Stop Wasting Your Money (On Things That Don't Work)
Ultimately when building a business, there are many different types of investments you can make within the company. Allocating your resources efficiently can do wonders for your business. Although there are many great contributions you can make when building a business, there are a few contributions you should not cheap out on. Here are four investment types that you shouldn’t cheap out on if you’re looking to grow your business.
Hiring Multiple People to Develop a Website
When building a business from scratch it is important to eventually create a website to allow your customers to get more information about your business. When trying to find a website company, businesses tend to look for website designers. Often businesses hire a web design company to design a website for them, and then turn around and go hire a web development company to develop the website. When doing that, businesses end up wasting money on hosting more meetings, back and forth revisions, and learning curves due to communication issues. It’s a waste of money to hire one company to design your website and then hire another to develop the website. Try to find a company that has both web developers and web designers in house. A good example of what to use would be a website development agency. (Like us!)
Worrying About Branding After the Site is Live
Many new businesses begin to get eager when first starting out and want a website as fast as possible, often before the company even has branding completed. Creating a website before having your brand identified can cause a lot of issues down the road. When a business creates a website before company branding, they tend to not be able to convey their message properly to visitors. It’s harder to convey the message when creating the website first because most of the time the business doesn’t know what kind of message they are trying to present. Spending money on branding after the website is live is also a lot more costly and less efficient. Typically businesses go through a branding process before creating a website because it helps develop the look, tone, and feel for the brand that should show throughout the website. Choosing to do branding after the website is built creates a higher likelihood of having to redo the website once more which can get costly and be a waste of resources.
Spending Money On Stock Photos
Say you own a Physical Therapy business and are building a new website but don’t want to take your own images or create your own content to display on the website, there are companies that will sell you stock images of a Physical Therapist to display on your website. The caveat is that 50+ other Physical Therapy businesses have that same image on their website. Using stock images and content on your live website isn’t the best idea. Presenting your own photos shows to your clients that you have originality and that you physically exist which gives your business credibility when customers can actually see your line of work/results through photos. Using your own company photos also can help with proving your creditability with Google and with that, SEO. Google helps promote websites that have custom content.
Spending Money On SEO Sites
Many SEO companies advertise that they can get your website listed “on the 1st page of Google today”, but usually don’t deliver on that promise. Spending money on SEO sites like Fiverr is generally a bad idea. Oftentimes businesses like Fiverr are a great place to go for cheap services, but cheap services often yield cheap results. While Fiverr does appear to be useful to some people depending on the service, for most marketing or SEO services the results are pretty shoddy. SEO takes time to build, building repertoire with other companies is crucial to successful SEO. Companies will volunteer to link back to your website if they like your brand, which will help your website get views. The more websites that link back to your website the higher you will be ranked on a search engine. Also, content changes take time but can help improve your SEO ranking drastically. Getting rid of old content and taking the time and resources to produce new and improved content for your website can positively impact your ranking on search engines. The most efficient way to increase your rankings without taking to much of your valuable time is to just make upgrades to your old content without getting rid of it altogether. Doing this allows you to make your existing content better with every tweak you make while not having to give up too much of your time to do so.
