Having some identifiable tech skills can often prove to be a passport to success when you forging a career, and having these skills is just as relevant if you are running your own business.
Business owners are better served by being generalists rather than specialists. By hiring the right specialists that are skilled in specialist tasks, the business owner should be taking more of a directional role in the business. At the very least however, a business owner should at least have a rudimentary competency in most aspects of his business, and at least know the limitations of the specialists he employs.
Creating your own website and updating a blog
There might have been a time when a small business owner might have had to outsource a task like creating their own website or maintaining a blog, but now that tools like WordPress are so freely available, this is something you can and should be able to do yourself.
Time is always an issue of course, but having the skills to create and maintain your own website is an attribute that will most likely benefit your business, as it will not only be more cost-effective but it give you greater flexibility in being able to update posts and make adjustments to your website, without having to wait for someone else to do it for you.
Get to grips with SEO
There will probably be a percentage of business owners who might well decide that getting to grips with search engine optimization, is a bridge too far for their limited techie skills.
SEO is an integral part of running your business online and making the most of your efforts to maintain a high level of visibility, and the fundamentals of how to apply an SEO strategy to your website is not actually that daunting as it sounds.
What you have to remember is that SEO needs to be at the forefront of your content creation strategy, rather than an afterthought. Working out how to shape the structure and content of your website is worth learning how to do, as it will provide a better website experience for your users and help to make you popular with those all-important search engines.
It really won’t take you long to learn how to use keywords, what a meta description is and how to use backlinks effectively.
Hard Skills
There are hard skills that can be picked up and improved on which serve every business owner in the digital age like typing and coding. And learning these skills can be done informally and online. More and more people are using sites like Typisto and freeCodeCamp to pick up such skills in their own time and at a pace that suits their schedule. People are also increasingly using YouTube to find ways to learn about video editing, podcasting, installing WordPress sites and even some basic graphic design skills.
Master the cloud
Cloud-computing is widely considered as the future and as this is where a lot of data already goes and that percentage is only going to increase going forward, you would do well to master the cloud as a business owner.
Learning how to keep your business files safe and secure is definitely important, and there are a number of innovative apps based around the cloud that could help boost your productivity, so it makes sense to get up to speed on what the cloud can do for you and your business.
There are many advantages attached to having some usable tech skills and even a basic understanding of coding, can give you an edge, which is always something worth pursuing if you are a business owner.
[Image via: Google Images]
