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Seize the Opportunity: The Best Ideas for Your Small Business or Startup

The business landscape is changing fast as technology seizes market control. Entrepreneurs need to stay ahead or else competitors will have a stronger edge.

More proactive business owners are exploring emerging opportunities to survive and stand out.

Seize the Opportunity: The Best Ideas for Your Small Business or Startup

If you manage a small business or startup, you will need to know what opportunities are available. Seize the opportunity to grow your profits and expand your market share.

Fulfillment by Amazon Sales 

If you’re relying only on your offline or online store to make sales, you should consider the Amazon FBA program. This is the largest e-commerce platform globally. You can take advantage of the platform to boost your sales.

In 2020, Amazon reported net sales of $125.56 billion. This was a 43.6% increase from $87.44 billion in the same quarter in 2019. More people are shifting to buying online by the day and this is a fact businesses should leverage.

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The advantage of selling on Amazon is the increased visibility of your products. Amazon is global, meaning anyone in the world can order your product.

Amazon also frees you from the headache of managing your online business. It handles packaging, shipping, storage, and customer service. In return, you will pay a monthly fulfillment and storage fee.

You’ll also ship your products to their fulfillment center and list your products in their store. After that, you can promote to boost traffic while tracking your weekly proceeds.

Starting a Blog

Blogging is still one of the most profitable small business opportunities. It is a double-edged marketing weapon.

In one way, you can use it to boost brand awareness. Blogging can also enable you to grow your profits. You can earn through affiliate marketing, ads, information products or premium gated content.

Even today 59% of marketers find blogging useful. Creating a blog allows you to convince and convert undecided visitors. You can educate and captivate your audience to boost engagement and increase traffic. Optimizing blogs for SEO or sharing on social media will also help promote your traffic.

Salesforce for Ecommerce

E-commerce is lucrative but there’s a lot of moving pieces for small business owners. Businesses have to compete with many other brands from around the world. Besides, handling the aspects of marketing, sales, and customer service can be hectic.

If you want to maximize e-commerce, you need to get competent e-commerce software for your team. Salesforce B2B commerce enables you to enhance coordination between your teams and maximize sales opportunities.

With overwhelming choices, consumers are the drivers of customer service. You need to meet their service expectations without hitches or delays. Salesforce ensures seamless transitions between departments to speed up customer service. Click here to learn more about how Salesforce can help your e-commerce business.

Affiliate Marketing

Startups can also maximize affiliate marketing to boost sales or grow their income. You can use an affiliate marketing model to increase sales. This means giving out a commission for every sale made through referrals.

Give an affiliate link to bloggers, influencers, or customers so they can share it with their fans. You can also do affiliate marketing to increase your income streams. If you’re running a blog or active social media, you will attach affiliate links to your posts.

It would be best if these affiliate links are from your partners or products that you have used. For instance, an online business can promote its web host for a commission.

Professional Consulting

If you’re an expert in your field, you can maximize your knowledge by offering consultancy services. Brand yourself as an authority and add a consultancy page or your website.

Being a consultant also comes with flexibility. You can provide your services online, on the field, or through in-person consultations.

Course Creation

If your schedule is tight, consider creating courses instead of providing consultancy. Online courses are a massive trend as most people want to learn online. Niche courses are also in high demand because they focus on one subject at a time.

With sites like Udemy, Allison, or Coursera, you can create courses to help people grow their startups. Most of the courses don’t need accreditations and are a great way to help people while promoting your brand.

Examples of brands maximizing course opportunities include Hubspot and SurferSEO. Hubspot offers a range of courses for free thus boosting its reputation as a leading CRM.

Influencer Marketing

Social media provides startups with plenty of growth opportunities. Over 3.9 billion people use social media today. The ability to sell on Instagram or Facebook makes brand building on social media more than necessary.

Growing a business on social media is no longer comfortable. Organic marketing on social media doesn’t work as it used to, while ads are becoming more expensive. Startups that need to speed up their growth need to consider influencer marketing.

Influencer marketing allows your business to divert engaged traffic towards your website. Influencers, especially micro-ones, have a solid reputation. Letting them promote your business will boost trust faster than doing it on your own.

SEO

One of the best online opportunities startups can explore is SEO. SEO is a cost-friendly way of marketing if you can’t afford to hire marketers. It’s also a strategy that you can reap from for many years once it pays off.

SEO involves optimizing your website and content for the top search engine rankings. The process can include optimizing your website for speed or mobile search. In 2021, 55.56% of internet traffic comes from mobile phones.

You also need to find the keywords that are common with your users. That’s finding the terms that your customer will use when looking for information in your niche. Your content will focus on these keywords to make your website search-friendly.

Virtual Assistants

Growing a startup or a small business can be overwhelming. You may need to juggle several roles before you can hire support staff. Unfortunately, sometimes your business may not break even as soon you would expect.

A virtual assistant also works if you’re not ready to hire a full-time worker for one-off services.

Use New Opportunities to Grow Your Startup 

As a startup owner, you need to keep an eye on new opportunities or else your business will stagnate. Maximize the ideas in this guide to improve efficiency, boost traffic and increase your profits.

For more advice and tips on running and growing your business, check out our blog.

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