Nowadays one must build a strong strategy to maintain their online business running. The internet has given small and large firms the capability to start up their online businesses and every day more and more competition begins to surge. Marketing is essential to create traffic for your website. There are several steps you can take to successfully market your website:
1. You must obtain a domain name: A domain name is an internet address that allows users to find your websites. You can check if a domain name has been taken if you take a look at www.uspto.gov. It would be better in most opinions to get one that ends in .net or .com.
2. Build a professional looking website: People will take your website seriously depending on the content found inside. If there valuable information they need? Is the content relevant to the purpose of the website? There are templates already provided by sites such as Yahoo.
3. Make your website easy to navigate: Many people often focus their time trying to make their website visually stimulating and tend to forget other important aspects such as navigation. Have information organized and accessible. This will determine whether web surfers decide to use your site again.
4.Build up your email list: Offer people incentives for allowing you to obtain their email addresses. Email marketing is a cheap and easy way to reach the public. However, inform them that their personal information is safeguarded against spam or acts of fraud.
5. Send periodic emails or newsletters: This form of communication allows you to reach existing customers, potential customers, and a larger audience as well. When sending these news letters try to keep them short and to the point. Give customers the option to opt out of newsletters if they wish. Be professional and try to make it visually appealing.
6. Buy Banner Ads: Invest in ads and place them on sites that are related to yours or complement your site. Make the ads appealing to the eye to drive traffic to your website. Monitor the success of your ads by tracking the amount of clicks.
7. Optimize your site for search engines: Sites such as google and yahoo are used consistently by people conducting web searches. The tool known search engine optimization helps your efforts to increase your ranking in web searches.
8. Buy keyword ads on search engines: By purchasing key words when a customer does a search it will directly lead them to your website or the product they were seeking located on your site. For instance, if you specialize in selling authentic leather handbags, then the keyword you may want to purchase would be "authentic leather handbags".
9. Make it easy to buy: To facilitate shopping you should have a shopping cart system and credit card authorization process. There are systems you can integrate into your website to help the shoppers feel secure in their purchases such as Paypal. Don't make the system complicated by requiring too much personal information such as the routing numbers on checks and so forth.
10. Provide great customer service: Great customer service will ensure customer loyalty, which will mean continuous web visits and references to others about the usefulness of your website.
All these steps for marketing will establish the foundation of the eValue framework described by Amit and Zott which involve efficiency, complementarities, lock-in, and novelty. Efficiency is enhanced when you simplify the purchasing process and make it easier for customers to buy items. By placing ads on sites relevant to what you offer such as personalized logos on a T-shirt website creates complementarities. By offering exceptional or one of a kind services you lock-in customers. Constantly innovating your site will keep customers interested and they will remain loyal to your company since you are creating novelty.
How you market your business will determine your success. The harder you work the better the outcome.
References:
http://www.allbusiness.com/marketing-advertising/internet-marketing/630-1.html
I completely agree on your detailed tips on a successful business plan. Such as a domain name, professional looking website, Provide great customer service etc. Which is complimentary to what Amit and Zott discuss in their article which involve efficiency, complementarities, lock-in, and novelty. This also adds to what i was saying in my article.
ReplyDeleteYou give some great points to anyone attempting to start up their own e-commerce site or any site in general. You also state some details as to how they should go about implementing your guideline. It is a very good frame of reference that I think people should consider. I also like your closing sentence, it is true that the amount of work you put in to something directly relates to the success of that venture.
ReplyDeleteThose are all great points and every company should add them to their business plan. Having great customer service, optimizing your site for search engines, and making your site easy to navigate are essential and very inexpensive.
ReplyDeleteI totally Agree just by having a well optimized website your business plan is almost done. People use online sources to do everything nowadays, so if you have a good website you are pretty much set.
ReplyDeleteI agree that the creation and marketing of a well constructed website that facilitates the customer and enhances their experience will go a long way to helping an e-business be a success. Just a comment on point 8, a business doesn't necessarily have to purchase keywords. When creating a website one can include keywords on the backend content pages along with meta titles and meta tags that will aid in SEO and organic searches.
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