3 Things to Watch Out for as an Online Entrepreneur

Running a small business is hard - you do not have an easy access to capital as much as you would like. Growing your customer base from scratch can be tricky. And most importantly, your business does not have enough buffer to survive when things go wrong.

Things can be trickier for an online small business owner. If you depend on Google for traffic, then you always run the risk of violating one of Google’s many algorithmic demands that can get your website to disappear from search results in no time. You can of course choose to bypass this by acquiring paid visitors instead. However, PPC ads can be quite expensive for a small business owner.

Here are a few things that you must watch out for as an online entrepreneur.

Poorly run website

As an online entrepreneur, a well-run website is key to your business success. A website that fails to load, or takes too much time to load brings down your credibility in the eyes of your customers. While it may be tempting to save costs by picking a cheap shared hosting option, or use free scripts to build your website, it is worth noting that this infrastructure may not be optimized for your operations.

The best small business web hosting service is one that is cost effective and is also, at the same time, highly reliable with minimal downtime and fast processors. Most web hosting plans today come with an option to try for free and so take your time to test your scripts on these various platforms before you finalize on the best option.

Using the wrong tools

Small business owners need a number of different tools to run their business. Apart from services to send email marketing messages and SMS notifications, they may also want online tools to help them with accounting, invoicing, payment processing, shipping, and so on. Thankfully, there are tons of free tools to help you with each of these various operations.

But this is where things can go wrong. Paid tools cost money for a reason - they are more reliable and have a solid development and support team to handle your business needs. While free tools can work on a good day, there are often times when they fail and this can bring down the overall productivity of your application.

Take email marketing as an example. There are many free email broadcasting services you can use for your business. But email deliverability from these tools leaves a lot to be desired. Services like MailChimp have better deliverability. But if pricing is an issue for your bootstrapped business, you can consider investing in one of the many MailChimp alternatives that offer the same levels of deliverability at much lower costs.

Wrong customer acquisition channels

As an online business, you could potentially cater to clients from anywhere in the world. But picking the wrong acquisition channels can define the success or failure of your business. Search Engine Optimization can deliver free traffic to your business on a consistent basis. But finding success with SEO can take a lot of time. Similarly, paid ads can help you acquire customers at short notice. However, this costs a lot of money - something that you may not afford.

Finding the right acquisition channel for your business can thus be highly profitable.

Are you an online entrepreneur? List down the factors that are crucial to your success in the comments below.