Small business owners work hard to launch their businesses on their own and don’t typically rely on too many people for help. After all, many business owners intend on working alone until they can turn a profit and hire staff.
From the beginning, they know they must wear many hats and manage all their own business needs, which can often require them to have or learn technical skills. If you’re about to embark on a new solo business venture, you might see the value in fine-tuning the following skill sets:
WordPress
WordPress used to be an entry-level blogging platform, but as you’ll see by reading articles on Times International and similar sites, it’s now a leading content management system that you can use to build your website, update it, and optimize it for SEO.
WordPress skills can be crucial if you’re building your own website rather than outsourcing this task to a marketing and web development team. When you understand how to use WordPress, you can keep on top of site maintenance and help your business grow.
Cloud Computing
Cloud computing describes using computing services over the internet and having on-demand access to internet-based applications, processing, and data storage. Cloud computing presents many benefits for small business owners, like remote work capabilities, straightforward backups, and seamless data access.
However, not all business owners understand how cloud computing works nor how they can use it to its full potential. Brush up on this essential technical skill, and you might enjoy more convenient daily operations and potentially even time and money savings.
Search Engine Optimization
Search engine optimization (SEO) can be crucial for an online business’s success, even if it doesn’t seem important. If you’re trying to market your products and services online, optimizing your website can be the difference between receiving traffic and not.
At a minimum, you should become familiar with how to improve your site’s ranking with search engine marketing and SEO, which can include:
- Publishing high-quality content
- Integrating keywords
- Writing metadata
- Using alt tags
- Incorporating links
Payment Processing
We’ve come a long way from once only being able to make purchases with cash. Now, dozens of different payment methods exist, such as wire transfers, cash, check, and credit card. Understanding how payment processing works can be pivotal for providing your customers with a seamless checkout process each time they buy something from your physical or online store. At a minimum, you should learn the chain of events leading to a sale so that you can troubleshoot any problems that arise between each step:
- Customer
- Merchant store
- Software gateway
- Merchant processor
- Bank
- Merchant
Typically, payment processors also offer reporting and analytics tools for real-time reporting and revenue tracking. You might find it helpful to learn how to use these tools so that you can monitor particular payment trends, identify areas for improvement, and answer any questions customers have about their chosen payment method when the time comes to check out.
Google Analytics
If you’ll be putting time, effort, and money into optimizing your website to improve your online presence, it’s only natural to want to find out if your efforts have paid off. This is where Google Analytics comes in.
Google Analytics enables you to learn how many people are visiting your site, how long they are there for, and how they got there. As Google Analytics provides you with a broad range of data, you can learn what’s working, what isn’t, and where you should focus your efforts to improve site traffic.
HTML Coding
When you’re busy with everyday business operations like serving customers and dispatching orders, HTML coding will likely be near the bottom of your to-do list. However, having a basic understanding of HTML coding can be helpful. When you understand the basics, you can make fast fixes and changes to your website without having to call in coding experts. You might then save time and money.
Cybersecurity
Cybersecurity skills would likely be one of the most crucial sets of technical skills the average business owner needs to help their business thrive and remain safe in the process. It’s easy to assume that hackers only target big corporations, but the opposite can be true. Instead, many cybersecurity companies report that nearly half of all cyber breaches impact companies and businesses with 1,000 or fewer employees.
If you lack cybersecurity skills, now would be the time to brush up on them. At a minimum, it might be a good idea to understand networking and administration, network security control, and blockchain security and brush up on operating systems and virtual machines.
Social Media
Social media has changed in recent years to become a powerful business tool for brand recognition and increased sales. If you haven’t yet explored social media platforms from a business perspective, you might like to start. Understanding the intricacies of Facebook from a business advertising standpoint might put you in a strong position to build up a loyal social media following that converts into paying customers.
Business owners need a wide range of skills when they work by themselves, like customer service, communication, and basic computing. However, some of these technical skills above can also be important for growing your business and seeing it succeed.