
Regardless of whether you are a tech genius or just an enthusiast, you are in for a treat! Since almost all people use the internet whether for regular navigation, social media, business, or just for fun, some would think to launch their own website either to sell products or share their experiences. Thanks to the ease of creating websites without the need for expert help, WordPress has always pioneered in the field of content management systems.
It has an extensive range of features and plugins, facilitating the process for its users. Trends change, and so does WordPress. This is why having certain skills is a must if you want to become a developer to easily manage your blog or website. This article explores 6 essential skills needed for WordPress development.
1. Information About Content Management Systems
It is undeniably beneficial to be aware of the content management system (CMS) software; knowledge comes first. Such systems are the tools helping you establish a website without having to write all codes of the digital platform initially or knowing how to code from the first place. Although WordPress is considered one of the easiest and most suitable systems to use in content management and web development, there is no harm in getting to know other similar platforms as well. The templates in other CMS can be just as decent as those of WordPress. This is why it would be a brilliant way to sketch and devise in these as well. As you are using various programs in CMS, you can certainly learn some new skills that would aid you in easier and better administration of the WordPress website you launched.
2. Good Command of Plugins
You will typically be dealing with online platforms and software programs. This includes getting to know some tools, languages, and more importantly plugins. The wide ecosystem of plugins offered in WordPress grants you numerous features that will help you a great deal on your website, such as increasing site speed, enhancing SEO, creating online stores, creating booking sites with WordPress booking plugins, displaying data with WordPress table plugins, or providing email opt-ins.
Usually, coding skills would come at the forefront of your to-do list, but with WordPress, the procedures are much easier. WordPress offers handy plugins that make the process go smoothly. You would need no programming skills for duplicating posts or pages in WordPress, you can just install it onto your software. Making many duplicates for your website is beneficial for several purposes. Duplicates made will be useful for your website to use as templates or references for posts.
3. Smart Marketing
The main aim of creating a website is to have a lot of people checking it out, where the services, products, blogs, or content are proliferated. Only then will your hard work truly pay off. So the need for having smart marketing strategies is highly important for web developers. Whether you offer your website’s theme or plugin for free or for pay; marketing yourself is the way to go.
A good way to begin is through specifying what you wish to achieve with the development project and visualize those who might make the most benefit out of it. While the matter is not necessarily right out of a textbook, it can be practically devised by a blend of knowledge of the customer, the product, and the ways such a product fulfills the customer’s needs. By doing so, such strategies will aid you in determining what the most appealing images are to your targeted customers.
4. Adapting to Change
The virtual world is constantly going through upgrades and new changes. So it is always better to know what the new trends are, what kind of websites customers visit more frequently, and what content they find more appealing. The versions of WordPress go through a lot of changes, and the atmosphere it exists does so as well. For instance, it is beneficial to consider the website design and how modern it should look. Keeping up with the latest features and technology used in web designing will help your website grow faster. Besides, taking into account the threats to the security of the website and its data is essential in the days where cyberattacks have become a normal occurrence. In a nutshell, you need to have a capacity for continuous learning to grow your skill set.
5. Strong Planning Skills
Before initiating any project, mapping out and planning take place. Devising a solid plan and recognizing likely issues and red flags are the optimal approach to prevent any obstacles that may affect deadlines and budgets. Web developers should always have an ambitious mindset about their websites. It is fruitful for them to think of the goals, their target audience, and most importantly, the main content of the website they are to launch. Besides, there are other aspects to consider, such as the competitors, needed site features and options, and social media assessment, among other things.
6. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Knowledge
The key benefit of dealing with WordPress as the development tool is how compatible it is with SEO. You don’t need to be an SEO professional to acquire such knowledge; some simple and fundamental aspects are enough. It is rewarding for developers to learn more about SEO because it typically has many benefits, on top of which attracting clients or audiences to their website. Not only does the SEO improve user experiences and gain their trust, but it can also help run things smoothly while managing the content. Besides, it helps in making your website stay ahead of the competition.
In the modern digital world, launching a website is something we see every day, but the process consists of intricate steps. Thankfully, programs of content management systems such as WordPress have made it easier and simpler. Naturally, creating a website from scratch has a lot of procedures to be taken, and more importantly, the skills that need to be honed to cope with the changing market. With the previous guide, you can learn more about some of the most important skills necessary for being a successful WordPress developer.
