I have a confession to make. This is my second Internet business, and I'm starting it having learned from the mistakes I made in the first one. I took a course at the Small Business Administration on business management and planning, and I'm amazed at how many things I did wrong the first time. Consider this a blueprint for avoiding the mistakes I made.
The overall structure of my internet business check list is the business plan. It should cover the steps you want your business to grow through, factoring in cash reserves, cash outlay, marketing budget and operating capital. Fortunately, internet businesses are low overhead operations.
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.
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.)
She also helped me set up my customer feedback forums, and talked to me about font choices and usability. While she disagreed with stuff that Jacob Nielsen recommends (mostly because his sites look ugly and dated), she did point out that my content needed to be the focus of my site, and readability was key.
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.
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. - 21151
The overall structure of my internet business check list is the business plan. It should cover the steps you want your business to grow through, factoring in cash reserves, cash outlay, marketing budget and operating capital. Fortunately, internet businesses are low overhead operations.
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.
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.)
She also helped me set up my customer feedback forums, and talked to me about font choices and usability. While she disagreed with stuff that Jacob Nielsen recommends (mostly because his sites look ugly and dated), she did point out that my content needed to be the focus of my site, and readability was key.
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.
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. - 21151
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