Forecasts have warned we may have two million additional unemployed after the
lockdown. In the UK the chancellor is expecting a quick “bounce-back” but the jobs market will be far more competitive.
In this article we look forward with optimism and consider moves we can make in readiness for the changes businesses will be looking at in a new climate of opportunity.
Many businesses will not re-open but for those that do remain in business there may be less competition, the chance to pick up more trade as well as expanding into other products.
Remember, we are not alone in these problems, countries in Europe have the same difficulties, as does India and many more.
Obtaining supplies from abroad may become a problem, resulting in shortages. More articles may have to be made in the UK providing new opportunities for our workforce. Business owners are already looking at the future for their businesses and we see some updating their websites and marketing plans accordingly.
Being Prepared For Change
Businesses with an on-line presence will have been best equipped for surviving the shut down and many business owners will be considering how they can develop a section of their business that would survive any recurrence.
The solution may not be obvious at this time but with the new business climate they must be ready to take advantage, and fast!
For employees who may lose their jobs and parents who are planning to return to work, then they will need to demonstrate they are the best applicant in a competitive job market.
Administration in the forms of accountancy, website building and controls, social marketing, product photography and YouTube videoing will have greater prominence in many businesses. Now is the time to train yourself in these areas to give your C.V. a boost and show that you have the valuable skills that all businesses need.
Bookkeeping and Accounting
There is an excellent accounting package developed in the UK by accountants which has a free version that will be adequate for most start-ups. Should your business be VAT registered then the Pro version will be required at a cost of just £5 + VAT per month. Visit Pandle.com and hover over “Features” to appreciate the facilities provided.
With modern on-line accounting packages the need for a dedicated bookkeeper is no longer a necessity. An understanding of the basics included within the packages is a great asset. The free easy to learn bookkeeping course included within this website will give you the basics to follow how entries into the accounting package are processed. In addition, the article Duties Of A Bookkeeper will add the important knowledge of the safeguards that should be included within your administration systems.
Another level of knowledge that can be most valuable to your future employer is the skill of working with the popular accounting packages Sage Accounts, Quickbooks Online, Xero and KashFlow. Free training is provided on videos accessed from the website freebookkeepingaccounting.com
Website Creation
Being able to build websites in WordPress is a very valuable skill.
WordPress powers more than 30% of all websites in the world and the features available through WordPress are vast. We also have to be aware that a website involves costs for a domain name and hosting. The domain name will usually be the name of the business for example AB Hairdresser or a description of the website contents, for example AdminAdvice.
Website hosting is the charge made for “hosting” your website on their server computer which runs continuously so that your website can be found from a search made through Google or Bing. These servers have to be extremely powerful to cope with many people or businesses accessing your site at the same time.
Back in 2013 I was aware of many businesses loosing their websites through the developers of their sites going out of business. I started to investigate the possibility of being able to build our own websites and within a couple of years a number of template website builders were advertising these options. According to PCMag new providers are “popping up all the time” and they can only rate the top provider as four stars. With so many in competition there will undoubtedly be some failures and higher charges from others to keep afloat.
Deterred by the high costs of obtaining and hosting quality websites, start-up and small businesses are increasingly turning to the cheap website option of template website builders, unaware of the limitations and hosting problems associated. For example some of these builds recommend a host at a ridiculously low monthly cost, e.g. “start-up” at £0.33 per month, and it is not until you examine the options provided by this host that you find they only offer “priority support” on their most expensive option at £24.95 + VAT per month (£360 a year). Prompt support is essential, otherwise your website could be down for days and worst case you do not get the issue sorted at all.
Risks With Template Website Builds
Ideally we require a website building platform that has it’s own hosting facilities. That way there’s no “passing the buck” between two parties.
A small business needs to be in a position to add to their website and make changes even on a daily basis. Building your own website you have full control. (It is unusual to design your website perfectly first time)
You are going to learn to build your website using the world leader, WordPress. Setting up WordPress is generally considered a difficult task, most people make a lot of mistakes when setting up their first WordPress website and this can lead to problems later down the line – your platform will have WordPress set up for you, ready to run.
The platform you use is the most simplistic, yet advanced platform in the industry. As the difficult part of loading WordPress has been done for you, it now takes less than 30 seconds to get a full operational WordPress website up and running online, ready for you to enter the content.
Your website design is something personal and WordPress provides a choice that leaves other platforms in the dark ages. On our platform you have access to over 3,000 beautiful themes, mobile ready and every type of website niche catered for. Then there are over 51,000 “feature” extensions that you can use to ENHANCE your website in every imaginable way. Everything from building membership sites, adding shopping carts, image/design plugins, fonts, managing social aspects – and these are FREE and installed on your website with a click of a button.
Training
The package I am going to introduce to you goes way beyond website building, you will also be given training in all aspects of building a business on-line. You will be joining the many, many members that have used the extensive training to build and grow their on-line businesses marketing their own products or services.
The business, formed in 2005, initially to help people learn affiliate marketing, is Wealthy Affiliate. (W.A.). They have invested millions in the creation of their Site Rubix website builder with WordPress together with the development of the fastest hosting in the WordPress industry.
Whether you require a blog or a multi-page stunning, unique website you can achieve it with WordPress and W.A. The W.A. community is 2,000,000 strong worldwide, well over double the number when I joined back in 2014.
During the five years of my membership W.A. have developed their platform and hosting facilities to become the elite in the WordPress industry. They have ideas deep in development behind the scenes that are going to carry W.A. forward not just in the next year, but in the next 5-10 years. Although they have been in business for 15 years, they feel they are just getting started!
The information, facilities and training we witness will I am sure provide us with even more on-line earning opportunities.
If you are already running a business and can’t spend time on the depth of training available i.e. beyond the build of one website, we suggest you may have a member in the family or in your staff who would love to learn the valuable skills of using WordPress, all social media skills, SEO, and learning about other ways of generating an income on-line. You will have the facility to host TEN websites and could build and host websites for your friends etc.
W.A. has the most diverse subset of training, with many ways in which you can monetize a business on-line. The training includes e-commerce, drop shipping, local marketing, adsense, facebook ads, SEO, pay-per-click, e-mail marketing, lead generation etc. If you don’t see the training you are looking for, simply request it. An expert within the community will build it! Every week there are live interactive classes of one hour plus which are recorded. There are many hundreds of hours of these classes in the video library.
Some hour long training videos from March 2019 to February 2020:
- Introduction to Google Webmaster Tools
- Introduction to Bing Webmaster Tools
- The 2019 SEO Checklist
- Introduction to YouTube Marketing
- Produce, Record and Uploading Your YouTube Videos
- Promoting Your YouTube Videos
- Understanding Marketing Funnels
- Building An Audience Beyond Google
- Researching Keywords
- Researching Your Competition
- The Fundamentals of WordPress
- Creating a Beautiful, Professional Looking Website
- Advanced WordPress Techniques/Strategies
- Building an Awesome Home Page
- Building a Convincing About Page
- Building Great Typography
- Building Convincing Call To Actions
- Getting Rolling With Instagram
- Amplifying the Direction of Your Instagram Board
- Instagram Feed and Story Posting Strategies
- Automation Strategies With Instagram
- Building a Local Marketing Business
- Ranking Elements of SEO
- Earning Recurring Revenue with Local Marketing
- How to Track Your Conversions
- Success With Affiliate Marketing in 2020
- Affiliate Marketing 2020 – Predictions and Strategies
- Pinterest Primer
- Building Amazing Pinterest Graphics
- Power Posting Pinterest Pins
- Running Pinterest Ad Campaigns
You have fantastic training for business websites to cater for all types of business.
You are mastering the world leader, WordPress.
You have access via the Site Rubix simplistic yet highly advanced platform.
You have hosting facilities for TEN websites with the fastest hosting in the WordPress industry.
The hosting is on powerful servers and the services provided compare favorably with other hosting packages out there charging £100 plus per month.
Other Features Of The Number One Platform
With W.A., when you register any domain through SiteDomains, you have access to all the features you would expect other domain registrars to charge for. Included with every domain is WHOIS Privacy Protection, 24/7 Support, Next Year Guarantee Pricing, Domain Security, Unlimited E-mail Accounts, Advanced DNS Management and Instant Set-Up. Incidentally a .com domain for your website will cost about $14 a year to register.
A fast website is a higher ranked website with Google. W.A.’s SiteSpeed feature will lead to the fastest website load times in the industry.
Site security is all important. The SiteProtect feature at W.A. adds a three-point protection layer on your websites. Comment Spam, Back Office Hacking (passwords), and Website Load Speeds (Botnet Attacks) are the three ways hackers look to wreak havoc on your business and protection is provided with the SiteProtect platform.
All websites at W.A. are set up with free SSL certificates.
W.A. have a dedicated team of “server administrators” that are keeping an eye on your websites’ performance 24/7/365.
There is a sophisticated layer of monitoring set-up on your websites to scan and find 100’s of potentially critical issues with the technology to automatically deal with these issues to maximize site performance, up time, and overall website security.
Hosting support has been mentioned earlier in this article where priority support cost £365 a year. Unlike other hosting companies where you have to contact an unqualified “help desk”, W.A.’s SiteSupport platform gives you direct access to their server administrators (the technical geniuses) who will immediately address any hosting issues 24/7/365. Average response time is less than 5 minutes for all requests.
The Managed WordPress Hosting at W.A. includes daily snapshots of your website, so if you ever mess things up, they can help get your website back and running for you.
The W.A. hosting includes full redundancy, which means they are at all times running “mirrored” versions of your websites, so if one server goes down, the other one will go live. This is incredibly expensive to implement and to operate, but is a service you will receive.
Fantastic Value
W.A. provides start-ups and small businesses the speed and security previously only available to those spending £2,000 plus on a website.
A freelance web developer may cost less and you can have a bespoke website, most likely built on a bespoke platform that cannot be moved anywhere else, meaning you are tied to that developer for the life of your website.
Template website build options may appear attractive but they could cost much more than the original offers suggest. These need hosting and as mentioned above many hosts have a number of price options with the lower priced being included on shared servers, possibly no backups, less protection and secondary support.
There are three levels of server hosting, shared, VPS and Dedicated. With VPS you enjoy increased power, flexibility and control of your websites. Dedicated provide the ultimate in performance, security and control. The popular Bluehost hosting service offers three levels of VPS hosting, Standard, Enhanced and Ultimate. Monthly costs range between £24.22 + VAT per month, through to £96.90 + VAT per month. Their Dedicated hosting ranges from £96.90 + VAT per month to £169.59 + VAT per month.
Understandably, many start-up and small businesses are not going to pay these prices.
Compare the builder and hosting facilities above to W.A., the most simplistic yet advanced WordPress build platform and the best Managed WordPress hosting available and there is only one choice. Then add all the extras in training and business growth tutorials, ongoing support and keeping your business informed as future technology evolves.
We are comparing a complete business package against a single website build and hosting.
W.A. includes the hosting of TEN websites and the complete business package for just:
$495 PER YEAR! no up-sells and you never pay for any upgrades.
And there is more, when you join Wealthy Affiliate through this website, you will have private messaging access to me and the joint owners, Kyle and Carson. My user name inside W.A. is “Braintree” and I will greet you with a message when you enter, initially FREE, no credit card required.
Yes, I’m there to mentor you going forward, I bring to your business my experience within accountancy and my son will be on hand for any extra website questions (Stephen has been a website developer for 15 years, mainly working with small businesses). I think you will find we bring the perfect team to enhance your admin.
AFFILIATE DISCLOSURE
As your introducer and future mentor, I will receive an affiliate commission from Wealthy Affiliate.
Summing Up
If you are interested in starting your own business then this package is for you. Many people are now creating a second income on-line termed a side hustle. The average earnings in the UK of over 500,000 people earning from various sales activities fitted around family and work obligations is over £370 a month.
Within Wealthy Affiliate there are people, having followed the training, created incomes way above their previous full-time incomes. These levels have been reached from scratch usually over a 3 to 5 year period.
However, at AdminAdvice we are concentrating on providing you with the best information on bookkeeping, accounting and website creation. We have found the website solution that can give you the same security, speeds, options and flexibility that a top-end provider will be charging £thousands for.
We have seen too many small businesses fall into the traps of having to rely on a website developer for updates etc., being stuck with inadequate hosting or having built their website on a template site where they don’t own their website or domain and cannot transfer to another provider. Building your own websites here at Wealthy Affiliate is the safe solution.
With WordPress and W.A. you may later decide to have a designer jump on your website and update it to something amazing for you. Your website is totally under your control, you can even give a member of staff limited access, say to update the daily restaurant menu.
The initial website you build yourself can be as simple (taking a few hours) or be as fancy as you wish. This website is a blog, and we have built AdminAdvice.net to show how you can design any layout you desire from blank pages (no templates). As your mentor within W.A. we will give you every assistance in the creation of your site(s) (remember you can have up to ten websites built and hosted all covered by the $495 a year fee). We are also available to help with your bookkeeping and accountancy.
Preparing for an Office Job
The forecast that an extra two million people will be unemployed due to the outbreak will make job finding much more competitive. Our suggestion is to train from the free bookkeeping course facilities on this site so that you understand the basics and can relate them to the entries you would make in the accounting packages, understanding how that builds to produce a profit and loss account for the business.
Additionally, being able to show that you can build websites using the leading platform, WordPress, is a valuable skill. You might also expand your talents to the other skills provided within the video library of the weekly videoed lessons.
Applying for a job showing you have the enthusiasm to have taken the time to learn these skills and also receive ongoing information and updates from your membership should weigh heavily in your favour.
Education, Education, Education
Even the most successful business people find time to continue their education. With technology changing all the time you must never accept that what you have learned in the past remains relevant today.
As a final comment I would add that being able to build a website and then research the web for content has proven to be highly therapeutic for people of all ages.