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.
I cringe at it now, but when I look at my first business plan, it was a disaster, and it wasn’t (in retrospect) that my internet business failed spectacularly. I hadn’t put together a realistic budget, and I’d just assumed that marketing would “happen on its own”. I took out a loan, based on a second mortgage without identifying where the revenue potentials were.
A key aspect to making your internet based business is getting on the web in the first place; you’ll need a web designer for that, or you can learn it on your own. We’re going to be iconoclastic here, and suggest that it’s worth your time to pay someone to do this for you. The primary business case for spending money on outside people is whether or not they can do something you can’t, or whether they can do something you can do - but free your time up to do something else. Even if you’re an HTML and CSS guru, if you’re starting your own business, having someone else do the grunt work of designing the site is worth the time.
About the only thing I did right last time was learn the ins and outs of using Register.com for setting up my domain names. My designer helped me find a hosting provider who could install the software I wanted to make this all work, which helped a lot.
The other place where my designer helped a lot was getting me to realize that More isn’t always Better. She took out her laptop, hooked up a cellular modem to it, and we loaded my old site. There was time to grab a cup of coffee and watch the birds before enough of it loaded for me to be able to see what the site was about. Dulls ville. By using Cascading Style Sheets (the CSS stuff I mentioned earlier), she was able to make it dynamic and much more attractive. (I was still using JPEGs of titles in a fancy font.)
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 whizzbang 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.
Once I learned how to set up a maintainable web site, it was time to focus on marketing. I started marketing last time by taking out radio spots, in part because a friend of a friend got me a deal at the local radio station. Since the spots were local, I got no coverage outside of local broadcast range. Not a good idea when I’m trying to sell things on the Internet. Now, I focus on building up web traffic.
A sure fire method it getting traffic to your store is to get your business in the top twenty search engine results. Keep your business in plain sight for everyone to see. Advertise on related web sites and you will see customer traffic begin to pull into your web site. Back links, keywords, SEO’s, and strategically placed ads should all be created by your design firm, and will get you high search engine rankings.
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