For how many years are you telling yourself that you are going to start your own business and quit your job one day?

For how many more years are you going to live with the job that you don’t like at all, as you don’t have the gut to put your bright business idea ( If you are actionable ) out there? Whether it’s fear of failure, lack of confidence or resources or not being able to go against your loving parents to give up on your safe job, you are pushing your freedom of money, life’s happiness and entrepreneurial dream further away.

Today is that ‘one day’ you stop procrastinating and start working on the next step to bring your startup dream closer. Because in this post I’ll show you why ‘Today’ is the best day and ‘Now’ is the best time to nurture your startup seed..

After 2015, Sri Lanka’s startup ecosystem started to burgeon steadily with newly emerged opportunities for young tech freaks to take their innovative ideas to the commercial level.

With a growth index of 7.4 aspiring startup ecosystem of Sri Lanka(Source- Startup Sri Lanka Report | SLASSCOM) rise year by year prospering the island with more and more startup seeds while generating new career opportunities and contributing to the economy of Sri Lanka

For the determined individuals with innovative ideas and zero interest for typical day jobs, Sri Lanka provides you with everything a startup needs to thrive at your figure tip. It will only cost a strong will power to hustle off until you succeed and a wise strategy in place.

While many complain the government about the policies, financial matters and other challenges, Sri Lankan startup environment has grown immensely. Today, Sri Lanka proudly owns 150-300 tech startups in the ecosystem and 65% of these entrepreneurs exceed 150 million revenue (Source- which is indeed a considerable growth compared to the past years.

With the attention of the government, other organizations, new emerging investors and young successful entrepreneurs with hearts willing to give a hand to the new startups, the startup ecosystem keeps expanding and evolving creating more and more space for ambitious Sri Lankan techies.

Here are 5 things that testify that ‘Now’ is the best time to start your Sri Lanka startup’.
For those who are still waiting for everything to become perfect to put your business idea to action.

 

1.Government support

By witnessing the success, job opportunities created and the economic support startups can add in strengthening the island’s economy, Sri Lankan government has started to pay their attention to help the thriving youngster techies around the island with new policies, law enforcement, banking facilities and more. Though the reliefs are not even close to what they can amend to help young entrepreneurs, it’s safe to say that it’s a good start. Here are some of the best examples that provide testaments that government encourage startups to thrive.

• Government’s announcement of 200% Capital Allowances for business making investments in the Northern Province and 100% Capital Allowance for Eastern Province Investors.(Source-National Budget Proposal 2017 )

 

 

• “Sri Lanka Export Development Board (SLEDB) has implemented a budget proposal on Start-up funding in 2016, where 26 Startups had been recommended by a committee appointed by the EDB for concessionary loans provided by State Banks”(Source -EDB)

• Dedicating segment name ‘Start-Up Pavilion’ for startups and innovators to showcase their products and solutions in ‘INFOTEL,’ one of the biggest tech exhibition in Sri Lanka organize by EDB, providing more exposure for startups and innovators.

2.More funding opportunities

Apart from, investing your personal money, applying for a bank loan and asking money from your rich parents and friends, there are several ways to fund your business idea. These are few of them.

• Startup programs
• Crowdfunding
• Angel Investors and Venture Capitalists
• Grants
• Zero Interest MSME Loans
• Catalyst support

Enriched with investors of Sri Lanka and from around the world, Sri Lanka’s startup ecosystem now offers you better funding opportunities than ever. With the immense growth and significant achievements and success of Sri Lankan entrepreneurs, the ecosystem is grabbing more and more attention of local investors while other international investors are realizing that Sri Lanka is a safe place to invest with favourable geopolitics and healthy economic growth and stability. This has increased funding opportunities for determined tech-stars out there.

3.Supportive organizations and events

Today, if you have the courage to daydream your startup dream, commit to spend weeks of sleepless nights and dare to get burned and rise from the ashes, figuring out the ‘How to‘ part is not that hard with all the newly born supportive organization and events available in Sri Lanka. BOV Capital and  SLASSCOM are some of the organizations that help startups to grow and ‘Startup Weekend’ and ‘Startup boot camps’ are some of the startup events out there waiting to support young people who are looking forward to taking their business idea to the next level.

4.Better Mentoring

No matter how great your business idea or product is, lack of knowledge on doing business and management and experience in managing a business take no time to take you down the hill. Which makes getting mentored and receiving guidance extremely important for a startup success.

With the collaborative and supportive community of startup founders and co-founders, experienced industry professionals and successful entrepreneurs who once were individuals with doubt and a business plan, finding mentoring and guidance are not extremely hard in Sri Lankan startup ecosystem as it used to be. In addition, there are many programs that provide guidance and insight in implementing and executing strategies and expanding.

5.More incubation opportunities

This is something many startups find tricky with their tight budgets. As the startup current is still immerging in Sri Lanka, every factor isn’t fully completed yet. And incubation is one of them. From finding a working space to accessing resources 0from developing their prototype to taking it to the market, finding facilities and resources are definitely a great challenge for Sri Lankan startups. But, thanks to few of the industry giants in Sri Lanka and some international companies, Sri Lankan startup ecosystem is receiving more incubation opportunities now. Slingshot , a startup incubator/ seed accelerator developed by Hemas PLC, John Keels X and Yarl IT Hub are few good example for this.

Here is a list of people and organizations who are willing to nourish your seed in various ways including, funding, market reach, resources, mentoring, business skills, strategy and more.

Startup incubators

• Lankan Angel Network
• Venture Engine
• BOV Capital
• Startup X Foundry
• Yarl IT Hub
• Crowdisland
• Youth Business Sri Lanka
• East West Capital Group
• Spiralation
• John Keells
• Lanka Ventures PLC

Conclusion

Without no argument, Sri Lanka is still not a healthy place for startups comparing what we have in Sri Lanka with Silicon Valley or other regional startup hubs. Yet, Sri Lanka offers enough resources and facilities to ensure successful startup seed growth.

When considering all the market opportunities and flourishing funding, mentoring and other essential startup opportunities and most importantly all the inspiring startup successes born in Sri Lanka it’s clear that startups culture will grow faster and faster year by year.

So, it’s crystal clear that ’Now’ is the best time to do the research it takes, makes a solid business plan, practices your pitch and launch a mission to bring your business idea to life before the ecosystem gets too competitive.

Social Bookmarking sites have become a favourite with bloggers these days. If you are thinking that social media doesn’t have the same reach it had previously, think again. Social Bookmarking drives the traffic to the blogs when users on different social media sites share interesting videos and posts with their friends.

Before we get into the advantages and disadvantages of Social Bookmarking, we need to understand what Social Bookmarking is.

What is Social Bookmarking?

Social Bookmarking is nothing but an online portal that enables users to share, add, and edit different web documents. Every individual spends a large portion of their day online and when you read something interesting that you want to share with your friends and family, you bookmark it and save it online. It’s as simple as adding a bookmark to a book. Social Bookmarking allows the user to return to the page later and access it from different sources since it is available online.

With Social Bookmarking, you save the webpage online instead of copying the URL in a notepad or document. Social Bookmarking also helps the user to organize the best content that they come across on the web in one particular area, so that it is easily accessible.

After the know-how on Social Bookmarking, we need to understand the different advantages of the same. Social Bookmarking is highly popular these days.

 

Advantages of Social Bookmarking

 

Helps You Go Viral

You might have used a lot of codes to increase the SEO of your blog. While some may find success in this technique, there is a lot that you often lose out on. This is where Social Bookmarking comes in. When you make post a link of your blog post as a bookmark on different Social Bookmarking sites, the users will automatically be redirected to your blog when they view the same. Once you interest the new visitors with your blog, they will automatically bookmark your posts on different social media sites. Thanks to a large number of backlinks, you will get more traffic. However, make sure that your content is interesting and unique or else you will not be able to attract new visitors.

 

Increase Traffic

Once your blog goes viral on social media thanks to Social Bookmarking, you will see an increase in traffic. Make sure that you don’t stop at posting your bookmarks on one site. Post on multiple sites to increase the inflow of traffic. Post on Social Bookmarking sites like Google+, Reddit, Technorati, Delicious and Digg. Posting on these sites are free, so you don’t have to spend any money. Once these Social Bookmarking sites contribute to your blog traffic, view the analytics of your page and determine which of these sites contribute more than the others. You can tweak your bookmarking accordingly.

 

Build Your Brand

With Social Bookmarking, you get targeted traffic. When you get the targeted customers, you automatically help your brand grow. Once the new users find your blog appealing, they will subscribe to it. Social Bookmarking sites often allow users to review the different sites. Depending on user preference, some posts are buried while some get more coverage. When you are one of the most preferred sites, you automatically build trust and new users show interest in getting a better idea about your brand.

 

Improve SERPs

 Social Bookmarking is a convenient way to build one-way links. Bookmarking sites have a positive impact on the ranking of the bookmarked sites. They eventually improve the PageRank and SERPs of the sites. Since Google is planning to make SEO social, Social Bookmarking is a convenient way to improve search engine ranking.

Like everything in life, all good things come with their own disadvantages and problems and similar is the case with Social Bookmarking.

Disadvantages of Social Bookmarking

 

 

SEO

While bookmarking can help you with your SEO and SERPs, it can also create a lot of subsequent problems. There are multiple sites that will use your bookmarks to create backlinks for their website, without generating any new content. These bogus websites will simply add junk and hope your bookmarks help them to improve their ranking.

 

Tag Structure

Since Social Bookmarking is still a new concept, there isn’t a lot of information on the same. There isn’t any formal way to regulate how the different Social Bookmarking sites tag the different links. This gives rise to discrepancies that might often create problems. Since it’s individuals who tag these bookmarks, there’s the possibility of human error as well. Such errors create problem inconsistency and organization.

 

Collusion

Scammers are everywhere on social media. There can be scammers who get a large group of people to submit bookmarks and control their votes. They can trick other users into thinking that this highly bookmarked content is worth seeing and trick them to visit pages that might set free a virus or force them to make a payment.

 

Spamming

Since individuals have the freedom to create their own tags and bookmark contents, there is a high risk of spamming. This is the problem has further increased since individuals view bookmarked content from people they aren’t connected to. Spamming can also prevent the user from finding the actual website or page.

 

Conclusion

Social Bookmarking has both its advantages and disadvantages. There are two sides to a coin and like everything, if you are using Social Bookmarking, you have to weigh the odds and go ahead. If you keep aside the disadvantages, you will realize that the advantages are crucial and they can help you to a great extent. The competition to improve page ranking is getting tougher with every passing day. It is easy to make blog posts online and there are over millions of such blogs. If you want to stand apart and expand the number of visitors, you have to do something unique and since Social Bookmarking is still a new concept, it is the best option.

How does social bookmarking help you? Do let us know in the comments below.