Tech Tip for Covid-19 Work from Home Entrepreneurs

 Few DIY tips to make your efforts professional

Over the past two months of lockdown imposed in our beautiful island, I noticed there were many posts on #LinkedIn and #Facebook posted by my connections and friends on new business ventures they have started to engage. This was clearly a result of pay cuts, jobs losses, poor inflow of business revenues and even capitalizing on the current opportunities created due to #Covid-19.

It was interesting to see these ventures included reselling of digital products to distributing face masks, shaving items and even daily essentials competing with the large players in the market successfully by utilizing their own people networks.

This gave me the idea of sharing some of my own research and experiences which helped me in successfully setting-up my spouses business startup. This is not the secret formula of success, but will be some essential tips which could help you to amplify your efforts while making it professional.

Here goes the list,

Creating your company domain and website.

Having a professional domain and website is truly a sign of trust for any business instead of using yahoo, gmail or outlook emails and social media as you only tools of promotion. You could make essential information available on your website where your social media page visitors could get redirected to your website to establish your business authenticity. Unlike the good old days buying a domain, hosting and creating a website does not cost much or require great effort or IT knowledge. When purchasing the domain and hosting services choose rating sites who will be able to offer you a better deal than visiting the domain/hosting providers directly. See below example of buying domain + hosting from GoDaddy which has a SGD 4.49 per month savings, buying from a rating site which could be found just by typing "best hosting providers" on Google.

This is the link to the rating site: The 10 Best Hosting Sites 2020 | 10 Best Web Hosting Sites 2020‎

Things to get a little expensive with hosting providers when you move to the second year and therefore separating your domain purchase and hosting would be an necessary action. Domains are generally cheaper to purchase provided that it is not an premium name. Once domain is purchased you could host your website on #Bitrix 24 which is a free website offering. There could be little IT work involved to link the domain with the hosting and instructions could help you navigate how this could be done.

This is the link to Bitrix24 Website builder and hosting: Bitrix24

CRM and direct email tools.

Many who are engaged in products which require a direct engagement approach would benefit from a CRM tool to professionally manage the sales cycle which will provide insights on the efforts. Also some of these tools are equipped with powerful direct mailer tools which could give you great insights on the success rate of your direct mailers. I was personally amazed by #Hubspot which is a free CRM tool equipped with loads of features. See below image of a direct mailer I sent to contacts and I could see many insights related to the mail content which I could use to improve my next mailer.

This is the link to the CRM site to signup: Hubspot

Email Service for your domain

It is obvious that you require an email service provider to setup your emails using the domain which was purchased. On the offer which was mentioned above by GoDaddy they provided a 1 year free subscription to Office 365 which can help you setup effortlessly. Things to get a little expensive with hosting providers when you move to the second year and therefore you may need to seperate email services. Interestingly Zoho was providing free email services upto 5 users if you have your own domain,

This is the link to the Zoho email signup: Zoho Email (Scroll down to find the above signup link)

Video Conferencing Facilities

Engaging your customers professionally would require a professional video/call conferencing facility as personal Skype, Google Hangouts, WhatsApp would not work for certain organizations due to their IT policies. You could simply signup for #Zoom which is an enterprise video conferencing facility which is accepted by many organizations. A single user can signup for free which will allow you to host up to 100 participants, have unlimited 1 to 1 meetings, unlimited number of meetings and ticket support. Only drawback I see would be, 40 mins limit on group meetings imposed by Zoom.

This is the link to signup with Zoom: Zoom

Most of the instructions, best practices, trainings for using these tools are made available by the providers and some interesting instructions and nitty-gritty details could be easily found on YouTube so don't be lazy to watch some videos and put that extra effort to make your business a success. These can be done on your own and does not require any professional support coming at a high cost.\