20 Small Business Tips for Your Success

Whether your small business is online or offline, whether it is home-based or located away from your residence, and whether it is part-time or full-time, here are 20 small business tips to boost your success.

1. Know thyself. Spend time with yourself to dig it deeper, to find your real passion in business, to determine your hidden talents, and to discover your potentials. Develop yourself first before you attempt to develop even a small business.

2. Have a vision. Ensure that you have a perception and you can see yourself, your business, your customers, and every stakeholder of your business becoming successful in a certain future.

3. Start a mission. Make sure that your vision is backed up with executable mission, composed of achievable and time framed steps or procedures. Be courageous, but don’t forget to calculate the involved business risks to cloth yourself with preparedness.

4. Research your niche market. Based on your passion, expertise, and based on what you do best, determine the specific market that you should be focusing and targeting.

5. Target your market. After narrowing the right market for your small business, develop the right product or service that will satisfy that market. Aim to hit the bullseye.

6. Create a plan. Write down your business and marketing plan according to what we have discussed in the previous tips. Make them SMARTER (specific, measureable, achievable, relevant, time-bound, evaluated and reevaluated).

7. Establish your business principles. Never do business without having great business principles. They would serve as the foundation where you will stand firmly while doing business and entrepreneurship.

8. Position your core values. Have great values, such as excellence, integrity and consistency, placed on the center of your business, where your heart is.

9. Legalize your small business. Operate your small business with the applicable government licenses. It boosts your sincerity as an entrepreneur and enhances trust from your clients or customers.

10. Pay applicable taxes. Do not be above the law. Pay your tax obligations to have a good night’s sleep and save yourself from future tax penalties.

11. Understand financial accounting. Know the language of business – accounting. If you’re not an accountant or you don’t have the money to hire an accountant, attend short-term accounting courses or training on accounting to learn the basics of this subject matter.

12. Make your team works. Whether you’ve hired employees or have outsourced services from third parties, learn how to establish team work and collaboration. Be a good leader and an effective manager. Motivate your team often, make them feel valued, promote happiness, and ensure that the team is productive.

13. Wow your customers. As a surprise gift to your customers, always give a little more. It could be an extra product, service or saving. Study your competition to have an idea what to give to your customers to wow them. Be generous so that they will also be generous in giving you their precious money, and more importantly, their loyalty.

14. Set up an updated website or a blog. Build your online presence. Have an updated and rich-content website or blog that is accessible on the Internet, be searchable on the search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing, and be sharable on social media like Facebook, Google+ and Twitter.

15. Have an active presence on social media. Present your brand where the crowd is – the social media. Create active pages or profiles on Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and other top social networking sites. Target your social media audience according to your niche and connect to the social media people with a human touch.

16. Make a lot of friends. Earn more and more friends online and offline by being humble, helpful, and by being a man or a woman of integrity. Do that also by being a socially responsible business person or entrepreneur, who is helping the community and protecting the planet where people live in.

17. Take regular breaks. Give yourself a break regularly to be free from physical, mental and emotional stress brought by working on your business. Eat the right foods and do regular body exercise to be fit always to do business. Don’t forget to give your team or employees enough rest and vacation too.

18. Use your money wisely. Don’t save too much cash and don’t spend too much bucks. Get rid of the bad habits that squander your money, such as recklessness, boastfulness, gluttony, drunkenness, and the like.

19. Continue training and learning. Don’t stop learning and growing. Be humble and always admit that you need to learn more. You could always read books, learn from a business mentor or coach, undergo training, or conduct your own research and experiments.

20. Stick to your plan. Make sure that your good business plan will be completed and become a success. Thus, don’t be tempted by any kind of distractions, bitter or sweet. Make sure to successfully achieve your first big thing in business first… before you start the next big thing.

Thank you for reading. If you like this article, you may also read these 7 amazing business tips from babies or this comprehensive list of 36 ways to rock your small business online.