Sometimes, when you’re thinking of starting a business, you don’t need a physical shop to get your product out to your target market. In many cases, a business based purely online would be sufficient to get your product/service out there. But just how can you build this kind of business, and make sure that it’s a success? Read on to find out:
Build a Great Website
The first step to building a business based only online, is of course, building a great website. Without this, you can’t expect to run a successful online business. Unfortunately, building a great website isn’t always easy, or cheap. I wouldn’t advise building this yourself if you’re an amateur, no matter how many tutorials you can find online. This website is representing you, and it needs to have everything in place to make a great impression on visitors, so they’re poised to buy from you. Here are just some of the elements your site will need to be successful:
- Easy navigation that makes sense.
- Clear contact information.
- A design that isn’t too fussy/is easy to look at.
- Clear calls to action.
- Quality, original content.
- A blog.
- Social media integration.
- High quality pictures.
A professional designer will be able to put all of this in place for you so don’t try to save money by doing it yourself. You might save a bit of cash, but you’ll waste valuable time and could possibly get no results from your efforts.
Build an Awesome Brand
Your website isn’t the only important aspect of an online based business; your brand is too! Think of all of the best brands: Mcdonalds, Coca Cola, Nike, etc. What do they have? They have things such as; consistent colour schemes (using the psychology of colours), consistent brand personalities throughout their ads, social media, and content, catchy taglines, memorable logos, and more. They all know who their target market is too; so they gear all of their advertising campaigns towards them. You need to do the same! Your customer service will need to be up to scratch too, with all comments whether negative or positive answered in a timely, appropriate manner. Social proof is the best kind of recommendation, so if you can get as many people as possible liking you, you might even get all of their friends/family too.
Why Marketing is Important
It isn’t enough to simply build a site and design the most awesome brand ever. What good is all that if you don’t plan on marketing your site/products/services so people know you’re there? Companies like Posirank help you to appear more visible in the search engines when somebody enters a relevant search query to your business, so you have more of a chance of succeeding online. Although there’s the option of doing this yourself, you might find that you hinder your site rather than actually help it if you’re new to online marketing.
There you have it; now you can build your online only based business and help it to thrive. Good luck!
