Becoming a solopreneur can be a completely invigorating experience. One day you’re working in an office, under the auspices of a boss, and the next you are your own master, forging your own path, with complete freedom over how to spend your time and structure your day, nevermind what direction to take your business in.
The flipside to all that freedom and autonomy is, of course, that you’re going to have to work hard and smart and be completely self-reliant in order to make a success of your business.
In the pursuit of success, familiarising yourself with a few fundamental skills is extraordinarily important. These include the following.
An understanding of the basics of WordPress use
WordPress is one of the most widely used Content Management Systems out there, and it’s easily one of the most intuitive. Taking the time to familiarise yourself with the basics of WordPress use can save you large sums of money and big swathes of time down the line, as you will be able to put together and tweak appropriately professional websites on your own, rather than bringing a web designer on board for every task.
As WordPress is virtually ubiquitous, the skills you develop in working on your own website might be successfully leveraged later in working on a client’s site. Go the extra step and teach yourself some basic HTML and CSS coding, and you might even be able to include “website design” as a bonus service you offer.
An overview of SEO principles
SEO is the lifeblood of virtually all forms of online marketing. It’s certainly the core component which determines whether your website gets seen by clients or not.
SEO stands for “Search Engine Optimisation” and refers to the best practices for ensuring that Google moves your website reliably up the page and result rankings for your chosen keyword terms.
While SEO can get quite esoteric and weird at the more advanced end of things (that’s generally where professional SEO companies come into the picture) your business can benefit immensely from you simply doing some research and educating yourself on some of the basic SEO principles.
If you don’t know what a SERP is, or how to research the number of times a particular keyword is searched in your country per month, you’re likely blundering in some very essential aspects of your day-to-day business operations.
A mastery time-management
Good time management skills are always important, but they’re all the more essential and indispensable when you are entirely responsible for the success of your own business ventures.
You may already be quite good with time, but have you ever tracked just how much time you waste on a daily basis? And how much you spend on various tasks?
Auditing your use of time in this way is a fantastic idea for any entrepreneur. Use a tool such as Rescue Time and keep tabs on your time use for at least a couple of weeks.
Find ways of cutting out some of the wasted time, just as you would find ways to cut out financial waste in your business. Time is certainly no less a valuable resource than money.
