11 Tasks You Can Outsource as a Small Business Owner

With the rise of the new gig economy, more and more people are leaving their traditional workplaces to go into business for themselves. These include entrepreneurs, solopreneurs, freelancers, and small business owners.

While this means that the job market is robust, always changing and therefore steadily growing, it also means that there is now also an increase in independent professionals with a wide range of skills.

Outsourcing

For small business owners, this means that you can get someone short-term to do tasks that would usually require a full-time employee.

More and more business owners are outsourcing their work nowadays. However, it doesn’t have to be just limited to website or logo or graphic design.…

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3 Simple Ways to End Internal Communication Woes

In military forces around the world, top-notch communication skills, or a lack thereof, are considered a life and death issue. After all, any slip in the communication lines can result in catastrophe – soldiers can lose their lives, innocent civilians can be killed or harmed, wars can be lost. Big communication blunders are rarely forgiven, those who make the small ones are often subjected to the “three strikes and you’re out” rule.

Internal communication woes

In business, some workplaces have their communication down pat. Others are terrible, yet refuse to learn their lesson when blunders happen time and again. A study from a few years ago labeled “The Cost of Poor Communication” made it abundantly clear that communication woes cannot be treated as a casual issue.…

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Local SEO: Does Where You Host Your Website Really Matter?

While it’s still open to debate on any given day, up to a third of Google searches are for local businesses. The search engine provider has also stated that local searches on mobile devices are growing fifty-percent faster than other types of queries.

Local SEO

If you own a local small or medium size business, you could be losing hundreds, even thousands of potential customers if your web hosting isn’t up-to-par. Considering we’re in the middle of yet another online boom period (ie., local search), you need to make sure your SEO plan is leaving nothing to chance.

What’s up-to-par mean when considering hosting providers?

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4 Self-Improvement Strategies for Small Business Owners

As a small business owner, you may have become so caught up in improving your company that you have forgotten to spend any time improving yourself. Running a business can certainly be a turning point for many people, but there are also many strategies for active self-improvement that can be effectively used by entrepreneurs. Self-improvement will not only benefit your personal life and relationships, but it will affect every aspect of your life, including your business and perhaps even your finances.

Meditating business woman

Here are some of the best ways to invest in your own self-improvement.…

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Why Your Business Should Excel at Customer Convenience

We live in a world of instant gratification and ultimate convenience. Delivery services are faster than ever before, with some being able to deliver groceries and other items within the hour. Transportation services are available with the click of a virtual button. And with apps like Tinder, even dating has become mostly about instant attraction.

Customer convenience

We can order so much from our smartphones, and that means there’s less to wait on. It also means that your business needs to excel at customer convenience in order to compete with the other companies that are out there.

The Age of the Smartphone

More and more people own smartphones.…

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Mobile or Online Banking: What’s the Difference?

Today, there are so many options to conduct transactions at your bank without actually going to a physical branch. Two of these methods include mobile and online banking. While most people use these terms interchangeably, there’s still a big difference between these two modes.

Mobile banking

Defining Mobile Banking

Strictly speaking, mobile banking is an umbrella term to cover any transaction conducted using a mobile phone or device. For example, sending text messages to approve transactions or receiving SMS about your account’s status can fall under mobile banking.

However, these kinds of transactions are not as common anymore due to the advent of the smartphone.…

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ASP.NET Offers Open-Source Performance Tools For Websites

A Well-Tuned Online Engine

ASP.NET

Your website’s programming has some similarities to an automobile engine. Just substitute lubricating “oil” for functional “coding”. Like oil wears out, certain errors in coding will manifest through the site’s regular usage. How much traffic your site can handle, how it works in differing service areas, how well it performs generally—these things will transition.

When your car’s oil becomes compromised by continuous use, the functioning of the engine is in jeopardy, and so the resale value of the car. The engine could seize up, and then your vehicle is history. Well, there’s little danger of a website seizing up, but it can become so difficult to navigate that users have a propensity to avoid it.…

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Free Up Your Focus: The Benefits of Outsourcing Your Human Resources Department

In simple terms, Human Resources (HR) essentially deals with anything regarding the people involved in a company. From payroll to talent development to recruitment, HR departments have a wide variety of tasks that require an array of skills and time to complete.

Human resources

Almost every legitimate company with employees will have some form of HR personnel, and it’s essential the job is done correctly to ensure the people-aspect of a firm runs smoothly. Due to the pressure that’s sometimes placed on HR departments for such a wide scope of responsibilities, outsourcing HR has become increasingly popular. In fact, outsourcing HR has taken off so much it’s estimated to have grown to a colossal $165 billion, making it a worthwhile investment for a lot of businesses.…

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5 Things You Should Get from an ERP Demo

Before committing to an ERP vendor, it is essential that you insist on receiving an ERP demo in advance. Since the goal of any ERP is for it to become an essential part of your daily operations and long-term growth strategy, you want to have every confidence you’re committing to the right vendor. An ERP demo is a way to look past the stock sales pitch and get a more honest understanding of what an ERP solution and the vendor who offers it can and cannot do for your company.

Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP)

Here are the five things you should be sure to get:

1.

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Crossborder Ecommerce GMV Expected to Grow at 25 Percent Through 2020, per DHL

Online merchants positioned to sell internationally are poised to see considerable growth, according to a study just released by international express services provider DHL. Entitled “The 21st Century Spice Trade: A Guide to the Cross-Border E-Commerce Opportunity”, the report highlights significant growth opportunities for retailers and manufacturers with international ecommerce platforms.

Online shopping

Among the key findings of the report, cross-border ecommerce gross merchandise volume is expected to grow at the rate of 25 percent through 2020. This represents an increase from $300 billion in 2015 to $900 billion by 2020.

An expanding class of cross-border shoppers is driving this growth as they are increasingly being drawn to the ready attainability of products they can’t find on store shelves where they live.…

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