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. About the only thing I did right last time was learn the ins and outs of using Register.com for setting up my domain names. My designer helped me find a hosting provider who could install the software I wanted to make this all work, which helped a lot. Internet speed is one important aspect of My Internet Business Pre-Launch plan that I think many people do not take into consideration. No one surfing the net will want to wait a long time for your page to load onto their computer. So unless you plan to only target customers with high speed internet access, remember all the glitz and flashiness will not matter much to those who do not have the time to load it. 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. Once I learned how to set up a maintainable web site, it was time to focus on marketing. I started marketing last time by taking out radio spots, in part because a friend of a friend got me a deal at the local radio station. Since the spots were local, I got no coverage outside of local broadcast range. Not a good idea when I'm trying to sell things on the Internet. Now, I focus on building up web traffic. Traffic building is still something of a black art, but I'm focusing on keyword ad buy purchases - and believe it or not, advertising in the Daily Nickel newspapers. Since what I sell is household items, and tips on home organization, it's a natural mix of old style advertising and new. I also make sure that I'm in the Organizer's Circle of blog referrals, which helps a lot on getting on to social networking sites and builds relevance ratings.
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