Category: General

You might think that by waving goodbye to your full-time job, excellent career prospects and steady wage, you can simply utilize the skills that you have learned while working for someone else to start your own business.

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Sometimes, we all face mishaps, false-starts, and dead-ends in our professional lives. This is the case for pretty much everyone, regardless of how conventional or unconventional their job might be.

For entrepreneurs, however — and perhaps especially for those who work primarily through the web — the issue is magnified several times over.

It turns out that even the best entrepreneurs have to deal with the occasional setback — as the multiple failed businesses of Richard Branson can attest to, being skillful is no guarantee that you’ll be met with smooth sailing and endless success in every endeavor.

The fact is that entrepreneurs have to take more risks than conventional workers, on average, because they are responsible for blazing their own trail, often through unknown terrain.

But what should you do if your career seems to have hit a dead-end and you’re not sure where to go from here? Well, going to, or back to, University might be one solution. Here are a few ways that signing up for a University degree can help you get out of that professional rut.

By deepening your skill-set

Sometimes, the reason for your professional mishaps might be the fact that you lack certain vital skills, or that the skills you do have, have not been developed and deepened substantially enough for you to thrive in your chosen field.

On-the-job experience will, of course, go a long way towards developing various skill-sets, but there’s a good argument to be made that studying a University degree can help to give you specialist insight you might otherwise have been lacking.

Studying an Online Marketing Masters degree, for example, will give you a well-rounded overview of the best ways to reach out to clients via the web.

By making your resume more impressive

When it comes to being an entrepreneur, the experience is king, and the success of your business will, to a large degree, speak for itself. It is also the case, however, that — particularly in certain fields — your prospective customers or clients might be looking for a degree in your resume to feel fully confident in using your services.

If having a particular degree is a rite of passage in your field, getting the degree may well go a long way to helping you step out of a rut.

If having a particular degree is a rite of passage in your field, getting the degree may well go a long way to helping you step out of a rut

By helping you to re-train or otherwise adjust your direction

It’s a bitter pill to swallow, but sometimes an entrepreneurial venture is just doomed to failure, for one reason or another. This doesn’t mean that you have to throw in the towel and abandon your dreams of being a successful entrepreneur — in fact, it’s almost a rite of passage for entrepreneurs to get a few failed business ventures under their belts on the road to success.

Nonetheless, re-training and adjusting your professional direction may, at times, be necessary.

Going to University can be an excellent way of re-training and helping you to move from one dead-end career path to another, much more fruitful one.

Marketing is the lifeblood of every business, and this is no less true of online businesses, and online marketing, than it is for more conventional formats. (more…)

As a business owner, your website could be your greatest asset. This is especially true, of course, if your business is primarily conducted online, but it’s also true for any business, as in terms of marketing, communication, and commerce, there are benefits for any industry. (more…)

It doesn’t matter what stage your business is at, you should always be looking for ways that you can take the next step with your business. There will no doubt be so many different things that you can do to progress your business, and it’s the people who are always looking for the next best thing to do that are the ones who are reaching the most success. (more…)

The benefits of starting a freelancing business cannot be overemphasized. From more flexibility at work to high potential income among other things, it is not surprising that a majority of working-class individuals are willing to start a freelancing business at the expense of their traditional careers. Therefore, here are the top four tips for starting a freelancing business that are worth a try.

1) Define Your Goals

The whole processing of reaching your limits can be such a daunting task if you lack well-defined and easily measurable goals. If you are looking to start freelancing, it is crucial to decide if you want to be doing it on a full-time basis or just as a way of earning extra income. Irrespective of your ultimate goal, it is necessary to have a clear goal that you can efficiently work towards achieving.

Most of the entrepreneurs around the world will attest that this is one of the first aspects to put into account as far as starting a successful freelancing business is concerned. It is only after making this clear that you will genuinely achieve your short-term goals as well as benchmarks that will help catapult your business to the horizons of success.

2) Identify Your Niche

Knowing what makes your work unique is not only appealing but also vital for the success of your freelancing business. Understanding your niche goes a long way to helping you narrow your client search, preventing time wastage as you only deal with clients that are truly interested in your services.

In other words, identifying a profitable niche for your freelancing business is similar to seeking out the type of clients that honestly value your work. The good news is that finding the right niche is not rocket science since you only need to examine your work and identify the exact needs of your clients.

3) Find Clients

Now, as you embark on your freelancing business, this is also the right time to find some clients to build a portfolio. At this point, your networking skills will be put to test. Friends and family members present the best way to start your venture. The initial clients are crucial since they can give invaluable feedback about your business.

Consequently, this will be key to the growth of your business since you will be gaining many clients’ trust as you build your portfolio. Interestingly, these clients can also help you build a large client base if you deliver pure gold that satisfies their needs.

4) Create An Online Presence

Remember the ultimate goal is to attract a large client base in the long run, and this is only possible if you have the right portfolio. Now, this is where your online presence comes into play. A portfolio website provides any potential clients with a first impression of your style, work and above all, your past clients. So you can guess what happens if your portfolio website is not well done.

However, a website alone may not be enough if you are looking to develop your freelancing business and it may be necessary to pair it up with social media accounts that reflect your work in the best way manner. Your work should be professional.

You know that WordPress is a great CMS for SEO and the best SEO plugins can drastically help you with ranking higher in search engines. The brutal reality is, you still need to install all the plugins. What’s more, they also don’t just get configured properly out of the box because every site is different and the default configuration that the plugin author offers you may just not work for your WordPress site. Plus, plugins may also fail to get along with the newest version of WordPress. So, you also need to keep track of that. The good news is, you can just have all the WordPress SEO plugins installed and properly configured without you moving a finger. (more…)

I want to offer you a really interesting chart from Moz.com that gives amazing insights on the correlation data in today’s SEO. Though the items in the chart are not exactly ranking factors, they do have some connection and are common among sites that rank high in search results. As Edward Tufte puts it,”Correlation is not causation but it sure is a hint.” And that’s exactly how you need to use the data from the chart. For instance, you’ll find out that there’s a pretty obvious connection between Google rankings and the number of Google+1’s of a particular page. At the same time, Google reps are saying that they are not using this factor in their algo. (more…)