My Internet Business And Getting It Running
When you are thinking about starting up your own online business you will want to have a pre-launch plan in place before jumping in with both feet. Consider it the blue print to creating a successful business.
One of the basic pre-launch steps you want to have covered is a detailed business plan that will cover even the most minute detail. Remember you can never have things too planned out.
I designed my own web site, rather than hiring someone to do it for me. Now, I’d taken a college extension course, and I read a few books about Meta tags but when I look at my old site, I sigh. It was overly elaborate, it barely used CSS style sheets, and it was more work than was feasible to maintain. This time around, I hired a pro – and they installed a lot of server side tools, like WordPress, to let me focus on running my internet business, not maintaining my web site.
A web designer should not only design your site, they should also be able to take care your domain name registration, all of your hosting needs, and all of your software that you may require to run your business successfully. Keep open lines of communication with your designer so that they can give you all of your desires on your site.
As part and parcel of the domain name parking part of your business plan, you should look into hosting providers. The first rule in hosting is that you get what you pay for. Take it from us – it’s better to deal with a reseller who will answer the phone at 3 AM than it is to have your technical requests routed through Mumbai where an Indian cubical worker reads off of a script. Look into your bandwidth usage, and read the fine print carefully before setting up the contract.
When designing the site (or working with the designer), remember the KISS principal: Keep It Small, Stupid. No matter how shiny the graphics are, no matter how whiz bang the Flash animation is, your goal is to have something that loads almost instantly. Take the time to hit your site with a dial up modem; if it takes long enough that you wouldn’t wait for it, make a low graphics main entry page and work from there.
So, the next step, after the site is up, is bringing in visitors. This is the marketing part of the business plan, and near the end of the pre flight check list. In most cases, this means getting your shop into the top twenty results for a search engine keyword hit. There are countless articles on how to do this, but the realistic way to do it is Google Ad Words.
Traffic building is still something of a black art, but I’m focusing on keyword ad buy purchases – and believe it or not, advertising in the Daily Nickel newspapers. Since what I sell is household items, and tips on home organization, it’s a natural mix of old style advertising and new. I also make sure that I’m in the Organizer’s Circle of blog referrals, which helps a lot on getting on to social networking sites and builds relevance ratings.
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