When the COVID-19 pandemic played havoc with the business world and consigned people to their homes for lengthy stretches, it sparked a massive wave of entrepreneurialism. The idea of having a job for life with one company had already become unrealistic, and a spate of firings stemming from businesses trying to protect their profits made one thing clear: if you want some stability in your professional life, you need to take charge of it.
Now that over a year has passed since the scale of the outbreak became apparent, though, home entrepreneurs can no longer view their operations as fundamentally experimental. Competition just keeps getting higher, and the strength of support for fresh entrepreneurs that peaked during the worst lockdowns has dwindled as life has settled down somewhat.
In short, those who’ve turned their hobbies into businesses need to step up their efforts to achieve lasting success in a world starting to emerge from the worst of the pandemic — and in this post, we’re going to identify some things they should look to improve. Let’s get started.
Their websites
Every good online operation relies on a strong technical foundation. It’s possible to establish a business on a mediocre platform, but extremely difficult to grow or even sustain it. Most entrepreneurs will have built their sites using WordPress (which is perfectly respectable) or low-
cost ecommerce services like GoDaddy, but some will have made much worse choices — and for them, migrating their websites (though frustrating) would be entirely justified.
Even a good platform needs a smart configuration, though, and that’s where more issues arise. A business site should be fast, responsive, and primed to perform well in the search rankings for key terms: that means having suitable metadata, featuring informative posts, and meeting core security requirements. Anyone uncomfortable manually tweaking their website should seriously consider getting a consultation from a developer to see what (if anything) needs to be done.
Their brand identities
A modern entrepreneur needs a personal brand to help them get noticed, but it isn’t easy to create one. It requires various elements that together form a unique package: a core value proposition, some character traits, some key media types, and some network associations (after all, a solo operation can’t easily grow without support from relevant business contacts: Science of People has some tips on this).
Now that things are settling down, it’s a good time for entrepreneurs to go back to the drawing board and decide how they want to present themselves on a long-term basis. What are they known for now, if anything? What do they want to be known for? Only when they’ve set out some clear goals can they start to implement improvements.
Their marketing content
Part of maintaining a strong brand today involves producing a lot of branded marketing content. This is why so many companies have blogs: it allows them to attract views to their business sites, engender goodwill from their target audiences, and even pick up backlinks from other brands that choose to link to their resources.
The issue there, of course, is that producing good content is extremely challenging. It’s complex, time-consuming, and more creatively demanding than many can handle. The path forward involves careful planning (setting out a content calendar with titles decided ahead of time) and setting achievable goals (only producing two pieces of content per month if that’s all that can be managed). Consistency is more important than frequency.
Wrapping up, home entrepreneurs have bright futures in the post-COVID-19 world, but only if they take action to improve their operations as much as they can. Working on the things we’ve looked at here is the way to go.
I came across an interesting stat, looks like covid times number of business registrations have increased by about 10%. It is a good opportunity now to work on networking and building a brand further