One of the main reasons why I started this blog was because I saw the need to help women specifically get somewhat of an equal chance of making a success out of their forays into the cut-throat world of business. There’s no doubt about the fact that things are at least three times harder for us, which is a reality and not an attempt at getting any form of sympathy. Indicatively there’s no room for sympathy in the world of business so we won’t go looking for any of that.

So, one of the major weapons you can have in your arsenal simply takes the form of being informed. Information is king in the world of business and it really doesn’t matter what line of business you’re in. If you have some data in your possession for example, telling you exactly where a group of people making up your exact target market will be and when they’ll be there, you’d be willing to put down quite a bit of money to exploit that information, would you not?

We’re targeting something a little simpler than that though. In today’s post I’m going to talk about some free resources you can use for your business, whatever market it’s targeting, which will not only generally make things a little easier for you, but will also save you a lot of money.

Local government portals

Both local and national government portals in fact make for a very invaluable source of free resources to exploit if you want a leg up in business, or if you at least just want to have a fighting chance of survival and hopefully success. The onus is on you to search for them though because it’s simply a matter of starting with a visit to the website of your country’s equivalent of the Department of Trade and Industries.

What doing this does is it opens you up to all the information you’ll need to complete tasks such as registering your business formally and even applying for government grants and tenders, bypassing the brokers and agents who play “middleman” and charge super high fees for commission on business related tasks which are otherwise free or cost a lot less.

Content Management Systems (CMSs)

When Content Management Systems platforms such as WordPress and the now less popular Joomla came into prominence, many predicted the death of the Web Design & Development industry, or at the very least a re-alignment in power. This is because pretty much anyone who can read and is computer literate can create their own stunning, dynamic and intuitive website without the need to pay exorbitant fees to a web developer.

So look into the likes of WordPress and you can have your company website up and running at a fraction of the indicative fees charged by web designers.

Accounting and bookkeeping portals

While it’s probably a requirement to rope in a professional to do the books when auditing-and-filing season comes around, for the day-to-day management of your finances though you can keep track of what every penny does via the use of free small business budget templates which leave absolutely no stone unturned. Save yourself the costs of having a staff which is bloated by the unnecessary employment of full-time accounting personnel in this way, and more importantly, keep better track of your finances.