Building a business from the ground up can be a brutal experience. You have to constantly weigh the options of spending money on outside help versus spending time learning how to do what you need completed. Mark Cuban refers to the process of constantly learning and taking on new challenges head-on as “grinding it out”.
Let’s take a look at a few situations where grinding it out and learning to do things for yourself may be more beneficial to your brand than hiring outside talent.
Creating a Website
The first step for many entrepreneurs is building a website that represents their project. A website provides a first impression for people that google your company or project. It’s incredibly important that the design of the site, as well as the information presented is consistent with your brand.
There are a couple different routes to take when creating a website. You can always whip up a free site using Wix or Weebly. You could also crank out a WordPress website on your own, using the multitude of tutorials available online. If you want to delve even deeper into what’s possible with a website, there are courses available at sites like Zeolaearn that will help you learn to code online.
Of course, if you want to skip the time and energy required to build your own site, you can always hire a firm to code and design it for you. There are relatively inexpensive options, like working with an overseas freelancer that will charge less than $300 for an entire site. Or, you can go with a North American based team that may bring more sophisticated experience to their work, but their time comes at a premium.
Online Marketing
If you’re a retailer or service provider, your website needs to be more than an information source for potential customers. Your site needs to be the first thing your users see when they search for your product or service online. To make it to the top of the search engine rankings, your website needs to employ multiple Search Engine Optimization (SEO) strategies.
There are multiple tools that will allow you to optimize your site on your own. However, doing anything beyond basic edits to your site will take significant, ongoing time. This can mean lost opportunities in your core business as you spend time constantly tweaking, updating and optimizing your site’s content.
SEO, at its most comprehensive level, is about producing content that is valuable to readers and establishes a track record with search engines that results in your site being an authority on specific subject areas. Subject areas tie into the keywords your target demographic types into google when they’re looking for your product or service.
Additionally, your site’s reputation is tied to the other sites that link back to your content. Search engines give websites a grade, or Page Rank, based on the quality of their content and historical activity.
Winners surround themselves with winners, and winning sites build link relationships with high quality sites in their industry.