Looking to grow your business online without a lot of money? If you are just starting a business, then you cannot afford to waste money. In this article, we will share practical tips on how to grow your business on a small budget. Our goal is to help you compete with the big guys without spending a fortune.
The biggest mistake you can make as a small business is choosing the wrong platform to build your website. A wrong platform will not only cost you more money, but it will also limit your business’ growth potential.
We recommend using WordPress. It is the most popular website builder in the market, and it powers over 31% of all websites (including both small and large businesses).
When we say WordPress, we are talking about WordPress.org and not WordPress.com. They are two different platforms, see our article on the difference between WordPress.com vs WordPress.org for more details.
To start a self-hosted WordPress website, you’ll need a domain name AND a web hosting account. Yes, they’re different. Want to learn more? See our explanation: what’s the difference between domain name vs web hosting.
Different hosting companies offer different plans suitable for small to large websites. This ultimately affects the cost of your website.
If you are just getting started, then we recommend using our hosting services. We are one of the most affordable, value for money hosting companies in South Africa, and we are services businesses around the world, an officially recommended WordPress hosting provider.
As your business grows, you will likely need more hosting resources. Hopefully, by that time you’ll be making enough money to justify an upgrade.
Once you have a little more money to spend, then you can choose a managed WordPress hosting solution from TrendWeb.
Many beginners believe that their customers will not take their business seriously if they don’t have their website professionally designed, grow your business online with a beginner theme and then perfect it once you start making a return.
Getting a professional to custom design your website is expensive, and it’s not needed when you’re just starting out, if you have the budget and want professional advise or solutions from the outset get in touch here.
You can easily start with a ready-made free or premium WordPress theme for a fraction of a price.
See our expert’s pick of the best WordPress themes for some inspiration.
If none of the above themes suit your need, then you can also use these drag & drop WordPress page builders to create completely custom designs without writing any code.
If you want your website to bring you more customers, then you need to add an easy way for visitors to contact you.
The easiest way to do that is by using a contact form on your website.
By default, WordPress doesn’t come with a contact form. Luckily, there are WordPress contact form plugins that can help you easily add a contact form to your site.
We recommend using WPForms Lite. It is the free version of the popular WPForms plugin that’s trusted by over 1 million websites.
Once your business has grown, you can upgrade to WPForms Pro to create more advanced forms like surveys, polls, payment forms, etc.
Most people who leave your website will never come back again. This means that if you don’t get their email address, then you will have no way to communicate with them in the future.
The most cost-effective way to do this is by building an email list.
Email marketing is the most reliable way to communicate with your website visitors.
You can get started with MailChimp, they’re the top rated email marketing service provider in our list.
Search engines like Google are the major source of traffic for most websites on the internet. There are a lot of things you can do to optimize your website for search engines by learning basic SEO.
SEO or search engine optimization is a set of guidelines and techniques that make your website more search engine friendly. It is not too technical and you will be able to do it on your own.
We have published a complete step by step WordPress SEO guide for beginners. We will walk you through the whole process of making your website as SEO friendly as possible.
To get traffic from search engines you’ll need content, which brings us to the next step in this guide.
We hope this article helped you learn how to grow your business online with a shoestring budget. For further assistance, advise or services get in touch here.
