I’ve hand-picked some of the best resources to help you grow your online business and skills to stay relevant in the digital world.
Upgrade Your Skills
Learning new skills is crucial to keep yourself relevant in the industry. Whether you are a developer, sysadmin, security researcher, marketer or business owner – there is always some innovation taking places which might impact you if you are not well aware of what’s going on in your industry.
Example – AI has evolved rapidly in last years. There are millions of things you can automate and become more efficient. With the right AI tools, you can save hundreds of hours at your work.
Geekflare has hundreds of articles to guide you with the helpful courses and certification to upgrade your skills.
Understand Technology
We often ignore the basics by assuming that we know things. To become a master in any field, you must know the basics concepts. The below are some of the articles that teach you the basics of technology.
Start Blogging
One of the best ways to make an online presence is to start blogging. And, not only that, you can extend to passive income source if you like. There are many, once started as a blogging has made a full-time career.
Pat Flynn, Neil Patel, Pete Cashmore, Amit Agarwal are some examples to get inspired.
The first thing you need is a domain which you can buy on Namecheap, it won’t cost more than $10. Alternatively, you can start wiring on open blogging platforms for free.
If you go with your own domain name, which I would strongly advise, next, you need to decide how to host your website. WordPress is one of the leading blogging platforms that offers domain and hosting, both. Probably the easiest way to get you online.
If you need alternative hosting solutions, you can go for SiteGround.
Managing Team
When your team grows, you’ll encounter many challenges, but with the productivity tools, you don’t have to worry about how to collaborate with the team.
For documents, emails, calendars, you can use Google Workspace. And, Slack for real-time chat. If you are a Microsoft fan, you can try Microsoft 365 alternatively.
To manage team’s leave, payroll and HR related stuff, you can use Zoho People or Rippling.
Managing Tasks
When I started Geekflare, I was managing all tasks within email by labeling and starring them. This works well when you are only one doing everything. But when you grow, you will need a software to help you become efficient.
We use Notion to manage tasks and wiki, but if you need more than that to manage a bigger project, you can check out monday.com.
Supporting Customer
Providing best class client or customer support is vital to building relationship with your customers. When you start selling online, email support is fine. However, as you grow, emails can be challenging to manage.
For small volume, you can try DragApp which lets you share the inbox with your team. And, when you are ready to try full-fledged helpdesk software to manage customer queries from multiple sources like email, phone, social media, etc., you can go for Freshdesk.
If you run SaaS, you can leverage CRM tools to organize customer data and manage customer relationship. There are plenty of options like monday.com or HubSpot.
Securing Website
Often ignored by founders, assuming that your website is secure if you are hosting on AWS or GCP. That’s not true, you must deploy security mechanisms to ensure your online shop or website security.
Cloudflare offers CDN and WAF which is a popular choice. Alternatively, you can try SUCURI to speed up and secure your website from known vulnerabilities and DDoS.
You shouldn’t ignore emails. Most of the phishing attacks start through emails, and you should explore email security solutions to ensure your employees and organization is safe from spam, spoofing and known email attacks.
Periodic penetration test is also recommended to ecommerce and SaaS business to comply with compliance and ensure the system meets security requirements to keep customer data safe.
Protecting Yourself
You become a target too!
We are exposed to the open internet through our smartphones, personal computers or tablets. You should guard your personal devices, especially when you are travelling and connecting to unknown internet.
Avast One is one of the popular choices for personal antivirus and firewall to secure from viruses, Trojans, malware, etc. You can use Avast on a desktop, laptop or mobile devices.
If you are always on the go or need to test applications remotely, you can leverage Proton VPN.
Monitor What Matters
Keeping an eye on your business is important. You can monitor almost everything and, depending on your requirement, you can leverage the necessary tools.
To monitor your website, so you get notified when it is down, slow or having error, you can use StatusCake. And, to monitor entire infrastructure like servers, websites, containers, etc., you can try New Relic.
To get notified when someone mentions your brand on the Internet, you can use Mention or SproutSocial. Monitoring the brand will help you to know what others are saying about your product.
Sometime people are needed to be monitored too. When you have a remote team, you may need to monitor your employees too.
I would also recommend checking out ContentKing to monitor your site’s SEO in real-time. If your online business is very competitive, this can be handy to know when SEO metrics go wrong.
Managing Payments
PayPal is very popular for sending and receiving payments, worldwide, but it can be expensive considering their fees and conversion rate. Wise is a practical alternative solution which offers boarderless account to pay and receive to anyone, anywhere (almost).
If you are selling online, you can use Stripe, which lets you send an invoice and receive payment in major currencies.
You also have to manage your annual accounting, and it would be wiser to use QuickBooks or Xero.
Analyzing Competitors
There is no way to succeed if you don’t know who is your competitor, what they are doing and reviewing their offering time to time. Some businesses require manual research on the ground, but if you are running SaaS, content, ecommerce or publication, you can leverage these tools.
Ahrefs or Semrush for all-in-one SEO audit and competitor analysis. To monitor your competitor’s website for visual change, you can use Visualping. You can use this for defacement monitoring as well.
Closing note
I’ve tried to cover resources for most use cases to start and run your online business. I hope this helps you.
Good luck!
