Social media is an important part of any marketing plan. I have seen many new business owners start out with the belief that social media is all they need. This is definitely not true. There are seven programs and services you’ll need for your business to survive online.
1. Backups. It’s sad how many people don’t back up their data. What would you do if you lost everything? There are many ways you can make data backup automatic so you don’t have to remember to go in and do it every day. Go out, take a look, and find out what works best for you. I personally have a plugin on my Word Press website that automatically sends me a backup every day. I do not have to do anything, I don’t have to remember and it’s automatic..
2. a shopping cart. A shopping cart will allow your customers to buy products from your social media profiles, you can create the links, create the pages to put the links on, have those great buy now buttons and web forms that will allow you to make all of that happen.
3. credit card processing. Yes, you can go without accepting credit cards and just have customers use PayPal. There are many people who will not connect their accounts to PayPal but you want Make it as easy as possible for people to pay you money.. You can do this by making sure you get a credit card processing company that can accept all types of credit cards.
4. Web hosting. Your website needs a place to be hosted. There are many different companies out there. Do your research. My personal favorite is HostGator. There are many of them out there. Take a look, do the research, Find what works best for you.
5. anti virus software. The bigger your site is, the higher the chance that someone will hack it or try to hack it. My site was hacked once. It was a very scary experience! Luckily with HostGator, they cleaned it up for me, but it scared the shit out of me. Because I thought it was just a small page, just getting started, why would anyone want to hack me? MISTAKEN! So now I have an antivirus software on my computer.
6. Accounting. This is the one I procrastinated on for far too long. Start early, get a free version of some accounting software, and get the smallest version you can, get started. Don’t wait on this one. If you want to grow your business more and more, it is very important that you keep track of all the numbers.
