Social media is a big part of any marketing plan. I have seen many new business owners get started with the belief that social media is all they need. This is definitely not true. There are seven programs and services that you are going to need in order for your business to survive on line.
1. Data backup. It is sad how many people don’t back up their data. What would you do if you lost everything? There are many ways that you can have data backup be automatic so that you don’t have to remember to go in and do it every day. Get out there, take a look and find out what works best for you. Personally I have a plug-in on my word press website that automatically sends me a backup every single day. I don’t have to do anything, I don’t have to remember and it’s automatic.
2. A shopping cart. A shopping cart will enable your customers to purchase 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 the web forms that are going to enable you to make all of that happen.
3. Credit card processing. Yes, you can go without accepting credit cards and just have clients/customers use PayPal. There are many people who will not connect their accounts to PayPal but you want to make it as easy as possible for people to pay you money. You can do that by making sure that you get a credit card processing company and are able to 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 a lot of them out there. Check out, do the research, find what works best for you.
5. Antivirus software. The bigger your site gets, the greater the chance that someone will hack it or will attempt to hack it. I did have my site hacked once. It was a very scary experience! Luckily with HostGator, they cleaned it up for me, but it scared the daylights out of me. Becuase I thought I was just a little page, just getting started, why would anyone want to hack me? WRONG! So I now have antivirus software on my computer.
6. Accounting. This is the one that I procrastinated on for way too long. Start early, get a free version of some accounting software, and get the smallest version that you can, get started. Don’t wait on this one. It is really important if you’re going to want your business to get bigger and bigger that you are keeping track of all the numbers.
