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. I cringe at it now, but when I look at my first business plan, it was a disaster, and it wasn't (in retrospect) that my internet business failed spectacularly. I hadn't put together a realistic budget, and I'd just assumed that marketing would "happen on its own". I took out a loan, based on a second mortgage without identifying where the revenue potentials were. 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. A web designer should not only design your site, they should also be able to take care your domain name registration, all of your hosting needs, and all of your software that you may require to run your business successfully. Keep open lines of communication with your designer so that they can give you all of your desires on your site. As part and parcel of the domain name parking part of your business plan, you should look into hosting providers. The first rule in hosting is that you get what you pay for. Take it from us - it's better to deal with a reseller who will answer the phone at 3 AM than it is to have your technical requests routed through Mumbai where an Indian cubical worker reads off of a script. Look into your bandwidth usage, and read the fine print carefully before setting up the contract. She also helped me set up my customer feedback forums, and talked to me about font choices and usability. While she disagreed with stuff that Jacob Nielsen recommends (mostly because his sites look ugly and dated), she did point out that my content needed to be the focus of my site, and readability was key. So, the next step, after the site is up, is bringing in visitors. This is the marketing part of the business plan, and near the end of the pre flight check list. In most cases, this means getting your shop into the top twenty results for a search engine keyword hit. There are countless articles on how to do this, but the realistic way to do it is Google Ad Words. 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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