Your Online Entrepreneurial Goals For 2018

Entrepreneurs are an incredible bunch. They are often smart, cunning, resourceful and able to find opportunity where no one else would. They are inspirational to watch, and often bring the very best to the world of business. All of the greatest established ideas are ideas once generated from the entrepreneurial mind.

If you count yourself among this number, congratulations! We have nothing but the most respect for you. Looking towards the coming year, it pays to stay on top of your positive progression, making sure you achieve goals and never stagnate.

What would you consider to be one of the most important things for an entrepreneur to get right in 2018? Well, we’d consider it to be their online approach. The world seems to be transitioning to an always online perspective now, and in many industries it has been for a while. In order to develop your reach, and promote the best parts of what you offer to the world, you should also focus on your online strategy.

We’re here to suggest some brilliant online goals for 2018. For entrepreneurs that have yet to establish these, this can work wonders.

Connection
We are stronger together. Entrepreneurs able to develop a more connected reach with many people are able to promote their ideas well. For example, public profile pages for yourself and your idea can connect, and utilize the contacts built from each platform to elevate the other.

This also demands you open social media accounts on every platform you can. This means Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, Facebook, LinkedIn among others. You always need to be found online, no matter how little you might have to offer right now. At the very least registering the usernames that make the most sense for your brand and future goals is a good pre-emptive measure. We would say however that common social media marketing is for sure the way of the future, so if it’s taken you up to this point to familiarize yourself with these systems, you have work to do.

Crowdfunding
The days of angel investors are still here, as are the days of shareholders. No amount of online functionality will prevent that from being the case. Money talks no matter which platform you hope to gain it from.

However, as evidenced by the near-celebrity status of YouTube stars, the internet is returning the power of content and reach to the hand of individuals. Why should your progression towards your business dreams be any different?  Crowdfunding websites such as Kickstarter, Patreon, Backme and IndieGoGo serve as mainline hubs for you to expose your idea through creative media content. If successful, your project may become fully funded in a matter of months, and maybe even preemptively profitable. While it’s always in your best interest to develop the project from a reputational perspective, if the idea is unsuccessful or otherwise fails, you are under no hard line to refund money.

Of course this shouldn’t be what you aim for in the least, as you can quite rightly alienate many of your backers, and will never find this opportunity again. However, if you get it right, you have gained both funding, an audience, and exposure of your success on an international scale.

Crowdfunding is not limited to individuals with no other means of income. Even larger businesses are beginning to use it to their advantage. One of the most prominent examples is the video game industry. Companies such as Obsidian, who are very successful in their own right will crowdfund titles for a niche audience, titles which may not inspire publishers to invest heavily in the idea. These ideas have caught on, and this company serves as one of the main and most prominent examples of excellent campaigning done right.

If you’re looking for that stress-free funding of your next idea, levelling with your target demographic honestly will gift you with more potential than you may have otherwise realized.

Give Something Back
If you’re relatively successful in your exploits, or have performed well in the past year on your own, why not give something back? This can heighten you in the view of people who know of you, and attract new people to your shores. The secret? This well doing does not come at an express cost. Let us use an example to illustrate this.

Consider you are a business tycoon. You’ve received some popular success for the past year thanks to your development and resale of well priced, great quality properties. By anyone’s account, you are set for life. Now, as part of your web strategy, why not begin a blog dedicated to informing those with entrepreneurial sprints such as you about your history, how you were started, and the decisions that informed your success. This insight will have authority behind it, and will gain an audience naturally.

If you give something back, people will flock to you. This heightens your exposure, and serves as a form of free advertising. It will take a little time to curate, but if you’re looking for an excellent and relatively low-cost method of improving public relations, this could help you to no end.

Automation
Any entrepreneur knows that in order to focus on the objective of innovation, passive income must be earned to generate the backbone for these pursuits. Automation can offer something quite wonderful in this regard, and this matters in an online capacity. Systemizing your support network, your order forms and promotional advantages, as well as utilizing social media connection on your website streamlines a lot of automated processes which you may have been taking care of manually. Anything you can automate for low cost and without sacrificing quality should be your main goal.

As AI develops and offers a more rounded way to detecting and resolving problems online, you may just find it works perfectly when embedded into your online strategy.

Web Design
If it’s been awhile since your last reupholstery, your entire online presence could use a revision. Remember, the UI of your website is the same as dressing well for work, people will see it, make the necessary judgements or craft immediate impressions. You can be the slickest entrepreneur in the world, with a silver tongue and premium suits at your disposal, but if your website is lacking, so are you.

Visit a competent web developing service and consult with them. Allow them to offer solutions which will help you become more adept and able in the online marketplace. Ask to see what predictive trends will arise, and do your best to acclimate to those before they even surface. For example, mobile-friendly websites should be taken care of already at this point, but how about the new virtual reality innovations taking place? Soon your online content will be perceived through a completely different and unique lens, and it pays to get ready for this.

Reliability
You should aim for zero downtime for your website during 2018. Websites are now nuanced and complex (yet reliable) enough for this to happen. You simply need to be aware of the maintenance efforts of your team, and to allow them to carry on their work. You need to be educated in online cyber security issues which could take you down. You need to protect yourself from leaks. You can be sure that Equifax, the credit agency firm which housed information on over a third of Americans were directly and forever impacted by the leaks. You do not want to emulate this in any capacity.

Competency & Capability
2018 is upon us. The internet is such a vital component of our lives, in a professional, private and recreational capacity, that being unfamiliar with it is similar to using sundials to tell the time. If you can, try to develop some basic programming language tools, so you’re able to fix and systemize small programs to help you along in your business processes. Being competently educated will help you turn your entire online strategy in a positive direction, leading you to make fewer mistakes, and allowing you to understand what your web development consultants are telling you.

Be More Present
Be more present online. Use Twitter, and all of the aforementioned social media links to express your opinions, promote your work, and show appreciation for your customers and those that helped you. If you’re online often, you become part of the living room of anyone who follows you. This is a dream that the marketers of the 1950’s would have been astonished for weeks to learn of. If you fail to utilize this, you aren’t keeping up with the modern pace of the world, which increasingly localizes itself in cyberspace.

In conclusion, you can be sure that your online efforts will be rewarded twice over, but only if you use the correct methodology for learning and adapting to the changing trends we all must understand. If you’re able to do this, a wealth of opportunity lays at your fingers. We wish you the best of luck