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Six Easy Ways To Raise Capital For Your Business

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StrategyDriven Starting Your Business Article |Raise Capital |Six Easy Ways To Raise Capital For Your BusinessRaising capital for your start-up or small company is probably the biggest challenge most entrepreneurs face when starting a business. This is not only a serious obstacle but also a popular excuse for many business-minded people. From renting production space or office to hiring staff and buying goods and equipment, everything you do to take your idea to profitable business requires money.

Luckily, the success stories of all the entrepreneurs show that capital is available to everyone if you turn to the right resources and get a little creative with your capital-raising options! Below we share six ideas on how to get money to fund your business.

Start With Your Own Savings

Creating a new company and running your own business can be risky. Also, this level of risk sometimes prevents traditional lenders from providing loans to entrepreneurs. This can become even more difficult if the business owner hasn’t invested his or her own money.

If you take your business dream seriously, you can consider using your savings as a source of capital. Or maybe you are willing to refinance or take out a second mortgage. You should definitely look for available options of personal financing if you are ready to take risks and comfortable with the potentially bad consequences.

Talk To Your Friends & Family Members

Your friends are always there when you need them, therefore, raising capital through your closed ones is another viable option. Try to contact your buddies to get some money to raise capital, but think about how they can benefit from the idea of lending you money and what form the funding will take. For instance, you can ask for some debt financing and then pay it back with interest, or simply you add them on as partners in your business.

Similar to your close friends, your family members and relatives can be an entrepreneur’s first point of contact for raising capital. The peculiarity of the family is that they will always be ready to help and support a good idea with financial help. The bond between your loved ones is very strong, and even if you don’t have a very good business plan, you can still raise money from your family. Remember that the amount of funds collected from your family members may not be enough; however, it is a good start.

Regardless of what you decide to do, make sure to be honest with your friends and family, realistic about how much money you need and clear about the risks; otherwise, you will not receive money even from your best friends.

Apply For Business Grants & Loans

There are various types of lenders and debt products for small business – banks, government agencies, credit card companies, online lenders and microcredit programs. All of them offer term loans, invoice financing, lines of credit, cards, cash advances and much more.

For instance, since nowadays many businesses are dealing with the consequences of the global pandemic, Coronavirus Business Interruption Loan Scheme (CBILS scheme) provides the small and medium-sized businesses with two fast and effective solutions to beat the cash flow crunch. CBILS lenders offer a hassle-free CBILS loan and a flexible CBILS revolving credit facility to get financial support and fund your business, whether you need to hire more employees, pay for your workplace or create an emergency reserve of capital.

Find Angel Investors

Angels investors are people with a surplus of funds who are usually interested in investing in new start-ups, but it is also possible to raise money for a small business in return for an ownership stake. Furthermore, they work in groups of networks to collectively review proposals before investing and can offer mentorship or invaluable advice alongside the capital.

Knowing this, angel funding can be a great source of capital for your business. First, you must have a succinct, clear and memorable pitch and a solid business plan. Since angel investors aim to fund a potentially profitable business with clearly outlined services or products and experienced leadership, you should capture their attention with enthusiasm and promising data on the current situation and future potential of your company.

In addition to visiting different events, such as fundraisers and conventions, to find angel investors, there are also various online platforms that can help you find the right people and fund your business. Angel Capital Association, Angel Investment Network and Gust are considered the most versatile online platforms for finding an angel investor for your business.

Or Venture Capitalists

Unlike angel investors, venture capitalists usually want to invest in slightly more stable and mature companies, and sometimes want to have a voice in the direction of the business and the management of its day-to-day operations.

Since venture capitalists are responsible for achieving a certain return for a firm or fund, they need positive cash-flow companies with proven products and a high potential for growth. If your company meets all these requirements, you can apply for an investment in a venture capital firm. It’s not an easy task, but many small businesses have been successful in getting the much-needed capital.

Raise Capital Through Crowdfunding

Crowdfunding is a new and quick way to increase start-up capital. Instead of focusing on a few people like your friends, investors or banks, this funding option allows you to make small amounts of money from many investors at the same time.

To launch a successful crowdfunding campaign and raise capital for your business, you need to present a detailed description of your business. This includes the goals of your business, the value of your service or product, plans for making a profit, how much funding you need and for what reasons. Then anyone can read about the business and contribute money if they like the idea.

At the same time, you should be aware that crowdfunding is a competitive place to get funding, so unless your business idea is absolutely rock solid and can convince regular consumers with a simple description and a few images online, you may not be able to raise money for your company.

HR Management Can Help Develop Your Team

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StrategyDriven Talent Management Article |HR Management|HR Management Can Help Develop Your TeamHuman resource management requires a wide range of qualities such as: leadership, proper time management, ability to motivate employees and assertiveness. In this section you will find a variety of tools that will help you upgrade your recruitment system, human resource management, management team development, tips and skills.

The perception of the role of the manager today is completely different from what existed 30 years ago. The variety of capabilities and multi-tasking that the manager is required to perform, leaves them very little free time to actually manage their employees. In the form of management today, is the manager first and foremost a leader? New employee recruitment processes and new job training processes are due to the Achilles heel of many organizations and small businesses. How to train employees? The answers in the article in front of you. It all begins with good training. Work training is vital to ensure that everyone is working to their potential.

The issue of productivity and the work of interfaces often arises in work in medium and large organizations. We lose valuable work time and build ineffective processes. Through proper work and a method of building processes it is possible to significantly upgrade the efficiency in any organization and save time and money.

Assimilation of procedures and processes in a focused management

Processes, efficiency, proper time management and tasks are among the four most common things most organizations today talk about. Often, we talk a lot about these issues, but do not carry out a deep and rooted process for deepening method and language in the organization.

An excellent recruitment strategy requires the use of your entire team as well as some aspects that you may not always anticipate. To help build the process, we have some tips to help you attract the best talent. After all, who does not want a large amount of inquiries on their site, constant phone calls from customers, new project management, new tasks and other profit channels for the business.

Many articles have been written about the status of management as a profession. Academic discussions, workshops and professional philosophical discourse on the subject have existed for decades. Despite this, as of today (and probably for years to come), there is no compulsory course or professional training in order to become a manager or improve management skills. So are you a manager looking to employ new staff? Like an electrician, an accountant, an engineer and a lawyer, a manager is also a profession and like any other profession, in order to perform it optimally it is important to learn and also to experience the work they are in; which is how training can maximize their skill. However, employing the worker is the first step.

Getting a new team together

Sometimes the simplest strategies are the best: recruit the most amazing people you know, make sure to keep them regularly happy, encourage them to bring in their most talented friends, make sure to provide great experience to each candidate and repeat this process regularly until your employees become recruiters. When you get to a point where you can not repeat this process, you have probably started developing a dedicated in-house recruitment team. If their experience with your organization is particularly positive, even non-accepted candidates still serve as recommenders for your organization. Poor candidate experience will usually leave a sour taste, not only for the candidate who came for the interview, but also for the employee who made the referral. It does not matter how much the organization pays, or how big projects the organization has, if you fail to treat candidates with the same appreciation you would provide to a veteran employee, you are doing a poor service to the organization. I’ve added a quick list of topics to make sure your candidate’s experience is on track. It is advisable to make a neat list for the recruitment process. Let’s not forget that you want to attract the very best people to your company. You can’t do this if you appear incompetent, incapable and inefficient.

How to interview potential employees: Freestyle interviewers versus template interviewers

We have all encountered one or two freestyle interviewers in our lives. Those who do not work with a page or a set of ready-made questions. They are usually big refusers of the pattern and their ability to feel and feel the candidate will determine whether they will be accepted or not. The questions do not repeat themselves and sometimes it is also not clear what they are asking.

How is an interview from intuition and gut feeling a rational and process interview? Very simple, because what those people call a gut feeling or intuition is an analytical process. How is this possible? The same gut feeling or intuition works in such a way that when we see a certain behaviour. We go back in time and identify patterns of identical behaviour, connect the same patterns in people and situations we have encountered in the past and draw a completely statistical conclusion which predicts the future behaviour of the candidate. If those interviewers who rely on feeling actually perform a thought and analysis process then where is the problem? Why are they not interviewing well enough? For several reasons and the main one is that they conclude how someone will behave in complex situations at work based on their behaviour in an unnatural situation which is a job interview. I will expand on the problems with the ability to draw conclusions in this way later.

In stark contrast to freestyle interviewers, the template people leave nothing to chance. The questions are ready in advance. Each answer indicates a character trait or behaviour of the candidate and there is almost nothing left that is prone to interpretation. Everything is clear and it is possible to know everything about the candidate before getting him a job, the people in the template say (and are wrong). Those who come to the interview with all the questions prepared in advance often find the best outcomes, for the business and its future.

7 Strategies to improve your web page ranking through SEO

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StrategyDriven Online Marketing and Website Development Article |Web Page Ranking|7 Strategies to improve your web page ranking through SEOSEO is a lot about experimenting with a bunch of techniques and which ones fit the shoe best. It’s an absolute nightmare for webmasters to see their rankings stay stagnant month after month.

In this post, we look at the most promising B2B SEO strategies that will improve your web page rankings and organic traffic.

Update Your Content Regularly

Search engine optimization is an ongoing process. That’s why regularly updating your blog and publishing new content is paramount. It tells users that you’re always in the business.

Search engines also see sites that regularly update their content as ‘relevant’ ones. It’s a good practice to audit your site’s according to a fixed schedule (let’s say every 3 months) and make necessary updates wherever you see fit.

Internally Link to Other Pages

Apart from using link building techniques, you must also internally link your pages. While writing on a certain topic, you may find yourself creating references to other pieces of content from within your site. This is called internal linking wherein you add a link to other posts or pages of your site.

Internal links help search crawlers understand your content better. They also keep users engaged for longer by serving as tools of navigation. The words that you link to are called anchor texts. Since search engines pay special attention to these, be sure to use meaningful text for linking.

Pro Tip: It’s good if you read the entire copy after you have written it and proactively look for opportunities where it makes sense to link other pages. Having an internal linking strategy that cross-references and creates groups is good for any website’s SEO health. Although, it can seem a bit challenging and time-consuming; in the end, it’s worth it.

Improve the Load Speed of Your Pages

This is one of the most crucial ranking factors, and for good reasons too! For one thing, Google looks at slow-loading pages and thinks it’s not worth users’ time. In this way, high load times can negatively impact your rankings even if you have great content to offer.

Research tells us that 40 percent of visitors will leave your site if the page takes more than three seconds to load. Of those, eighty percent will likely never return. From an SEO health perspective, this is awful.

A quick loading page keeps people engaged longer and keeps them coming back for more. When Google sees this they will adjust your rankings accordingly by pushing it higher.

Therefore, you must check both your server response time and page speed. Pingdom is one free tool that can help you with that. You can test how your page loads from all across the world. To help with the load speed of your site, you may want to fix the themes and heavy plugins.

Produce High-quality Content

This one is a no-brainer. Content has been the king for a long time and will continue to. Producing high-quality, relevant, and fresh content should be any web marketer’s top priority. Other than that, you must look at something called ‘the dwell time’.

Dwell time refers to the average time a visitor spends on your site. Sites with newsworthy, fresh and, interesting information tend to enjoy higher dwell time.

Here’s something else to look at – Chrome happens to enjoy the majority market share in the world of browsers with 45% of all users using it. In 2017, it was downloaded the maximum number of times.

When a visitor bookmarks an interesting page, there’s a good chance they will come back to it. Having quality content can thus help your SEO rankings as more and more readers bookmark your site pages.

Title Your Page to Help Search Engines and Users

The title of your web page holds a lot of relevance both for users and readers. Search engines, at the time of indexing, will read the meta/title tag to see what the page is all about. Your meta tag is also also the blue color link people see in search results to get a hint about the page’s information.

It’s a healthy SEO practice to include relevant keywords in this tag. Also, the title tag is a little different from the description people see at the top of your page in a browser. If it helps with clarity, you should write one title for the meta tag to show in the SERPs and a different one for the page.

Create purposeful URLs

It’s easy to ignore the URL of the page but it carries SEO significance. It’s a good practice to include relevant keywords within the URL. You can see the page name appear in the URL in most CRMs like WordPress.

Before publishing, check and review the URL. if the page is already published, you can always redirect readers from the old page to the new one.

Target Keywords With High Commercial Intent

While doing keyword research, it’s easy for webmasters to focus mostly on the search volume. It’s also likely that you ignore terms with low search volume. But, that’s not always intelligent.

Once again it’s not always about the quantity but the quality of the terms. In simple words, you must look at the commercial intent of the searches.

For example, keywords like ‘link building services’ don’t necessarily have a lot of search volume. It must be no more than a few hundred. However, the CPC cost of such searches is $25. High commercial intent is an indicator that the traffic for them is made-up of invested and legit buyers.

End Words

SEO is a continuous process. As you progress, you may find some techniques to work better than others. But, the above-mentioned techniques have stood the test of time in yielding high rankings.

How to Increase Website Traffic: 8 Helpful Tips

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StrategyDriven Online Marketing and Website Development Article |how to increase website traffic |How to Increase Website Traffic: 8 Helpful TipsYou’ve got a top of the line product idea that you’re ready to tell everyone about. The thing is, if you don’t take the time to drive traffic to your site, nobody will know about what you have to offer.

You see, the more clicks your website gets, the higher your Google ranking will be. Since nobody ventures too far in their search, you need to be sure you make it to page number one.

Not sure how to increase website traffic? We can help you out. Check out this guide to learn how to get more clicks and keep all eyes on your site.

1. Use Social Media to Your Advantage

If you don’t have a social media page for your business yet, you should get on that. It’s too important of a resource to ignore. You can use social media ads to drive users to a landing page where they can check out your products.
If you have a sale going on, you can tell all your followers about it via a post. Make sure to include images, a description, and a link to the items when you create one of these posts.

You can also use your social media account to promote your blog if you have one.

2. Choose Interesting Titles

Your headlines and titles are a person’s first introduction to your site or blogs. They’re what gets people to click on your content. That means you need to choose something catchy.

There are two things that you need to keep in mind when you’re typing up your titles. Number one, they need to contain keywords. These are words that people type into Google to search for a particular item or piece of information.

So, what are these secret words? You’ll have to use a keyword tool to figure this out. These tools will tell you what a word’s competition and difficulty rating are.

You’ll need whatever words you choose to rank low in these two categories while also having plenty of traffic.

The second thing to keep in mind is trial and error. Once you have your keywords in mind, write a few titles that seem catchy to you. You can ask other people which one they think works the best.

3. Long-Tail Keywords

Single-word keywords are great and all but, long-tail keywords are the best. They can be as long as an entire sentence. They work well for a few reasons.

For one, they’re not typically high as far as competition and difficulty are concerned. They also provide a lot of traffic. The other thing is that many people take a hands-free approach by using talk to text.

When they Google search something with their voice, they’re more likely to use a long-tail keyword than a short one.

4. Keep Things Fresh

You’re going to have a million different people going to your site. Not all of them want to read an in-depth 1500-word article on how to paint their car. You need to have a mixture of short-form and long-form content on your site, or you’re in for a poor user experience.

It’s also a good idea to use some visual content. More people recall what they see vs what they read. This means that someone is more likely to share a bright, fun image on social media than a wall of text.

The more shares you get, the more people will visit your site. If you don’t use any images, you’ll be lucky if your social media post gets noticed at all.

5. Try Out Guest Blogging

Guest blogging will get you a higher search engine ranking than almost anything else. If you’re unfamiliar with what this entails, it involves giving your URL to other blogs like yours.

Whenever the blog user posts something, they may link externally to your site. When Google sifts through the posts and sees your URL there, it will see that you’re an influential website and thus, give you a higher ranking.

While you’re at it, you can allow guest posts on your blog as well. It will help the search engines understand what niche you’re going for and rank you accordingly.

6. Utilize Internal Links as Well

SEO tips 101 states that you need to use internal links as well as external ones. Let’s say for a second that you sell hair products. In an article about how to take care of your hair, you can link to what you have in your store.

Since the person reading the content is already interested in hair care, there’s a good chance that they’ll click the links so that they can see what you have.

Even if they don’t buy one of your products, the extra action means more traffic. Search engines will see that someone visited several of your webpages, which makes you look great.

7. Podcasts

Podcasts work sort of like a television series except for the fact that it’s all audio. They’ve gained a lot of popularity lately, so many companies have started using them in their marketing strategy.

The problem is that they can be expensive to create. If you’re a new company, you might not be able to afford the equipment. What you can do is volunteer to be a guest on a Podcast.

It’s not much, but it should be enough to get listeners interested in your website.

8. Comment on Blogs Similar to Yours

If you notice that a blog similar to yours has posted something relevant to your products and services, don’t be afraid to make a comment and provide a link.

Just make sure that the information you provide in the comment is helpful to people. If you drop a link with no context, you look like a spammer.

How to Increase Website Traffic and Increase Your Ranking

If you’re not able to drive people to your site, it won’t generate the traffic it needs to rank high in search engines. Since many people don’t go past the first page of Google, this can be a huge detriment to your business.

We hope that you’re able to use the tips that we’ve provided here today to learn how to increase website traffic and start getting the clicks that you deserve.

Are you looking for more ways to help your small business grow? Check out the entrepreneur section of our blog daily for all the latest advice.

Where’s Your Business’s Safety Net?

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StrategyDriven Risk Management Article |Business Safety Net|Where's Your Business's Safety Net?Running a business can often feel as though you’re walking a tightrope. You’ve got to keep your balance and your composure or you could end up falling. However, there’s one big difference between running a business and walking a tightrope: there’s nothing impressive about running a business without a safety net. The reality is that the risks of running any kind of business are so high that having no potential protections in place if something goes wrong is simply irresponsible. With that in mind, here are just a few things to consider when making sure that your business has the safety net it needs.

Insurance

If you’re looking for a way to protect your business in the event that something goes wrong then there are few more obvious and effective things to consider than the right insurance. There are a lot of things to consider when choosing the right insurance for your business. Everything from how much it will cost to what kind of cover you need to the specific risks that your business poses. Click here to find the insurance that’s right for your business. Insurance can be a frustrating cost, especially in the early days, but the value it provides is absolutely worth the money you spend on it.

Investors

Investment is something every business needs. After all, it really doesn’t matter how great your business is, you’re never going to be able to get things off the ground without some form of capital. That’s where investors come in. They can provide the capital that you need and can often help to prop up your business if it requires a little extra nudge. Of course, you need to remember that investors are not just giving you money. If you can’t guarantee that you’re able to provide them with a return on their investment, they’re going to take their money and walk away.

Careful Planning

One of the most common reasons that a lot of businesses fall apart when things go wrong is that they were entirely unprepared for it to happen at all. This is because a lot of new business owners only ever plan for the things that they want. Instead, you should be planning for every possible eventuality. You need to know what your business is going to do if something were to go wrong. Do you have contingencies in place? If not, you need to go back to the planning stage and think more carefully about the areas where your business might be vulnerable.

When your business is doing well it’s often all too easy to assume that things are just going to work out and that you have nothing to worry about. The problem there is that it means that you’re going to be utterly unprepared for the moment that something does go wrong. As counterintuitive as it might feel in the short term, the reality is that it’s far better to have these protections in place and not need them than it is to realise too late how valuable they would actually have been.