When people are thinking about opening their own business, they automatically gravitate towards the Internet because there are low start up costs and they think it will be easy money.
Only half of that is true, there will be low start up costs, but it will NOT be easy money. Having an Internet business takes a lot of hard work and you have to get the website noticed otherwise you will have months where you don’t make any money in the beginning.
You have to go into an Internet business with your eyes wide open because if you don’t get what you expect, then you will give up quickly and you will never be the success that you want to be. Therefore, there are a few things that you should do.
If you are thinking about opening an online business and you have no idea how you should go about it, or the level of work that you need to do, then read further on for some tips that can get you started.
1. Website Design – If you know the language and you have designed websites before, then you should be okay designing the website yourself. If this is the first time you have designed a website, then you should pay someone else. This is because it will save you a lot of time and it will make you look more professional. If you just throw a website up, it will not look good and people will not trust that your site is a legitimate business.
2. Branding – Branding and getting an identity for your website is the most important thing. You need a catchy name and a logo to begin with. It should be something that people will understand and immediately know about when they see the logo. For example, if you come across the front page of a site and all you can see is a swoosh, and then you will immediately know that it is the Nike store and they are selling sporting goods. If you have something that is confusing, then people are just going to skip your site and move onto the next one. Having an identity as a business is something that is very important and if you don’t know what you are doing, then you should hire a company than can give you an identity to start with. The best design company will look at your business as a whole and give you tips on what you need to do and the things they will do for you. Yes, this will add into your start up costs, especially if you have already paid to have the website designed, but just make sure that you use a company that can do both and they offer you an exclusive price for doing both. The money that you have spent on the design and SEO company will be returned to you off the profits from the site.
3. Continuous work – You need to keep an eye on the site. Look at the analytics pages and see which elements are successful and which need changing. Therefore, you can make changes and attract more people to the site. Also, with analytics, you can see when you get the most traffic and when you get the least, therefore you can focus new elements on when the page is the most successful. There is no point releasing a new product when there is no one on the site to see it. You have to be smart about releasing products when the site is busy.
