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Thread: How to Start a Business in South Africa

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    How to Start a Business in South Africa

    You may think starting a business in South Africa is really hard, and it is true that many people struggle to get started, especially if you are strapped for capital and have never been in business before.

    But it does not have to be a long, drawn out, uphill battle.

    The advent and access to digital technology makes it possible to get your business up and running in less than 72 hours, at a very low cost.

    As a new entrepreneur, you can easily fall into the trap of thinking that you need to first have an office, a Telkom landline, a website, a logo, business cards and produce expensive presentations.

    In this post, I show you how to either get around having any of the above, or the really fast and inexpensive way to get it done.

    http://www.marketingchannel.co.za/ho...-south-africa/

    I start of with helping you lay the groundwork for setting up your business and then go on to help you validate your idea and show you some really cheap ways to make your first sales.

    The only thing that is required from you is to have your business idea ready.

    Let me know your thoughts and if you can add some money saving or sales techniques to this.

    Read the full post here.

  2. Thank given for this post:

    BusFact (26-May-17), New Perspective studio (14-Jul-17)

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    Site Caretaker Dave A's Avatar
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    Great job, Leon.

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    Nice tips, helped me on solving some problems.

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    New Member navitas's Avatar
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    great tips.. thanks

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    Awesome! Its hard to find good content related to South Africa. Well done.

    PS you should get a SSL cert for your website as it may not render for some users.

    As aside, you should check out 99 designs for running graphic design contests for logo, CI kits etc.

    Another great start up business resource is Upwork (formally Elance), where you can hire all kinds of freelance resources to do tasks for you on the cheap.

    Are you familiar with these tools?

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    I cringed a bit at the website and logo references as i am a graphic designer.

    A recent study shows that 72% of consumers research a product online before even entering a store...So if your website, logo and branding are not directed towards your consumers with simple things font types, colours, images,
    call to action (all of which have massive psychological influence in the direction of a sale as you mentioned with colours) ,back-linking your website in certain linking communities, gaining authority in your relevant online community with content that is of value and a strong cohesion between all off these it will have an impact. This is part of what Graphic and web designers study for.

    Website wise, Im not talking about marketing as in selling your product to customers with what you write or display because none of that matters if you arent "marketing" and optimising for search engines. It needs to be done for both.You need to know what search queries to go for ( and the Lsi around it),how strongly this keyword is competed for, what your competitors are doing right and doing wrong , withing their coding, marketing and what they display, before ever starting to consider content on a website.

    If you dig further into the said site's (wix, weebly ect) you will see that the content optimisation on page and in the actual html, the php, the JavaScript, the latent semantic indexing is often non existent or lacking, also because these drag and drop sites are written by applications your coding will often be bloated and extremely in-efficient, these are all things search engines will penalise you for, this means your site will get less organic traffic from search engines because of a lower ranking for queries and overall domain authority.

    Im am by no means saying dont start your own website or print your own cards and logos, just that there is much much much more to it which one could and should research before jumping in.

    One could easily distinguish the difference between a most wix, weebly, wordpress site's or generated logo or business cards. Not to mention that the printing of these things can go horribly wrong if you know nothing about rgb, cmyk, pantone colour pallets, bit depths and different image formats,vectoring and rasterisation, setting a bleed to make allowances for small cutting variations. a Printing company will not reimburse you for something that printed the wrong colour, pixelated or got banding lines.

    When we design we have to take account what material its being printed on, who its being printed by ( printing companies have different pantone palletes and dpi setting on printers),what its being printed for,the sizing ect ect , not to mention incorporating the psychological aspects in design to make it eye catching to a certain group of consumers.

    The reason why people dismiss the power of a graphic and web designers is our own fault though, we tend to focus to much on what things look like and not how it markets or how search engines see it. Its also because online you get many freelancers who have never studied marketing or graphic design, and they tend to create these template sites because when THEY were freelancers people got fed up with bad design that has no marketing impact.

    They turned it into selling a once off product not a service ( graphic and web designers of value offer a service in which they align with your marketing strategy as much as possible while employing what they have studied and experienced to further improve your marketing.)

    This is why i am moving towards seo optimisation, because the name and value of a graphic designer has dropped , due to the drop in standards, people are doing it themselves.

    I do not doubt your knowledge as i can see the article is well researched and written by somebody with experience and there are points in your article im considering and have bookmarked it for future reference.

    This is just an insiders view on the Graphic and web design and digital marketing aspects.

    Thanks Great read !
    Last edited by New Perspective studio; 15-Jul-17 at 02:54 AM.

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    Silver Member PlatinumWealth.co.za's Avatar
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    Good content all around.

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