Top 10 Tips and Advice on How to Start and Run an Online Business

Top 10 Tips and advice on how to start and run an online business

1)       Choose a keyword related domain name for your new website.

It is probably one of the most important parts of starting your new online business.
You must choose a good quality domain name for your business and preferable a .com or a .co.uk if you are UK based.

For example you may have a company name already, like “A & B Marketing Ltd” specialising in allsorts of marketing media and you are thinking of starting a business directory.
You would be tempted to buy www.aandbmarketing.com  but this is only useful in general advertising purposes, there is no harm in buying it to point to the main domain name, but if you want to get visitors to your site you must buy something a little bit more search engine friendly, a keyword related domain.

Here is an example, imagine A & B Marketing are based in Manchester in the North of the UK and their target base for the new directory is Manchester and surrounding areas the ideal keyword related domain would be www.manchesterbusinessdirectory.co.uk   because that is what someone would probably type in to the search engines who are looking for businesses in Manchester area, so if your domain is www.manchesterbusinessdirectory.co.uk  you will be on the first page within a few weeks of listing your domain name to the search engines.

2)       Choose good reliable hosting.

Another very useful tip is to make sure you get good quality flexible hosting. Do not be tempted by free hosting packages because in most cases there is a catch. You will probably find that most free hosting are very limited to what they can offer your business website, like low web space and data transfer, so as your site grows and more people visit then that’s where you start to get problems. Within no time you run out of web space or your visitors have drained your data transfer allowance. So what happens then ? well your provider will email you and tell you its some ridiculous amount of money to upgrade, that’s the catch. Buy good quality hosting from a reputable and popular provider.

3)       Website design

This can be a frustrating part of getting your website off the ground. Do you go for these free “easy design it yourself” packages or get someone to do it for you? My advice is, if you want the best results from your website, go to a professional, don’t do it yourself or get an Internet savvy friend who claims they can do it for you. It’s an art, there’s a knack, there is a lot of things that go in to designing and developing websites that most people don’t know about and these are the important bits that make your site perform to its max. Done incorrectly and your website will be pointless, dumped on the cyberspace scrap heap by the search engines and that will do nothing for your business what so ever.
You have to invest some money at this point on your website, this is your online tool that can boost your businesses online presence to extremes.
You don’t need to spend a fortune, a few hundred pound in most cases to get you started and most web developers, including my company will say you can come back anytime and add new features as your business grows.

4)       Marketing and promoting your website

This is an important part once your website is up and running and there are lots of ways to do most of this yourself. You may be tempted to try and SEO specialist, this can be a good option to fast track your website up the ranks but be careful!, there are a lot of these SEO companies that promise they can get your site to the top of google within days for something like £50 per month or more in some cases, but can be a waste of your money. If you are on a tight budget and want do most of this yourself then try Google Adwords, PPC (Pay Per Click), blogs, free ads and directories, article website like this one. A popular way is to get link backs, that’s basically your link on someone else’s website that directly links back to your website. Normally these are reciprocal link so you will have to put there like on your site to, so you will need a link page you can administer yourself. Speak to your web developer about how you can market and promote your website because they will probably have some realistic packages to suit your budget.

5)       Keeping your site active

Some good advice to moving up the search engine ranks is to make sure your websites text content is constantly changing by adding a news page or a blog this can be easily achieved and simple for you to add information on your products or give advice to your potential customers before they buy. Visitors just love informative sites, they need to know that the company they are going to buy from actual knows what they are talking about and this gives them confidence in making a purchase from your website. Lay off the fancy flashing images and flash content, keep them minimal because the search engines can only read text, not images, so they may look good be won’t do anything for your ranking or relevance. Nicely on to relevance, when adding text content to your site keep it relevant to what your selling or advertising on your website, these no point babbling on about how the weather is today if you’re a plumber, stick to plumbing related topics. Tell your visitors what you do and how you do it, add testimonials from previous customers or clients, contact them and ask them to write a testimonial for you and put it on your website, nothing better than word of mouth.

6)       Providing good customer service

Once your sites up and running always be attentive to your customers, make sure you answer all your emails regularly, don’t leave it for days to get back to people, its annoying and ignorant not to reply and you are losing potential business. Once you have a sale keep that customer informed every step of the way. I know you cannot always be online 24/7 but at least make it clear that they will receive an answer to their email within a certain time, put your online opening hours on your site in your enquiry area so they know you are close on a Sunday and won’t expect a reply until Monday.

As I said above, nothing is better than word of mouth so ask your previous customers to use your feedback form on your site to give their opinion of their experience buying from your website.
Speak to your web developer they can provide a simple feedback form and page which will display your customer feedback on your website automatically, on approval by yourself of course.

7)       Don’t neglect your website

There are quite number of businesses out there that either forget or cannot be bothered to keep their website up to date. These people don’t realise the damage they are doing to their business, just because you cannot see the visitors to your site doesn’t mean they don’t have something to say. One disappointed visitor could be a lost sale. You must make sure your site is correct, informative and most importantly up to date and working correctly. Visit your site daily to check it’s functioning properly, if not get on to your developer and ask them to fix it. You wouldn’t leave the front door to your shop locked or broken to the point the customer can’t open it, they would walk away. This has the same effect online if your site is not working properly, like the navigation of links to pages don’t work they will simply go to your competitors website. You could potentially lose hundreds of possible sales a day through neglecting your site. Pay your web developer a maintenance fee to make sure your site has support just in case it breaks down or needs immediate attention its worth it.

8)       Patience & Consistency

These are two major requirements of running your website. You must be patient when it comes to marketing nothing happens over night no matter what you hear, you must allow time for your site to mature on the internet, search engines prioritise older more established sites so it make take some time before you see any movement up the ranks. Consistency, well you must keep up with any marketing and SEO work to keep boosting your website up those ranks, if you stop you are dead in the water, and you will start to sink. You must keep a regular check on your sites progress and keep pushing those link backs, blogs, articles and advertising wherever you can, being patient and consistent will eventually pay off. I have used all the methods mentioned in this article for some years now and I adopted the patience and consistency philosophy and its been a great success for me and yes it is hard work but this is your business we are talking about and nobody with their own business will have it easy, until they’ve made it.

9)       Monitoring your progress

You must keep tracks on your progress in the ranks and to do this you can either sign up to a stats monitoring website and add some code the page your want to monitor or ask your web developer to add some kind of stats page on your site.

Most of these facilities can monitor your page daily, weekly, month, yearly visits, hits, page views and so on. Its important to understand what all these mean and you can get information on all of these figures from the Internet. You can see the progress and increased in visit to your site, where they are being referred from so you know which sites you’re advertised on are doing the most for you.

10)    Success or failure

This all depends on your drive and ambition to succeed in business, not all of us have this drive to work for ourselves and some will never know, but you have to try and take a risk to become successful. All business people are risk takers, some win some lose, and those who lose get back up and try again, now there’s the drive and ambition. Those who succeed don’t stop there, they want a new challenge so they start a new project another chance to increase their success.

Once you have your website up and running and you see its working for you, while not go for global domination? Or at least local domination, start up another website selling similar or related products or services. Imagine a plumbing services website and then a Plumbing supplies website with your plumbing services advertised on it and vice versa. There is no limits to what websites can do, so now is time to get planning how you are going to start your online business.

This article was written and is copyright to Andy Greenhalgh the managing director of
AGTC Business Websolutions Ltd http://www.agtc.co.uk
Specialist business website consultants, web design, web development, web marketing and promotion.