How To Grow a Small Business

Life is tough as a small business owner. With 20% of small businesses failing within their first year, and a full 70% failing by year 10, you have to do everything you can to make your revenue outpace your expenses before your cash flow runs dry.

Since one of your biggest expenses is probably personnel, hiring freelancers on a contract basis is an easy way to cut costs without sacrificing quality. In this post, we’ll look at several strategies for how to grow a small business by leveraging freelance talent.

Get a Good Website at an Affordable Price

You might not have any web design skills of your own, but you know that your business can’t succeed in the digital age without a modern website.

If you’ve talked to any web design agencies, however, you’ve likely been quoted a price in the 4- or 5-figure range. While premium web design is definitely worth the price tag, it can be an unrealistic investment for a small business owner that is just starting out.

The good news is that hiring one of the talented freelance web designers on Legiit can save you a lot of money while still providing a modern, mobile-friendly business site.  

A new business website, especially for a small local service provider, doesn’t need a lot of bells and whistles. It just needs to load quickly, provide a smooth user experience, and persuade visitors to contact you.

Finding the right freelance talent can give you all that and more at an unbeatable price.

Land More Leads With SEO

What good is a website if no one is finding it?

SEO is short for search engine optimization, and it refers to the process of making your website rank high in the results on search engines like Google and Bing.

SEO can be tricky, and for a lot of business owners, your time is better spent managing your company than learning and implementing SEO strategies. For a relatively new business, here are some of the most important tasks you can outsource to local SEO freelancers:

• Business Citations. These are listings for your business on websites like Yelp, Foursquare, and HomeAdvisor. They are crucial to ranking locally, but it can be really tedious to manually list yourself in dozens or even hundreds of relevant sites.

• On-site Optimization. This involves making sure all of the pages on your website are written and built in a way that maximizes the chance that Google will understand what they are all about. It can get pretty technical at times, so a lot of business owners prefer to let a seasoned SEO expert take care of this for them.

• Link Building. Backlinks are the number one ranking factor. They are what help Google decide if your site is more authoritative than your competitors’. A good SEO freelancer will understand how to grow a small business website’s rankings by finding quality backlink opportunities that don’t put you at risk of a penalty.

Grow Your Audience With Content Marketing

A company blog can be the perfect way to show off your industry expertise to potential customers and partners. But it’s also great for SEO. In general, the more relevant content that you have published on your website, the more authoritative you will be in Google’s eyes.

However, who has time to pump out a thousand words or more every week? Probably not you. And you also likely don’t have the money laying around to bring on a full-time content marketer.

By finding the right freelance writer for your business, you can have access to regular, high quality content at a price that fits within your budget.  

While you might be hesitant to trust your brand’s reputation to someone outside the company, all it takes is a little bit of due diligence on your part before hiring. Read reviews, ask for samples, and make sure that your writers are using a tool like Copyscape to avoid plagiarism.

Create Stunning Media

Whether you need a new logo, a catchy jingle, or a lead generating YouTube video, hiring a freelance graphic designer or media specialist is the way to go. You might not need their services often, but it can be helpful to know exactly who to turn to whenever the need for new media does arise.

Here are a few ways to use audio and visual media to grow your small business:

• Infographics are highly shareable content. Outsourcing their creation to a skilled freelancer and then sharing it on your blog and social media channels can be a great way to earn shares and reach new audiences.

• Lead gen videos can be published on platforms like YouTube to get your business more visibility and help you rank better in search engines. Of course, the true benefit of a well-designed video is that it converts visitors into leads by prompting them to call you or fill out a form.

• Social media design can help you ensure that all of your graphics, profile images, banners, and more look great and are sized appropriately across all of your social platforms.

Outsource Simpler Tasks to a Virtual Assistant

A good virtual assistant can save you hours every week at a fraction of the cost of hiring a full-time employee. Think of all the time you waste entering data, answering simple emails, scheduling appointments, and completing similar low-level tasks.

Your time is much more valuable when it’s spent on the big tasks that require your leadership and expertise. A trustworthy virtual assistant can take the little things off your plate so that they stop chipping away at your schedule and energy.

Start Your Small Business Growth Today By Hiring Talented Freelancers at Legiit

If you’re serious about learning how to grow a small business by leveraging freelance talent, the next step is to hire your first freelancer.

Legiit is a platform that connects business owners like you to global freelancers in a wide range of industries. Check out who’s available to hire today and learn how they can help you grow your business.