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Shortcut to success? Six useful tools to take the stress out of your startup

Dec 24, 2018 | Business Success and Challenges

Potential entrepreneurs are often spooked by the large quantities of cash needed for specialist services to get their startup off the ground. After all, outsourced or in-house services can be cripplingly expensive.

But help is out there.

A number of effective free-to-use shortcuts covering graphic design, social media management and enterprise social networks can help you drastically reduce those startup costs whilst giving you exactly what you need to flourish.

Here we look at six and examine how they can help your startup.

1. Canva: The website that turns you into a graphic designer.

What does it do?

Canva can turn you into a graphic designer by helping you create designs for your website, YouTube or Facebook channels as well a host of other platforms. You can drag images into a design, or select from among a million stock images, or upload files from elsewhere.

An all-in-one graphic design app, it allows you to add and edit text to create a professional design which can be published or shared directly to social media.

How can Canva help?

In short, Canva will help you save money and time.

Graphic designers can be costly, and anything you can do in the early stages to minimise your spend is money in the bank.

With many thousands of well-designed templates available, you can produce presentations, websites and social media channels with the gloss of a graphic designer at a fraction of the cost in a much shorter time.

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2. Hootsuite: The tool that saves time on social media management.

What does it do?

Used by a string of international brands to save time on social media marketing, you can view multiple streams simultaneously and monitor exactly what your customers are saying.

You can schedule posts in advance, connect with your customer base and track clicks across all your most important platforms.

How can Hootsuite help?

Its most valuable feature lets you manage more than thirty five popular networks in one place.

That allows you to post updates, review responses and connect with customers without having to go to each individual website.

From Twitter to Facebook, Instagram to Vimeo, you’ll only have to remember one password.

In addition, its analytics feature gives you the opportunity to analyse your social media strategy and gauge how effective it is.

And the ability to schedule posts in advance means that your strategy can more easily include those critical times of day when posts get the most clicks.

3. Slack: The enterprise social network that organises discussions into workstreams.

What does it do?

Slack organises discussions into channels, with files and incoming messages indexed and searchable, providing a transparent platform to access the collective knowledge of your business to provide effective project management.

It allows employees to join transparent communities which they can access to retrieve vital information and share knowledge company-wide.

And it can integrate with apps you use every day, like Box, Dropbox and Google Drive.

How can Slack help?

It lets you harness the collective intelligence of an organisation to drive increased productivity.

After all, anything that allows greater collaboration among staff who can access important up-to-date information is likely to save time.

And quicker access to that information will offer you greater efficiency and increased revenue.

4. Nabbesh: The website that lets you hire suitable freelancers within your budget.

What does it do?

You simply post the project you want to undertake and the budget you have for it. Nabbesh then creates a shortlist of suitable candidates for you to consider and allows freelancers on that list to bid for your project.

And while that’s happening, you can chat with freelancers from the shortlist on the private workspace and hire according to your needs.

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How can Nabbesh help?

Firstly, you don’t have to commit to an expensive permanent hire early on in your startup’s life. And Nabbesh only charges a 15% commission once a project is complete, not in advance.

In addition, Nabbesh acts as an intermediary in the event of any dispute between you and a freelancer.

And you don’t have to waste valuable time conducting face-to-face interviews with candidates to assess if they are a suitable match for your project.

5. SEMRush: The platform that identifies what’s happening in your niche.

What does it do?

SEMRush pinpoints different trends, whether on a corporate website or a blog, giving you the chance to check rankings and back links as well as identifying keywords.

Its traffic overview screen shows what search traffic you’re receiving and also lets you see if your main keyword rankings are up or down.

How can SEMRush help?

In short, it gives you competitive intelligence with a more in-depth knowledge of exactly which keywords people are using to search for organisations exactly like yours. Armed with that, you can see exactly which pages are helping or hindering your success.

This means you can focus efforts and resources into developing content to target those search terms.

And that translates into increased traffic and ultimately increased revenue.

6. Google Analytics: The tool that can turn visitors into customers.

What does it do?

It tracks and analyses visitors to your website, giving you an understanding of how much traffic you’re getting, how visitors behave once they’re on your site, and therefore how your website is performing according to your strategy.

In addition, it can tell you exactly where that traffic has come from.

How can Google Analytics help?

Because it gives you valuable insight into your visitors.

And that insight can help you make critical decisions about your website and content strategy based on real information about how visitors behave.

That way, you’ll have the chance to maximise the value of those visits, keep visitors on your website and thus turn them into customers. And more customers means greater revenue.

Shortcuts – how they can work for you

With just a few effective and carefully chosen free-to-use tools, you can give yourself a competitive edge whilst saving startup costs and driving revenue.

Setting up your own business has never been easier. Virtuzone takes care of it all so you can focus on what matters – building your business. For more information about company formation in the UAE mainland or free zones, please call us on +971 4 457 8200, send an email to info@virtuzone.com, or click here.

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