Tag Archives: CBS Review

5 Goals Every Entrepreneur Should Strive For

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Goals are an excellent tactic to keep you on track. They help you achieve something bigger you’ve been working on for a while. Everyone can benefit from goals, especially if you’re an entrepreneur.

Sometimes, though, it can be challenging to determine what kind of goal to make. Maybe right now, your goal is to create a good plan for the future. Try not to stress over this part. Your Corporate Business Solutions consultants have five goals that every entrepreneur should strive for.

Personal Development Goals

Entrepreneurial goals shouldn’t be limited to strictly about your business. You need to have some personal development plans mixed in as well. As you progress forward personally, you’ll learn new tricks and methods to help you improve all aspects of your life.

Some reasonable personal development goals to consider include starting a journal, read a new book (self-help, business learning, finances), take a new course, or learning to manage your work and life balance. These goals are there to make life a bit easier for you.

Relationship Goals

As an entrepreneur, you likely have many relationships on the go, and we’re talking more than your significant other relationship. Maintaining healthy relationships is crucial for everyone, and an entrepreneur is no exception.

Set goals that help develop your current relationships and branch out to create new ones. It could be something as simple as phoning a friend once a week, to something bigger like attending a conference in person. Networking is a significant portion of operating a business.

Health Goals

It’s essential that entrepreneurs take care of their health, both physical and mental. If you’re running on fumes each day, it’s only a matter of time before you burn out. Setting health goals allows you to focus on essential things that improve your overall well-being. When you’re in top health, you perform at your best.

There are many health goals you can set. A few examples would be eating more fruits and vegetables each day, getting in a short walk in the morning, meditating to help ease stress, or going for regular checkup appointments.

Business Goals

Of course, every entrepreneur needs to set themselves business goals (if you haven’t done so already). Business goals are what help drive your company forward towards success. You have many options available for setting business goals. Just ensure you’re selecting realistic ones for your company.

Need a few ideas? Your business goal could include rebranding your company, setting up a social media plan, developing partnerships with other local businesses, or launching a new product or service.

Financial Goals

Lastly, it’s a good idea to set financial goals. It could be either personal or business-related or maybe both. Financial goals are an excellent way to stay on top of your money to ensure you bring in more than you spend.

Keep financial goals small, measurable and attainable. If you’re a newer company, setting a financial goal like earning a million dollars in revenue may not be realistic. However, changing the timeline to five years with small milestones each year could keep you on the path to earning a million dollars.

Ready to set goals? Use the above five goal categories to get you started. Each category serves a purpose in your life that deserves some attention.

Find Your Competitive Edge: 6 Tips to Stand Out In Your Field

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As a small business owner, you soon realize how important it is to stand out against your competition. If you don’t, what’s stopping clients and customers from brushing past you and going to someone else?

Having competition is part of the business world. There are many benefits to having friendly competition in your field. It pushes you to achieve greater goals and helps you move your business in the direction of success. However, focusing solely on the competition can become overwhelming and quite stressful.

Don’t let your business fall behind and ultimately live in the shadows of your competitors. With the following six tips from CBS-CBS.com, you can find your competitive edge and get your business at the forefront.

Price Adjustments

One of the main reasons a customer will go to one place over another is due to the price of goods and services. Adjusting your price is one way to gain a little edge over your competition, as a lower price is more appealing.

There’s a fine line when it comes to pricing, however. Going too low, and ends up destroying the quality of what you’re offering. If your goods are significantly cheaper than other places, it begs whether what you offer is truly worth the price.

Exceptional Customer Service

Many individuals will stay dedicated to a company regardless of the price difference because of its customer service. How you handle customer complaints and issues can shoot your business to the top. So, spend time focusing on how you can improve your customer service experience to make it better than your competition.

Quality Matters

The quality of what you offer is another significant way to give you a competitive edge. We live in a world where quality means something. Usually, customers are willing to spend the extra few dollars if they know it’s worth the quality.

Your Environmental Impact

Going green has never been more popular than it is now. If you show your clients that you’re economically conscious about how you conduct business, it will mean something to them.

Sustainability is more expected from companies today. However, that doesn’t mean every business follows suit. If you’re one of the few companies in your field focusing on being environmentally friendly, you’ll have the edge over your competition.

Creative and Original

Your business is there to solve a problem or provide a valuable service to your customers. For your company to stand out, you need to show your customers why you’re the best choice and how you differ from the rest.

Get creative with how you run your business. Originality is important, so you don’t look like you’re simply copying what everyone else is doing.

Have a Message and a Purpose

Why did you start your business? When you have a story and a message behind what you do, it creates a powerful connection with your customers. That is an easy way to build up trust and keep customers dedicated to you. Just make sure it’s an authentic message.

The above six tips are simple ways to help you gain a competitive edge. Notice how these points tend to revolve around the quality of your business. Show the value of what you have to offer and enjoy the increase in customers strolling in.

Can Your Business Handle a Crisis? 4 Tips to Manage Difficult Times

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Prior to 2020, your business may have been immune to challenges. It could be that you’re a young company just starting to grow or you’ve been lucky so far. Fast forward to today, Covid-19 hit the majority of businesses around the globe with hardships like nonother.

From rolling shutdowns to closing doors and letting employees go, businesses of every size have battled tough terrain to keep persevering through one of the most challenging years to date. Luckily for you, it’s never too late to plan for a crisis.

Using 2020 as a learning experience, your Corporate Business Solutions consultants have four tips to help your business manage difficult times.

Don’t Turn Away Help

During a crisis, now is not the time to be a hero and tackle everything on your own. Although it’s difficult to swallow your pride and admit when you need help, it’s important you take advantage of the help when provided.

The goal is for your business to not only stay afloat during a crisis, but you want it to thrive as well. Help could come in the forms of government subsidies and grants, asking your social media following to share your business profile, or having your staff take on a few additional tasks for the time being.

Remember Your Entire Business Is Affected

As the owner, it’s easy to feel like you’re the only one affected by a crisis with your business. You wear most of the hats for running the company, so you feel the biggest impact. However, it’s important to remember that your business runs thanks to your staff and team, not just you.

Be prepared to offer support to your team. The more you can keep the company morale high, the more your staff will be prepared to stick it out with you during a crisis.

Use the Time to Brainstorm New Strategies

For many businesses, 2020 was a time to reinvent their business model. Take the fitness industry as a perfect example. As gyms and fitness studios worldwide shut down, they were forced to make adjustments to their business model to keep operating. Many personal trainers and group instructors turned to online classes.

Use a crisis as a way to reflect on what works and what you could implement that allows your business to persevere through difficult times. Grab your team and have an afternoon of brainstorming new strategies. You may find that what you come up with will grow your business even when the challenging times pass.

Stay Positive

As the owner, it’s essential that you remain as positive as you possibly can. If your staff and customers see how stressed you are or that you’re losing faith in your company, it’s only a matter of time before those feelings pass to them too.

Although there’s isn’t anything wrong with showing all sides of your business, even during challenging times. You must keep a strong face with a positive attitude and show your clients that you are determined to keep moving forward with the changes.

Trying to manage through challenging times isn’t easy as a business owner. However, if you take the task head-on and stay focused on a goal, you’ll be able to maneuver through any crisis thrown at you and even thrive more than ever.

Social Media Marketing 101: 5 Tips for Running a Successful Facebook Ad

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Small businesses often look for cost-effective advertising methods. That’s because your advertising budget (and overall budget in general) tends to be a little slim. You may not have the same amount of money as a large corporation does to spend on marketing. Luckily, Facebook has the option of posting and boosting ads that can go as cheap or expensive as you want.

Facebook ads can reach a wide range of audiences. However, if not done correctly, all that time and money spent creating the ad will get lost in news feeds that aren’t relevant to your current clientele. That is why the following five tips provided by reviews for Corporate Business Solutions will help you get the most out of your next Facebook ad.

Make it Eye-Catching

The goal of your ad is to grab the attention of your targeted audience. That is easier said than done. With social media, you need an ad that will stand out amongst all the jumble on an individual’s newsfeed – making an eye-catching and visually appealing ad will do that.

Use online services that allow you to design a graphic or short video to start. Especially if you’re new to social media advertising, getting help from online services will point you in the right direction.

Include a Call to Action

A call to action is a simple tool, yet often overlooked in any ad, not just a Facebook one. Adding a call to action is directing the audience to go precisely where you want them – a particular step that results in a sale for you.

Do not underestimate the value of an excellent call to action. Think of a short phrase (“click here now” or “learn more here,” for example) that tells the reader exactly what to do.

Narrow Down Your Target Audience

It’s crucial to have a defined target audience before you run an ad. That’s because if you pay for an ad without one, you’re wasting money on reaching for an audience that isn’t relevant to your business. Instead, if you narrow down to a more specific audience, your money will go further with your ad.

Track Your Progress

It doesn’t matter how much research and time you put into an ad. You’ll never honestly know how it will perform until you test it. That is why it’s essential to track the progress of your ad.

Facebook offers analytics to your ad. It can be overwhelming at first, but once you learn the basics of these analytics, you’ll be able to adequately track the ad’s performance and make tweaks where necessary.

Always Have a Goal in Mind

As with most aspects of running a business, you need to have a clearly defined goal in mind when creating an ad. Your goal helps narrow down what the ad will be, what details it needs, who you’re targeting, and even when you’ll post the ad.

Don’t let Facebook ads overwhelm you to the point of not even trying them. Yes, they can be challenging at first. However, with a little time and practice, you’ll be able to create an ad that draws in more customers, which eventually equals more sales.

Don't blend in.

An Environment for Productivity: 7 Tips for Decorating Your Home Office

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Whether you started remote working in 2020 due to the global pandemic, have always worked from home, or looking to have an office space to relax in, how you decorate your home office can have a dramatic impact on your productivity levels.

Your environment plays a role in how you feel and focus. Too much clutter and things going on around you can cause distractions and lead to increased stress. Even the color choice on the walls plays can impact how productive you are.

Design the perfect home office that supports a productive and focused atmosphere. Your Corporate Business Solutions consultants have seven tips to help you out.

Give Yourself Enough Space

Chances are, you’ll spend quite a bit of time in your home office. So, give yourself enough space to work comfortably. Don’t toss a desk in a closet-like room to preserve space in the house, especially if there’s a perfectly fine guest room that rarely gets used.

Let in Natural Light

Again, think about how much time you’ll spend in your office. Imagine how you’ll at the end of the day if you’re in a packed room with no natural light. Eventually, that will take its toll. Having natural light not only brightens up the room for work, but research has shown that it helps create a productive atmosphere.

Set Up Your Office in a Realistic Way

Although a setup may look aesthetically appealing, is it actually practical for when you’re working? If you have to get up frequently to grab something across the room or have a desk with no storage, is it serving its purpose? Set up an office that works for you.

Spend the Money on a High-Quality Chair

Your office needs to be as comfortable as possible, and one of the most critical aspects around that is your desk chair. Maybe you’re tempted to buy something cheap because it’s just a chair. However, you’ll quickly realize that’s a big mistake.

Since you spend hours sitting at your desk, having an ergonomic chair helps support your body and keep you from getting too sore.

Think About Your Wall Colors

Another design element that doesn’t seem like a big deal is the wall colors. Before you slap on a coat of expensive paint, think about how the color could affect your mood. Certain colors help promote a happy, energetic, and productive feeling, while others can promote sleepiness.

Decorate with Minimalistic in Mind

When decorating your office, less is often more. Having many items all over may seem cute at first, but too many of them can end up feeling cluttered. If t you’re sacrificing desk space for picture frames and other knickknacks, it’s time to eliminate a few of them. Remember, your home office is a space for work, not storage.

Keep It Clean

The most important tip to take away when designing your home office is to keep it clean. Many of our recommendations focus on the atmosphere and feeling of the room. That is because if you decorate in a way that makes you uncomfortable, why would you want to spend time in the room?

Use these seven tips to help you design and decorate the perfect home office for you.

Like your reflection.

Keep Your Health Top Focus: 7 Simple Ways to Be Healthier at Work

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Just because you sit in an office for eight to nine hours a day, that doesn’t mean your life is unhealthy. In fact, with simple, small changes, you can keep your health a top priority while you work.

According to the World Health Organization, a sedentary (physically inactive), life is the leading cause of disease and disability. Lack of physical activity can lead to many issues, including obesity, mental illness, and cardiovascular disease.

Luckily, even the smallest changes in the office can help keep your health in check. Corporate Business Solutions has seven simple ways to be healthier at work.

Pack Your Lunch

It’s your lunch break, and you didn’t bring anything to work. What do you do? Chances are you race over to the nearest fast food joint. Although now and then there is nothing wrong with this, you’re better off to bring your own lunch. That way, you control what you eat, and it will save you money down the road.

Use the Stairs

If you work at a multi-story building, opt for the stairs over the elevator. This simple decision can help you reach the recommended minimum amount of physical activity each week.

Store the Lunchroom with Healthy Options

Instead of handy a candy vending machine in the breakroom, provide healthier alternatives for everyone to try. Swap out the bag of chips for a piece of fruit. Provide flavored water instead of cans of pop.

If the only option available is junk food, of course, that’s what people will go for. However, if you provide healthier options, it’s a step in the right direction to promote a healthier lifestyle.

Stretch Every Hour

Sitting for hours on end won’t do you any good. When you sit for too long, it ends up tightening your hip flexors and hamstrings. These tight muscles can cause lower back pain, make it difficult to walk or stand, and make your life very uncomfortable. When you can, take a moment to stand up, move your body for a few moments before getting back to work.

Stay Hydrated

Dehydration wreaks havoc on our bodies and our minds. Lack of water can cause sleepiness, difficulty concentrating, and even headaches. Avoid dehydration by having a water bottle at your desk all the time. Once it’s empty, fill it up, so your water is readily available. You can even download apps that remind you to drink water throughout the day.

Take Five Minutes to Yourself

Yes, you’re at the office, which means you’re supposed to be working. However, that doesn’t mean you can’t take a few moments to relax your brain and focus on yourself. Taking five minutes to do a quick meditation session at your desk can help you refocus and recharge your mind. Plus, meditation is an excellent way to center yourself and appreciate your surroundings.

Start an Office Workout

Even a five-minute workout session is better than nothing. Adding in a simple workout routine is an excellent step to increase your overall health. Physical activity is known to improve not just your physical health but your mental health as well.

Implement the above seven tips to help keep you healthy while working all day. Don’t let sitting for hours on end cause you to have a sedentary life. These simple adjustments will go a long way for your health.

6 Tips to Help You Effectively Work From Home

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Working from home is not as easy as many like to think. There’s the image that working from home means you can get up whenever you want, work at your leisure from your pajamas, schedule daytime appointments, and that it’s a luxurious lifestyle. While that may be true for some, it isn’t always the case.

The truth is that working from home can be just as difficult, sometimes more difficult than going to the office.

When you’re at an office for work, you’re less likely to get distracted by your surroundings as you could at home. You have your working hours that are not to be disrupted. For those who work from home, many quickly find the distractions are too much to stay focused. It’s easy to fall out of routine and ultimately fall behind in work.

Your Corporate Business Solutions Consultants understand the challenges of working from home. Since that has become the norm for many individuals, we have six tips to help you effectively work from home.

Keep Your Regular Working Hours

One of the best things you can do for yourself is to keep your regular hours. Don’t fall into the trap of sleeping in and doing work whenever you please. Instead, keep your regular schedule you would typically have if you went to an office.

Plan Out Each Day

Planning becomes more essential to stay focused when you’re at home. Start your morning off with a few minutes of planning what you need to achieve. It’s the perfect thing to do while you’re enjoying your morning coffee.

Have a Separate Workspace

If you think that you’ll be fine working at the kitchen table with everything else around you, there’s a good chance it won’t happen. Although for some, the household distractions don’t bother them, and they have no issue working anywhere in the house. For the majority, though, that separate workspace is significant. It’ll help you stay organized and keep things quiet so you can work efficiently.

Separate Your Work Life and Personal Life

A challenge many people face is the overlapping of work and personal time. When the two start to intertwine, you’ll find yourself working in the evenings and on weekends. You end up feeling like you’re always working and never have time off. So, by keeping your work life and personal life separate, it allows you to turn off your work mode so you can enjoy the other aspects of your life.

Give Yourself Breaks

It doesn’t matter where you work. You need to take breaks. Studies have found that when you take breaks in your day, it actually can boost productivity and creativity. Not only that, but for your mental health, those breaks give you a chance to destress and compose yourself before heading back to the job.

Dress for Success

As tempting as it is to stay in your pajamas while working from home if you want to be the most effective, dress for the day. When you’re wearing sweats and a baggy t-shirt, how do you usually feel? Likely like you want to relax the day away. Instead, when you put on clothes that you normally would for work, it can bring you into the productive mindset you need for the day.

As many people around the world continue to work from home this year, use the above tips to help you stay productive for a successful day of work.

Worried About the Survival of Your Company? 5 Tips to Revive a Struggling Business

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How often do you hear this – over half of new businesses will fail in their first year. That’s a scary statistic. However, it isn’t entirely true.

The recent numbers from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) show that in the first two years of operation, 20 percent of businesses will close. That number increases as the years go on, but it does show that you have a fighting chance.

Every business will go through some rough periods. Unfortunately, some companies can survive those difficult times while others end up closing their doors for good.

Is your company during those difficult moments and wondering how you’ll move forward? CBS-CBS.com has a few tips to help you revive your struggling business.

Take a Step Back to Identify the Issue

Before you can begin moving forward, you need to identify the problem. If you try to revamp your entire company without first determining where the issue truly lies, you could end up in the same position relatively quickly.

Look at when you were the most profitable compared to right now. What has changed since then? It could be the market is changing, and your company hasn’t, your management style shifted, or maybe it’s the economy, and your customers can’t afford to spend right now. Once you have that reason, then you can develop a plan.

Revamp Your Marketing Plan

When’s the last time you’ve taken a look at your marketing plan and seen those analytics behind it? Sometimes, all you need to do is freshen up your marketing strategy to engage with your current clients and reach new ones.

Adjust Your Business Model

Adjusting your business model can bring business back to life. However, it isn’t an easy task. As the world changes year after year, your business must adapt to these changes. If you’re still doing the same thing you did for the last few years and noticed a decline, it could be time to adjust your business model to keep up with modern times.

Boost Internal Moral

What happens behind the scenes of business eventually spews out into the public. That means, if your company culture is negative, your customers will soon pick up on that.

The consumer often wants to support companies that provide a happy, healthy, and encouraging work environment. If your team struggles to work together or simply don’t want to come to work, a morale boost could be what your struggling business needs to thrive once again.

Make Cuts

In some circumstances, cutting costs can help a business get back to thriving. Maybe you were once spending extra dollars on luxuries to make life a bit easier for you as the owner. If those additional costs are coming at the expense of your success, it’s time to make some cuts.

In other circumstances, though, making cuts is only a band-aid solution and not addressing the root issue. However, making cuts could give you the time to determine the actual problem that needs fixing.

Failure to control costs is one of the primary reasons a business fails. If you are aiming to have a 10 percent profit, that means you have to run your business so that your expenses equal 90 percent of every dollar you take in.  You need to create what is called a managerial accounting system that pays yourself first. You are entitled to the salary of what it would reasonably cost to run the company if you were hiring someone to run it for you as well as your predetermined profitability.  Together, your salary, plus your planned profit becomes the Total Ownership Return. By paying yourself first rather than getting paid what is left over after all the expenses are paid, it will create the internal management discipline to make the necessary decisions to cut costs so that your business can pay your what you deserve while becoming a profitable business for the long-term.

The tips above could help you get your business back to where it used to be and even more profitable than before.

Your Checklist for Running a Successful Business

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Are you dreaming of running a company? Maybe you want to work your way through the corporate ladder, or you’d instead start something from scratch. If you’re looking at opening up a business, we’re here to help.

At Corporate Business Solutions Reviews, we understand the stress of starting a new venture. As exciting as it is to run a company, it does come with additional pressure on top of everything else. We created a checklist to help guide you on your journey of opening and operating a successful business.

Do You Have an Idea?

You can turn almost any idea into a business, but that doesn’t mean you should. Just because it could be a business doesn’t mean it will be a successful one.

When determining your idea, it should answer one fundamental question: does my idea solve a consumer problem?

Conduct a SWOT Analysis

Every business owner should know about a SWOT analysis and utilize this tool. A SWOT analysis covers four major sections of running a business:

  • Strength
  • Weakness
  • Opportunity
  • Threat

By conducting a SWOT analysis on your business idea and even yourself, you’ll be able to pinpoint what you need to work on, what you’re good at if the concept provides an opportunity and the competition around you.

Define Your Target Audience

So, you have your business idea and have concluded that it will be a successful business. Now, it’s time to define your target audience.

The target audience is those who are your ideal customer or client. A person’s age, gender, location, occupation, and even values are all characteristics to help definite your ideal client.

Create a Business Plan

Your next step is to create a business plan. It’s this plan that will guide you during the beginning of your company. Also, your business plan is a proposal to investors if you need capital to get you going.

All the points mentioned above are an excellent addition to your business plan. Add in other things like potential running costs, marketing plan, short-term and long-term goals, mission statement, and key operations.

Your Mission Statement

We mentioned a mission statement in the point above, and it’s important enough to talk about it on its own. The mission statement is a few sentences that describe the core values of your company. It explains why someone should go to you and how they’ll benefit from that decision.

Have a Support System

Although this may not seem like an important point to mention, it’s one that every business owner should have. Running a company, especially a start-up, is stressful. Having that support system allows you to talk out stressors and keep your mental health in check. Too much stress can cause serious harm to your mental and physical well being.

Define Your Critical Variables

Every business owner begins a new business with enthusiasm and passion for the chance to own and grow his business.  Business doesn’t fail for a lack of passion, they most often fail because the business owner fails to run the business by the numbers.  You need to develop a set of KPI’s, or Key Performance Indicators, which will allow you to evaluate your business with the metrics to evaluate how you are performing before it’s too late to make needed adjustments.  Your accountant is just a scorekeeper.  You need to be the head coach who has all the needed information to make the needed adjustments to win the game of business!

Take the Plunge

Once you have your plan ready to go and a support system rooting you on, it’s time to take the plunge. If you’ve prepared yourself as much as you can, the only thing standing in your way will be yourself.

Part of starting and running a business is taking those calculated risks and being confident in your decision. Many of the points above will also help you in the years to come as you run a successful business.

Are You on YouTube? Why Your Company Should Utilize the Popular Platform

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YouTube still dominates the online world as being one of, if not the top social media platform available. On average, two billion users log on to YouTube every month. That’s roughly one-fourth of the world population.

When put into that perspective, YouTube is an incredible market that every business could and should utilize. However, not many companies think about the upside of YouTube and miss out on the opportunity to grow their business.

Have you thought about using YouTube for your small business? We have five points from reviews for Corporate Business Solutions to show why you need a YouTube channel today.

Reach an Audience in a Unique Way

As you create your marketing strategy and search for different tricks and tips to help, you’ll often come across information on Instagram, Facebook, and having a website. Although those are all excellent additions to your marketing plan that you should have, it shouldn’t stop there.

YouTube offers a unique way of reaching out to your current audience and beyond. With how popular it is and how many users log on each month, you’re bound to reach people interested in what you have to offer.

Create a Lasting Relationship With Your Viewers

If you want to really connect with your clients, YouTube allows you to achieve that. You can bring them into the day-to-day that they wouldn’t usually see. Through your videos, you can showcase the fun side of putting together a product or service that could be surprising to your viewers.

YouTube also offers a chance for customer engagement. You can ask questions on your videos and have the viewers respond in the comments below. Your next video could then be your response to those questions. Doing this can boost your engagement and build those crucial relationships with your clients.

Provide Support

For companies that sell products or offer services, utilizing YouTube is huge. To start, you can upload videos that show someone how to use a specific product. If they’re struggling with it or something goes wrong, they can reference your video. It adds another element to the customer experience.

Companies that offer services, whether it be a trainer running classes or service at someone’s house, you can upload videos that show what goes on behind the scenes.

Showcase Customer Testimonials

Another advantage of YouTube is uploading customer testimonial videos. Words are a great starting point, but if you can get someone on camera talking about their experience, it adds to the authenticity of the testimonial.

You can fake words; however, you can’t fake the person on the screen, sharing the true story of their experience with your company.

Potential Revenue Source

Did you know you can make money from YouTube? Although it may take a while to get there, it is possible. With the ads, you see on videos, that could bring you in a couple of bucks here and there. Even if you’re not focusing on the revenue side of it, this perk could bring in disposable cash for anything extra you wouldn’t buy before.

Start a free YouTube channel today to access the additional possibilities it could provide for your business.