Juggling work commitments and home life can feel like you are in a revolving door of chaos, and that you are doing a bad job with both. The phrase ‘work-life balance’ can feel like an unachievable dream, but have you thought about setting up a business?
If you are an accomplished crafter, have spotted a gap in the market for niche products or have transferable skills that others could benefit from, running your own business could make the dream a reality. Starting your own business is hard work and requires dedication and passion.
8 steps to starting a business
In the early days, you will need to commit time and energy to getting it off the ground. The work that you put in early on will be the most important, as the decisions that you make will make a significant impact on your business’s long-term success. Here are 8 steps to starting your own business:
- Identify a need and provide a solution
- Research the niche market
- Research who your target customers are
- Research who your competition is
- Create a business plan
- Define your brand
- Design and build a website
- Market your products or services
Be specific
For your business to be a success, you need to have a deep understanding about the industry and market that you are entering. Research will enable you to identify the gaps in a market and avoid the risk of spending time and energy in an already oversaturated market. By being too generic and not having a concise business plan with achievable objectives, you risk being a small fish in a big pond. Defining a niche business will distinguish you from your competition and allow you to target a very specific audience.
Target your customers
Understanding who your target audience is critical to the brand that you create and how you are going to market the products or services that you offer. Your website should be SEO optimized using keywords and phrases that your target audience use in organic search so that you rank highly on the search engine results pages.
Links from other sites is also a way to get ranked highly in search engines. Your site needs to be linked from quality and authoritative sites, clickintelligence.co.uk can help you get links from relevant sites where your target audience hangs out online. Websites that you don’t want links from include:
- Spammy directory links
- Sites that lack trust
- Sites that are irrelevant to yours
- Sites that are of a poor quality
Be consistent
Consistency is key to running a successful business. Your branding is a visual representation of your business, and it should be consistent all through your business: the pages on your website should have the same design and navigation, the same tone of voice across your website, social media platforms, customer correspondences, and engaging content should be consistently posted. Consistency is reliability, and reliability builds trust and develops loyalty from customers.
Starting a business can feel daunting and overwhelming, but with thorough research and planning, you will be able to make it a success. You may not have the work-life balance that you hoped for initially, but once you are up and running and have solid strategies in place, you soon will have.
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