You’ve probably heard of them: Kickstarter, IndieGoGo, GoFundMe. In the past few years, these websites have become huge proponents of getting those who don’t have any money but have good ideas the capital to get their products and services off the ground.

It’s incredibly tempting to forgo any sort of work when the power’s out, especially if you had a big project due the next day or you could use a break. Sometimes that’s fine, and it’ll all be okay the next day if you skip a few hours of work tonight.

Holding onto everything yourself and doing everything in-house is a fight that business owners have every day with themselves. However, the truth is that you – and your employees on hand – are limited beings, and if you aren’t devoting yourselves to the most worthy, expensive tasks, then you’re wasting a lot of time, money, and potential.

It’s said over and over again: the answer to “why not social media?” is always, “I don’t have the time or money to focus on it.” It makes sense that as an SMB owner, you’d want to focus your time and resources on what you found most important, which is often making sure customers are happy with what you do and how you do it.

When you’re just getting off the ground, you may find some confusion when it comes to registering your business name. After all, there are often a lot of steps, and those steps – when not done correctly – can result in a lot of lost time, money, and patience.

Online reviews, particularly for products that aren’t bought in store (or can’t be), are incredibly powerful. This is especially true for the businesses that provide these products. If you start to soak up bad reviews, people will notice, especially if there is competition nearby.

Not so long ago, hashtags were the talk of the town. Every social media platform began to allow them – namely Facebook and Instagram, after Twitter made them an integral part of social communication. However, like every trend in social media, hashtags began to be used less often in productive ways, especially by companies.

All of the recent security breaches have some retailers running from online payment solutions like PayPal, a huge, multi-billion dollar platform that serves as a third party between a merchant and a buyer. However, this should not be the case: in fact, PayPal can protect you from problems that security breaches on your own networks would not.

You’ve done it; you’ve created a website and it’s live. You poured a lot of effort into the website, and you’re incredibly proud of all of the things you’ve done. Your content is perfect. Your pictures are perfect. Your call-to-actions took a long time, but they’re perfect.

Let’s face it: running a small business office can be incredibly expensive, especially when you have to keep the lights on. This is even truer if you have to run servers, computers, and other electronics day in and day out to keep your small business afloat.