SME stands for Small and Medium Enterprises. It refers to businesses that are smaller in size compared to large corporations, but larger than micro-businesses or sole proprietorship. SMEs play a significant role in the economy and employment sector in many countries. They are often defined by criteria such as number of employees, revenue, or asset size.

Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) can survive and thrive in a competitive market by implementing the following strategies:

• Niche focus: Identifying a specific niche and focusing on it to differentiate themselves from competitors.
  
• Quality control: Providing high-quality products and services to attract and retain customers.
  
• Cost management: Controlling costs by streamlining processes, negotiating with suppliers, and using technology to increase efficiency.
  
• Marketing and branding: Building a strong brand image and promoting it through targeted marketing campaigns.
  
• Networking: Building and maintaining relationships with suppliers, customers, and other businesses to create opportunities for growth.
  
• Adaptability: Continuously monitoring the market and adapting to changes quickly to stay ahead of the competition.
  
• Customer service: Providing exceptional customer service to build loyalty and positive word-of-mouth.
  
• Employee engagement: Empowering and engaging employees to improve performance and retain top talent.
  

Print-On-Demand (POD) is a low cost business because you do not have to manufacture or ship products. Here are 7 popular options.

4 Companies With Their Own Printing Service and Marketplace

These companies not only print their own products but also have their own marketplace to sell products

• Teespring: This is a marketplace specializing in custom apparel and accessories, with a focus on social commerce.
  
• Redbubble: A marketplace for independent artists to sell their designs on a variety of products, including apparel, home decor, and accessories.
  
• Society6: A platform for artists and designers to sell their work on a range of products, including art prints, apparel, and home decor.
  
• Amazon: Amazon Merch is popular option for those willing to start a POD business.
  

• Zazzle: A customizable product platform with a focus on home decor, accessories, and apparel.
  
• eBay: Ebay is also a popular platform to sell all sorts of POD products
  
• Etsy: This platform is one of the top 10 ecommerce websites in terms of web traffic
  

• Printful: An all-in-one print-on-demand and dropshipping solution with a wide range of products and printing methods.
  
• Printify: A print-on-demand and dropshipping platform for e-commerce businesses, with a wide range of products and printing partners.
  

There are different kinds of digital marketing, for instance,

• Social Media Marketing
  
• Search Engine Marketing
  
• Email Marketing
  
• Search Engine Optimization, etc.
  

• Social media platforms has a huge user base (Technically speaking, you can reach 1 billion people through Tiktok and 2.9 billion people through Facebook).
  
• Social media marketing is completely free. If you build a huge following on your social pages you will be able to market your products and services for free.
  
• You can directly sell through social sites. While most of the marketing requires user to click on your links to complete the sales, you can directly sell through social platforms.
  
• You can do a lot of things through social media marketing, and some of the most common social media activities are:
  
• Generating traffic and sales
  
• Building brands
  
• Connecting with customers and providing support
  
• Promoting your existing products and new products
  
• Improving online visibility for your business
  

In this digital age, launching a business is easy but launching a profitable business is hard. When you cannot make your business profitable, you end up shutting down within the first year. In order to avoid the failure, you will have to take some steps that ensure that your business is profitable.

Validate Your Idea

Your business ideas should be viable for you and also have the potential to make money. If you have just $1000 in your pocket, you cannot set up a manufacturing plant but you might be able to setup a screen printing shop. Your business idea should also look promising.

Determine Who Your Customers Are

Starting a business means you are selling products or services. You need to check your potential customers. Without knowing who your customers, your business will be unable to sell products.

Write a Detailed Business Plan

You need a step by step process involved with your business in black and white. This will allow you to do what needs to be done. Writing a business plan will ease your work.

Build a Brand

Branding is very important, your brand identity should be unique and the customers should be able to connect with it.

Create a Business Website

You need a website even when your business is offline.

Once you have set up your online business, you should do the following things to build your business brand:

Reach Your Target market With Content Marketing

In order to do content marketing, focus on four things: blogs, videos, infographics/graphics, and podcasts. Regularly create content and distribute your content through different channels. Your content should properly match with the sales funnel you have created.

Run Email Marketing Campaign

Build email lists and then start sending marketing emails to your subscribers. How do you do that? Create an ad offering free products for the exchange of email. Create a webinar and encourage people to register for your webinars through emails. Send marketing emails regularly, but do not spam.

Rank Your Business on Online Search

When people search online for the products that you are also selling, your business should appear on the top search lists. In order to do that determine best performing keywords on your niche. Create content based on the search intent, and create long posts.

Generate 5-Star Reviews

Reviews are great to generate sales because people like to buy products that have a lot of positive reviews. Encourage people to leave reviews, and give a reason for people to leave reviews. Make the reviewing process easy. In case there are negative reviews, try to address the issue raised in the reviews, without sounding offensive.

Branding is very important part of building your building your business, and generating sales and revenue. Here are three simple steps to build a brand for your business.

Create a Stand Out Social Media Strategy

There are a lot of social media platforms but choose the one that are more popular than others. While choosing the social platforms, try to see if users in these platforms are also your potential customers.
Social media platforms are for content distribution, try to see what kind of content are trending and create similar kind of content. Also create useful and interesting content that your potential customers will see and watch.
Partner with social media influencers on your niche, sponsor them, be a guest in their podcasts, videos, or blogs.

Optimize Google Business Profile

Create a Google Business Profile, provide information about your business, encourage people to leave reviews, try to address negative reviews.  The primary idea is to rank in the local search and encourage people to check your products and services.

Run Paid Ads

The primary purpose of running ads is to generate sales, but you can also run ads to build your business brand. By running ads on online platforms like Facebook, Google etc. you will not only build a brand but also attract potential customers. You will have to explore different kinds of ads from video ads to text ads and banners.

Every country have its own legal tender. It's the money which is acceptable for payment of any kind of transaction in a country. By right, it's the money one is suppose to save if one wants to save. But there are other valuable currencies out there one can capitalize on and save too. 

Have you considered saving another country's currency?

I was discussing with a colleague at work the other day and he said something about customers being overlooked and not treated right by big businesses or companies. He stated that those big companies have so many customers they don't care if they lose a few but it's not the same thing with small businesses because they still want to grow and that's why all customers matter to them as they will be treated right. 

What do you think?

One of my ways to make money from cryptocurrency is by trading it. If you don't have good knowledge on how to trade cryptocurrency, it's better to hold it and wait for it to appreciate before you can make money from selling it. Trading is a lot technical and difficult. 

I use Binance Futures whenever I want to trade on cryptocurrency. 

Which platform do you trade on?

One way you could potentially earn some money in is by collecting gold or silver. One of my coworkers has recently started to collect silver, he got the idea from his father in law. I think one of my uncles also has some silver in storage somewhere too. Have you started collecting gold or silver? If so, do you plan on eventually selling it or do you want to try and hold onto it as long as possible?