Business Pre-Flight Check Lists For My Internet Business
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 fontoy.)
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.
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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