Congratulations! You have identified a gap in the market and you are fully set on exploiting this knowledge to make a successful business, and now the hard work starts. Put your seat belt on and brace yourself for a journey that will take you to great highs but be warned: if you fail to sufficiently prepare, it can equally drop you into the depths of despair. Here’s a guide to setting up your business online, so that you can continue to rise and avoid being a business flop.
Know your market
You may have the products or services all lined up and ready to be launched, but you need to pay great attention to the market in which you are selling. It is not enough to believe you know who your target customers are and what they want, you need to research them! You need to understand what motivates them, what excites them, what problems they need solving and where they hangout online – is it Pinterest? Facebook? Or LinkedIn?
Use the internet for your research:
- Do keyword research to identify what people search for in relation to the goods that you offer – choose ones that you will not be competing against thousands of other sites for ranking – niche all the way! You can use this information to target your audience with your advertising.
- Access forums to identify what problems your products or services will solve. You can gleam so much information from understanding what challenges people face.
- Research your competition. Have a good look around their websites, social media platforms and You’ll get a holistic view of their business: things they are doing well to show you a standard that you need to exceed, and things they are getting wrong and that customers don’t like – unexpected pricey delivery costs? You can deliver for a set fee.
Your website
You have under 5 seconds to influence whether a visitor stays on your website or clicks away to a competitor. That’s a small window of opportunity to grab someone’s attention and give them an oversight of your products, your brand and your trustworthiness. The design and content of your website should excite viewers while signposting them to the products and through to checkout – seamlessly.
It’s a tall order, but one that needs to be mastered. You have two options. You can do it yourself or you can collaborate with a web design team. If you do it yourself you risk not having the skills to provide your visitors with a high-quality user experience, and remember, in the early days you have no reputation to make customers loyal to your brand.
A web design team will do all the nitty gritty for you and ensure that your site is beautiful to not only visitors but appeals to the search engine bots too to ensure a high-ranking page in search results. It is an investment, but one that offers you a high return. You don’t even need a large amount of capital either as there are monthly payment plans that deliver you a great website but with ongoing support to make it a success from day one.
Stand and deliver
When your site is up and running, you need to continually review the feedback that you receive. You need to be make sure that what you promise your customers, is what you deliver, and when errors occur, which they invariably do in every business, take it on the chin and sort it out quickly. Keep communication open with customers and inform with any updates to their orders.