The Best Tech for Your Home Business

Maximizing your efficiency and effectiveness as a home business owner can be difficult when you have limited starting capital. Turning to technology to make up the deficit is a smart idea, especially with the exciting new technologies emerging over the last few years. If you know what these new techs are and how to use them correctly, they will help you expand your business, or make it more stable, by letting you do more with less. Check out the top five new technologies for your home business below.

Five Exciting New Technologies For Your Home Business

#1. Augmented Reality

Not to be confused with completely virtual reality (VR), which involves a completely immersive, computer-generated environment, augmented reality (AR) refers to the blurring of the line between something real and something computer-generated. AR works within the real world as it exists to add sounds, smells, graphics, and haptic feedback.

A great example of AR functioning in the modern world is the very popular gaming application, PokemonGo. PokemonGo does not take the user out of the real world with a headset like the Oculus Rift, but uses technology to augment the natural world around you through your phone’s camera.

Small and home businesses will be able to employ AR more often as the technology requirements for AR continue to become simpler and costs decrease, Home business owners will be able to create engaging adverts, design viral marketing strategies using smartphones, and anything else they can imagine. Small-scale realtors have been using AR for years to offer house tours virtually.

#2. Chatbots

An older concept that continues to be reworked and updated with the release of new technologies, chatbots revolutionize how small and home businesses interact with their current and potential clients. Putting a chatbot on your website allows visitors to communicate directly with someone to ask questions about your goods or services, help them shop for items, and guide them towards which services or goods they would most likely purchase without needing to hire a dedicated worker.

Companies creating these chatbots keep appearing with more and more interesting customization abilities so you can offer a truly unique experience to your customers. You can do more than just cut down on customer service calls with a chatbot. Newly released bots like Niki.ai can even act as personal assistants that order dinner or schedule a doctor’s appointment for you.

#3. Cloud Services

Trouble finding enough space to store your home office equipment? Not sure how to share gigabytes of information with a co-worker, client, potential partner, associate, or client? Look no further than a cloud service like Dropbox, OneDrive, or Google Drive to remedy the problem.

Cloud services give you greater flexibility and freedom since you can simply scan a document and save it into the virtual cloud without it taking up any space on your home computer or in a paper file. You can then share the important file online with the click of a button instead of wasting time zipping the documents to send via email or spending a fortune making copies to send via snail mail.

#4. Video Conferences

Small, home business owners often cannot get out of their home office to attend important meetings with the many daily tasks and deadlines looming overhead. Even traveling 30 minutes for a meeting can limit your productivity during the day, but when these connections mean success or failure as a business, you do not want to say no. Investing in a home video conferencing system allows you to still attend or host these crucial meetings without needing to physically travel to another location.

Even businesses with very limited funds can utilize excellent free video conferencing services like Skype or Facebook Messenger. Just keep in mind these free services often do not provide as clear a picture and you may face audio lag. Once you get to a financially stable position, you can consider using smart home specialists to create a higher quality, real-time communication to help avoid troublesome technical issues.

#5. Virtually Hiring Contractors and Freelancers

As a home business owner, you often must act as receptionist, bookkeeper, office manager, customer care advocate, and a variety of other positions a big company would hire multiple employees to handle. When all that responsibility falls on you, things get forgotten, incorrect orders go out, and vital information gets lost in the shuffle. Hiring a temporary virtual employee through a contractor or freelance website like Fiverr, Elance, or Upwork is a cheap and easy solution to prevent spreading yourself to thin.

Search through potential freelancers after posting a job offer on the website. Each freelancer or contractor should have an online profile with information about themselves and their previous work history, reviews from previous clients obtained through the site, along with a virtual work portfolio. Once you narrow down your choices, you can conduct interviews, hire, and pay the workers directly through the website. Be aware most sites take a small to a large fee for this service.