Steps and procedures to start an online business.

In today’s society everything from grocery shopping to ordering pizza can be done online? Lets face it, everyone wants convenience. Today’s society is fast paced. It is no surprise that most business owners have taken their products and services and placed it online. In the present day and age it is almost impossible to have a successful business unassociated with the Internet.

The Internet opens new opportunities for any sort of business. Such as: low overheads, convenience for customers and clients, and presents various methods to display important and relevant information about your business to your clients and so that they remain up to date and well informed.

As a new business owner, starting an online business may be your first alternative. The question that arises is how to go about starting an online business? You may have heard of many who have tried and failed or may have succeeded but are not as successful. This may be due to lack of tools and research.

Research is very vital to the success of any business. Once you have decided what type of online business you would like to develop, then research the topic. The first step is to research your competitors. Research the products or services they offer. Find out as much information as you can. What makes their business successful? Who are their target audience? Where do they advertise? What products or services sell most?

Now that you have educated yourself and you feel comfortable with the knowledge you have gained it is time to research and develop your business plan and expense report. It is always recommended to prepare these documents especially, if you are planning to apply for a business loan or working with investors. Once these steps are taken care of it is time to focus on other key objectives.

The main focus of an online business is the website. Your website will act as the middle-man when it comes to selling and buying. The domain name you select is very important and should be chosen wisely. You may have already chosen your business name; but is it catchy enough to be used for your domain name? Your domain name should be catchy, easy to remember and unique.
After deciding an appropriate domain name, it is required to select a good web hosting company. When searching for a web hosting company there are some basic points you need to consider:

Reliability:
It is very important to find a web hosting company that is reliable and have a low percentage of downtime. As a new online business owner, your business needs to be up and operating at all times. Unfortunately, this is not always the case. Research the web hosting company of your choice and it may be a good idea to find a web hosting company that offers a money back guarantee.

Server Hard Drive Space:
Keep in mind that most web pages average 10-50 kilobytes in size. It is important to cover all of your web pages. It is recommended that you select a package which offers web space more than your requirements to be on the safe side.

Customer Care or Technical Support:
We have all been in a situation as a customer where you order something online and have question but there are no answers. In most cases, technical support is offered in the Web Hosting package. However, double check before purchasing. See how quickly the technical support center responds to your questions.

Secure Server:
Ordering products or service from an online business can have its consequences. Especially identify any theft and possible security issues. It is important to your customers that their information is protected and safe. Most online businesses offer this protection by having secure servers. It may be an additional cost; but it is one that is worth it.

POP Accounts:
Allows you access to emails sent through your website. Each account is password protected. In most cases, you will receive 5, 10, 100 or more POP Accounts. You can assign an account to all your employees.

Other Tools Such as FTP and Website Wizards:
If you are like most online business owners, you do not have the skill to create a website from scratch nor do you have the money to pay some expensive web site designer. In this case, a web host company that offers a web site design wizard and other tools will be of great convenience.

Price:
It is not impossible to find a web hosting company that offers you quality and quantity at a great price. Make sure to bargain with the company you are purchasing from as most hosting companies are willing to offer further discounts to acquire new customers.

Now it is time to create your website. Here are a few tips:

The content on your web site should be informative, interesting and well written. It should catch the attention of the reader and keep them interested. Each page should sell your product or service. Include a mailing list and maybe a referral program. Newsletters are great as well.

Building a web site is usually fun and inventive. However, marketing your website will prove to be a little more difficult. Nevertheless, some web hosting companies offer great information and additional marketing tools for an added fee.
This information should assist you in starting an online business and help you towards developing a new website for your company.

Affiliate Programs - A Reliable Online Marketing Strategy

npjjspqaAffiliate programs can be a great strategy of Internet marketing and add additional income to your business. Internet marketing through affiliate programs may be easier if you are marketing your own products and have established customers or a stable list of potential customers. However, if you market products that are not your own through an affiliate program, then the following tips can assist in developing an effective marketing strategy.

1. Buy Them First:
Common sense will state that it may not be wise to market products over the Internet especially when the ownership is not yours. You can’t really sell something you know little about nor can you guarantee the product will deliver to your customers’ expectations. It is advised to sample the product before you sell it. Educate yourself and learn the benefits of the product before you market on the Internet. Bottom line is to test the product!

2. Get Them While Their Hot:
It is important to get hold of the product in its launch phase or when the demand is very high and not many people are aware of the product. Ideally you should start promoting the product when 99% of the market is not aware of it. This will help you to maximize your efforts and generate higher commissions. Make sure to grasp the information of your customers which you can always use to up sell or cross sell your own products in the future.


3. Set up "Redirect" Web Pages:
You probably already know that having your own website and domain name is a very important strategy of Internet marketing. Having your own website is a critical element to the success of your business. Use your domain to "mask" the affiliate URL that was issued to you when you signed up. Customers are use to seeing affiliate URL's. There is a drawback however: When the product begins to gain popularity it is harder to sell with long URL’s. By using a redirect and bringing customers to your site, gives you a great lead over the other affiliates selling the product.


4. Devote Your Web Site to One Product/Service:
One thing that may have caught your eye that most web site owners share alike is that they will congest their website with thousands of different products on one web page. For more reasons than one this never works. Instead, avoid making this mistake and take your main page, the one that gets the most traffic, center it on your most profitable product or service. Try to focus towards a single product and even if you want to sell more products then ensure that the products are related to each other in terms of their offerings and value. The idea is to develop pages based on themes and then sell relevant products related to those themes. For e.g. if your page is developed to sell plasma tvs then you could always list products from different companies selling these tvs but placing other products like cameras and dvd players will not be a good idea as the customer who landed on your page was looking for tvs alone.


5. More Time To Online Marketing:
You should have time to market online, instead of setting up several web sites, unlimited forms, handling questions after questions (you will get some, not many though), or any other administrative tasks. You can spend your time with what makes money, advertising and Internet marketing and getting your site visited. This is your main priority and should stay that way for the success of your business.

Various Techniques of Search Engine Optimization

SEO techniques are effective procedures to put a website on the first page of search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and MSN for your targeted keywords. These techniques directly help in raising the SERPs (search engine result positions) of the site, increase site traffic and acquire relevant quality links.
If you want people to find your site via a search engine easily, the site will require a high SERP. This means when users search on specific keywords or phrases, they will find your site on the first page generated by the engine. Having the site on the 10th page of search engine results will not give you satisfactory traffic and you can potentially lose thousands of customers and sales.
Let’s discuss the techniques that can help you towards achieving a high SERP
1. Domain & File NamesSelect a domain name of your site that contains words from your main keyword phrase/query. The domain name should also be easy to spell and easy to remember. Ideally it should only contain alpha-numeric characters and no hyphens for optimum results.
2. Easy to think Keywords:
Such keywords are to be used which are searched for in excess on the net. Add keyword synonyms to your content. Make sure you use your keywords from the page you are linking to.
3. Density of placing Keywords: Keyword density is related to the number of times the keyword appears in the text on a particular page. High keywords density is considered spamming by the search engine and can get your site blacklisted. Your keywords should be toward the top of your page and in either every paragraph or every second paragraph depending on your paragraph length.
4. Misuse of SEO Techniques:
Misuse of search engine optimization techniques may get your site blacklisted from a search engine. Some techniques that are considered spam are cloaking, invisible text, tiny text, identical pages, doorway pages, refresh tags, link farms, filling comment tags with keyword phrases only, keyword phrases in the author tag, keyword density too high, mirror pages and mirror sites etc. These are all termed as Black Hat SEO techniques. While these techniques might work to give you a higher ranking for a short time, however in the long run they will slow down your progress and can have detrimental and very damaging consequences.
5. Construction of Titles and Description:Each page should have a different title with two or three of your keyword at the beginning. When search engine results are displayed the title is the first thing people observe and therefore enough time should be spent on constructing a fully optimized and well thought title. Your description should also have at least two or three of your keywords at the beginning as so should your first sentence on the page. There should be a different title, description and first sentence on each page.
6. Authors Biography:
At the end of the page place an author biography or company name. This technique will help you to improve the branding of your site and get good rankings for your company name.
7. Website Design:
In what way the website is designed is also important. Text content should balance the HTML text. The pages of the site should validate and be accessible in all browsers and from anywhere.
8. Links on the Site:
There should always a navigation menu present on the site from where you link to all the important pages of the site. The idea is not trying to optimize the home page alone, but each and every page of the site. The secondary and tertiary pages of the site will only be recognized and indexed by the search engines if the spider can reach those pages. There should not a single broken link on any page of the site especially the index/home page.


9. Links to the Site:
This involves ascertaining links that point to your site. The online world is not much different as compared to offline world. The celebrities in the real world are all famous and rich people i.e. have high SERPs. The reason they are famous is because so many people are familiar with them and know about their lives. The same principal applies to web-sties. The more the sites link to your site, the higher it will rank on search engines. This is an ongoing task and therefore a lot of effort should be spent in obtaining links from other sites. In an ideal world you should have all the sites linking to yours and your site not linking out at all. However this is not possible, but the idea should always be kept in mind when trying to acquire links. Also the quality of incoming link plays a big role in determining the overall benefit derived and its effect towards increasing the SERPs. The better the quality the better the result and so on so forth.

These are some of the techniques, which if used effectively can directly help in increasing not only traffic, potential customers but also the rankings on all search engines. In the end it’s not only about what you know but how you act. Hard work, dedication and patience is always a recipe for success, whether working online or offline.