Unique Ways Your Online Business Can Save Money In 2020

Money can often be tight for an online business looking to grow. The team is there, the skillset is brilliant, but sometimes the outs outweigh the ins at the end of the month. It’s time to try and introduce some cost-cutting methods, but the obvious advice doesn’t apply to every business or the scale of the issue.

Don’t fear, we’ve put together a list of slightly more unique ways you can save money within your online business without sacrificing the quality of your performance or service.

Outsource work

In the early days of your business or when you’re struggling for clients and customers, you may not need to have a large permanent team all year round. While it may be great to constantly have that resource in the office, harnessing the skills of external professionals will help you heavily save on overall cost.

Outsourcing your work is an effective money-saving technique in today’s modern employment climate, where more people than ever are self-employed and sell their skills. Freelancers can be expensive, but once the project is over, you’re no longer paying them. This saves on the continuous expense of paying a permanent salary, as well as the additional costs of benefits, days out and bonuses.

There are numerous ways you can find brilliantly skilled works online. Using this method gives you access to people when you need them most and allows you to build a strong working relationship with an expansive group of freelancers who could become permanent members of your team down the line. The cheapest way of providing the high quality of service you desire to.

Manage travel expenses

Travel is a major expense for small businesses to contend with. Unfortunately, it is often a necessary one you need to set aside a significant portion of your budget to cover.

To start saving, think about how you can cut down on the number of times you need to travel for meetings. Messaging and video chat services are often free and can save businesses significant amounts that would otherwise be spent on travel and meeting in a restaurant.

When you are meeting a new client for the first time or your business partners and have to travel, try to make little savings throughout the process. Public transport can often be a much cheaper form of travel, especially when using specialist savings cards. If you’re driving, investing in a fuel card can help you make little savings every time you refill your vehicle. For online businesses to truly save they need to recognize the little changes they can make along the way rather than focus on big expenses they can cut out.

Go green

There are huge benefits to be had in going green with your online business, beyond the obvious one of savings the planet it operates on.

Sustainability has become a major employee concern across the country, while making efforts to be more eco-friendly can also open you up to collaboration projects resulting in great PR. Most importantly, going green is actually a brilliant want to cut costs in your business. While making major changes in this vein sounds like an expensive investment, it’s actually very easy to introduce sustainability efforts without spending heavily.

By making your business paperless you’re actually cutting out a major monthly cost and making your team much less wasteful. Cloud systems have essentially made keeping everything on a paper file redundant. You can also make efforts to introduce car-pooling or remote working schemes into your work, reducing your carbon emissions total and removing the cost of paying for travel if you’re covering it. Having fewer people in the office also lowers the cost of utilities, a change that can be made with something as simple as energy-saving lightbulbs.  

Office shares

Many business owners start their online company with dreams of a fancy office somewhere in the center of a trendy city. The truth is, for an online business, office space can be incredibly expensive, with the price of rent only increasing year on year.

Sharing your office space with another business is a brilliant way of taking a huge amount out of your bill each month. It allows you to get a higher quality location for your business to grow in, without paying top dollar. When the price of rent is shared between two or more businesses it starts to look much more manageable, and the profits can be used elsewhere.

You may have visions of your own space, and find the idea of another company operating in your vicinity when you’re trying to collaborate as a team annoying, but it actually gives you the opportunity to build a strong relationship with a business of a similar size. Once you’re together in the same room it’s not just rent you’re saving on, it’s everything from utilities to decoration to coffee.

Embrace local advertising

Your local press is likely starved for material, with plenty of promotional opportunities just waiting to be filled by a business like yours. Making use of advertising much closer to home can help you reduce your overall spend and get much more direct results.

It may seem a bit old school, but an innovative online business can really make their mark making use of great cheap assets like the local media. See what advertising slots they have available on their website, ask if there are opportunities to highlight your business and look at local events you can try and sponsor or participate in. There may be a more limited range, but there is a strong potential for a more engaged campaign.

Social media may be a more advanced and effective platform to advertise your business on, but it’s vital that online businesses still go out into the real world to build a local base. Not only does it make the bottom line easier on the eye at the end of each month, it opens you up to opportunities to work within your community and establish your business as local leaders.

These are just a few unique ways you can go about saving your business a bit of extra cash. They save you from having to make hard decisions about your team or scaling back your operation.