Tips and Tools for Managing Your Online Business
I can bet that for almost everyone these days it is important to be productive because most of the time more productivity means more money. Sometimes it is pretty hard to stay on a productive track and procrastination just takes the lead. Especially when you are running your own business and you do not have a person to be accountable for. Those day to day business tasks most of the time are tedious and repetitive.
One way to become more productive and better manage your business is to automate some of the tasks or make them easier to perform. In this article, I will provide you with tools to automate some of your tasks and tips on managing your online business.
Automate Your Product Order Placement
If you are selling products online and take orders manually, you are doing it wrong. Now, there are many tools to automate order placement and process payments automatically. By using those tools you will save hours of your precious time every week.
If you are using WordPress in your page, there is a great wordpress shopping cart plugin and I think that you should try this plugin on your website. It is free and automatically takes as well as process orders through PayPal.
Use Appealing Visuals in Your Social Media Accounts
One of the most important parts of running an online business is marketing. I can say that without marketing your company will not reach its full potential. These days, when almost every person has some kind of social media account, you can reach your customers and advertise your business through social networks. It is one of the cheapest and most efficient ways to get more customers.
To be efficient in social network marketing you need to create appealing visuals that would catch the eye of a person. There is a free graphic design software that I recommend for you, that might help you to make your visuals more engaging.
Use Tools Made for Freelancers
You might ask me “Why do I need to use tools made for freelancers if I am not one of them?” There are dozens of tools made for them which allow people to become more productive. Maybe you are not a freelancer but running an online business have a lot in common with freelancing.
So, if you are running an online business, you might try to take an advantage of tools made for freelancers. You should see this post for the top apps for freelancers that you could incorporate in your work life to become more efficient.
Automate Your Customer Support
Photo by Mike Wilson on Unsplash
For some online businesses, the most time-consuming task is customer support. It is really important to keep your customers happy, however, a lot of the times they ask mundane questions that you already answered a hundred times.
Therefore, you should think of using HelpJet Knowledge Base Software to automate your customer support. The saved time on customer support might be spent on developing and making your business even better.
Upload Your Products on Amazon Automatically
Photo by Samuel Zeller on Unsplash
If you are using Amazon’s fulfillment service, you might be spending a lot of time on listing and updating your product lists on Amazon. Instead of increasing your product quantity, quality or developing a new product, you spend a lot of time on those boring FBA tasks. You ought to check out this project it is automatic amazon listing software. This tool simplifies your Amazon FBA and you can almost put your listing on autopilot.
Engage with Your Customers
When you are running an online business it is really important to be engaged with your customers. A one way of doing this is to create a form that customers could fulfill. It is a great way of gathering feedback or performing surveys. Also, when you are organizing an event, a form can make the registration process much easier.
There are many solutions for creating a form, you can use Google forms or built your own if you have some programming knowledge. But the easiest way for people who have a WordPress website would be using this WordPress form plugin.
Use CRM
In short, CRM stands for Customer Relationship Management. CRM tools allow businesses to manage data and information associated with their business relationships. It allows storing customer contact information, accounts, sales, leads and everything else in one place where you can easily find it.
CRM can help you to stay organized and productive because it will make contact or other information searching quicker than before. There are many Customer Relationship Management solutions, but there is one that stands out from the crowd as a Most Affordable CRM.
Have a Prepared Resume
Everyone should always have a backup plan. If you do not succeed in running a business or you just want to run your business only part-time at first, you can always find a full-time corporate job. For that, you will surely need an amazing resume. I can bet that by starting your business you certainly learned skills for a resume that will look appealing to your new employer.
Conclusion
Having your own online business is risky and energy consuming. However, taking your time in developing your online business can be extremely rewarding financially as well as emotionally. Investing in yourself while creating your online business is one of the best investments that you can possibly make.