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START AN ONLINE BUSINESS
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GETTING STARTED IN AN ONLINE BUSINESS
To start an online business you must at least know what you are selling and the details of its nature, be it a product, a service, etc. Get a clear understanding of what its estimates will be like, including money, time, resources and effort. If you can`t do it alone then look to get help, either paid, or otherwise. Be wary when it involves friends and family, as in a lot of instances there tend to be conflicts of interests, and uncertainty of personalities.
To start an online business you must at least know what you are selling and the details of its nature, be it a product, a service, etc. Get a clear understanding of what its estimates will be like, including money, time, resources and effort. If you can`t do it alone then look to get help, either paid, or otherwise. Be wary when it involves friends and family, as in a lot of instances there tend to be conflicts of interests, and uncertainty of personalities.
Anyway I have listed here a couple of points to note regarding starting a business online.
1.Be Seen to Be Sold
The first thing to doing business online is to be seen, if customers can`t see you then they can`t buy from you. To be seen can be done by linking to a website or creating a website of your own. While there are free sites offering to host your web page, they will however, either advertise on your site or link their name into your web address or url. The disdavantage of this is obvious, you will be seen as a cheap and perhaps questionable business.
2. Get a Good Domain Name
Choose a good domain name that at least has some significance to your business. The hosting company which will host your site must be reliable and flexible to suit your ever changing needs. Your e-commerce hosting account is likely to start out as a “shared” hosting (less expensive option) and later may grow to a “dedicated” server (more capacity but higher price) later, if needed.
3. Deciding the Type of Web Site
Decide if the goal of your website will be to capture leads (which can be done through simple contact forms), which you will then follow-up on later by phone and/or email. Alternatively, is your goal to make direct sales from your website, in which case you will need a shopping cart system. Regardless of your goal, you should also provide good quality content on your website that will capture your prospective customer’s interest.
4. A Merchant Account
In addition to the hosting and shopping cart system, you will need a merchant account that will enable your business to accept electronic payments (e.g., credit cards). You may already have a merchant account, but for online transactions, you will also need a Payment Gateway (such as authorize.net or Verisign).The Payment Gateway authorises payments for online businesses. Generally, these services will interact automatically with both your shopping cart system and your merchant account. Once setup, all this happens behind the scenes so your website is selling your products or services day-and-night, without you having to be directly involved.
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5. The Website Details
The website should be well organised with content relevant to your business. It is a given that you need a professional looking, well-organised website to sell online. This does not mean it has to be elaborate on the contrary this can work against you, as it can confuse your visitors. Your designer can integrate your new website with your shopping cart system. Make sure you use a website designer who has specific experience in the shopping cart system you wish to use. Make sure that he can organise the products so people can quickly find what they are looking for. The next step is to determine the various pages that will comprise your site, what content will go on each page, and how it will all fit together.
6. Marketing Strategy
While you map out the website structure, always keep your goals in mind the method of your marketing strategy. The marketing strategy will be determined by the kind of business you are doing, the customers you are looking to attract, and size of your business operation. The marketing strategy can be networking, direct sales, sales leads, etc. A good way to start this process is to go out on the internet, and look at what similar businesses have done.
The marketing strategy employed should be cost effective and easily replicated. The main reason for this is that the website is going to be around for a while, as a consequence it should be able to finance itself after a while. Don`t go pouring money in very expensive website marketing like Google adsense unless it is capable of paying for itself.
7. Attracting Customers
You now have a website giving you an online presence and the ability to capture leads or make sales directly. Now, how are you going to get people to people to visit to your site? While clearly a summary article like this cannot answer these questions definitively, it can at least serve as a starting point. It is important to do some research and find some articles on each of these topics.
8.Search Engine Listing
The next thing that you will need to do to attract customers is to list your website with a search engine such as Google or Yahoo. These search engines do everything from listing to optimisation. If at some point your business experiences enough growth, you will most likely need to consider hiring, professionals to manage your website and its transactions. To increase your site’s ranking in Google and other search engines, it is crucial to have quality content on your website. This should include reference to the keywords that you want to optimise. The place to start optimising your site is during the planning and design phase.
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9. Advertising and Optimising
Once you complete your site, you will want to seek out reputable directories and other sites relevant to your industry, and request to have your site listed in these. Ideally, the link provided on these sites would reflect the keyword you are trying to optimise. For example, if you are optimising “money making online” you would make sure that the clickable link is “money making online” not just www.yourcompany.com. It depends on the keywords you choose and how much you bid. Spend some time choosing good keywords. Google Adwords has tools to help you choose the most powerful keywords. You will also want to embed some special code in your website to enable Google to track conversions. Some types of adverting that you will need to be aware of are listed below;(a)Affiliate Marketing is an internet based marketing practice in which a business rewards one or more affiliates for each visitor or customer brought about by the affiliate's marketing efforts. It is an application of crowdsourcing. It basically is whereby a company (such as yours) advertises on another website with banners, links, etc, for a fee.
(b) Pay per click (PPC) is an internet advertising model used on websites, in which advertisers (such as yourself) pay their host (usually another site) only when their ad is clicked. With search engines, advertisers typically bid on keyword phrases relevant to their target market. Content sites commonly charge a fixed price per click rather than use a bidding system. There are a number of services out there that provide PPC like services, including Google AdWords and Overture (Yahoo). You will likely want to start with Google and then expand to one or more other services over time. The intent is to get persons aware of your business, when they click even for curiosity.
(c) Cost per click (CPC) is the amount of money an advertiser pays search engines and other internet publishers for a single click on its advertisement that brings one visitor to its website.
(d) Cost Per Action or CPA (sometimes known as Pay Per Action or PPA) is an online advertising pricing model, where the advertiser pays for each specified action (a purchase, a form submission, and so on) linked to the advertisement. Direct response advertisers consider CPA the optimal way to buy online advertising, as an advertiser only pays for the ad when the desired action has occurred. An action can be a product being purchased, a form being filled, etc. The desired action to be performed is determined by the advertiser.
(e) Article Marketing is the technique of inserting words and your links in comments, blogs, messages, etc to connect persons to your business.By putting your knowledge in articles for the benefit of others, the benefits that flow back to you are substantial. You can build a reputation as knowledgeable in your field, resulting in leads and more sales. In addition, part of the process of article marketing means including a bio of yourself.
This bio usually includes links back to your website, thus helping increase the Page Rank of your website. That means that people who do a search for relevant keywords are more likely to find your website.
(f) Email Marketing is the technique whereby through emails information regarding your business is sent to potential customers. A crucial but often overlooked component of starting an online business is email marketing solution that is in place which integrates with your operations from the beginning. This insures that you collect customer email addresses and ask them from the beginning if they want to receive emails from you.
Email can include invoices (often automated), product updates, announcements, special promotions, and email newsletters. The negative side of email marketing is that a lot of email sites sometimes intercept and discard the email as spam (unwanted and harassing).
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10. Converting Advertising to Real Sales
Maximising conversions is your goal but you need to define exactly what a conversion means to your business. Generally, it is either a lead (normally a customer submitting a web form requesting more information) or it is a direct sale (a customer actually purchases your product or service directly). Your website can offer both of these primary types of conversions or focus on just one – or it is possible you have other measures of success you want to measure.
If your goal is to get leads, then that is the sort of conversion your website and advertising should encourage. In addition, do not forget to ask your prospects to request more information or whatever the action you are seeking.
Getting Started
This article is just a primer to give you an idea of what it entails to start an online business. Perhaps not all the topics are covered here, as such you may need do more research into starting an online business. You will want to research each of these topics in much greater depth than they are covered here. It is worth your time to read articles on each of these topics, and even invest the time to read books as well. The effort you put in educating yourself about the various components of starting your online business will pay off, making it well worth the time investment.
All the best.
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