When doing business online, there are a set of fundamental skills that most ventures use to find success. While some skills are suited to specific roles, others are more transferable and can be applied to many different online business models. If you’re a solo entrepreneur or looking to improve your job prospects online, learning these three skills can help you out.
Website Building & Design
Building and fine-tuning websites is one of the most fundamental skills you can learn online. Every business, from small blogs to retail giants, needs a website to maintain its online presence.
Many small businesses are still making their way online, as entire sectors like e-commerce and iGaming are spearheading new ways to present their services to users. These sites consider user experience when designing their pages, putting products/services front and center to catch clients’ attention. That’s why blackjack games at Paddy Power are organized into distinct windows – small squares containing each game that efficiently advertises multiple services at once. Similarly, it’s why retail pages at Amazon keep it simple with a product image and descriptive bullet points beside it. Those are some examples of UX design, tailoring websites to how users interact with them.
Site building and UX design are valuable skills when starting your own business, and you can do it for others. There are a lot of reputable platforms like WordPress that make web building a lot easier than it was in the past. However, if you want an even more valuable skill, web development is also an option for those with a knack for programming.
Search Engine Optimization
Just like websites, search engines are fundamental to finding goods and services online. As a result, knowing how the world’s largest search engine works and how to rank with it can be a valuable skill that you can use with any online venture.
Large, established brands may have no problem ranking on Google, but many start-ups and small companies will pay for search engine optimization. If you’re making your own site, knowing SEO principles will help you gain traffic and open up monetization opportunities further down the road.
SEO encompasses a wide umbrella of activities, explained here by the SEO experts at Moz. All of them focus on making a site more appealing to Google’s ranking algorithms, so the site shows up at the top of search results. Many sites are starved for attention, with the competition getting fiercer over time. The skills of SEO can be applied to any venture, making it a nice-to-have skillset that can put you above the rest when operating online.
Social Media Management
Mastering social media engagement is another skill that can be very transferable. Many small businesses rely on social media pages, especially if they haven’t got their own site yet, and it’s a great way to reach new customers online.
Like website building, an effective social media manager will always be in demand so long as businesses use pages on these platforms to market their business on a budget. Social media sites can also be volatile – they become trendy and fall out of relevancy over time, so there’s no end to potential customers as people flock to the next big thing.
Social media management isn’t just about communication – many sites give you access to analytics that you can use to alter your strategy. This gets into SEO territory, as managers experiment with business-related keywords, keep up with trending topics, and post at times when their largest demographics are awake. Practical experience with social media engagement gives you valuable content and digital marketing expertise that can be an effective transferable skill, especially in our ever-evolving digital age.
