There has never been a more exciting time than now to start your online business. Setting up your website is easy, quick and fun. However, your initial excitement can die down quickly if you don’t follow some of these basic steps. The reason why we are insisting on your elementary groundwork is to gain and retain customers and beat the competition. Here are the 5 things that you need to do before you start your online business or store.
Identify Your Niche
Before you start, you need to identify a niche. A niche is a specialization in a particular field. For example, you might begin your business in the area of providing taxation services to small businesses and startups. Once the niche is identified, the next step becomes extremely crucial.
Creating a Website
The next obvious step is to create and launch your website. This is where many newcomers falter. They create their accounts on sub domains like www.example.wordpress.com and hope to get business. By doing this, these businesses are not tapping fully the power of their web business. Sub domains, though easy to create, are dependent on platforms like WordPress and are not amenable to search engines.
Having your own domain helps. You can speak with several domain resellers to buy a credible domain that conveys your seriousness and intention to the outside world. Creating your custom domain is easy, quick and fun.
WordPress is the most preferred platform for all the first time online business owners. You can also approach individual web developers to create your website. When you have your website, you are able to get a lot of customer insights like traffic, sources, nature of traffic, mobile versus desktop traffic, etc. Analysing your traffic helps you grow your business.
While booking your domain, you should also speak with a web hosting provider to give you a good hosting plan. Starting with shared hosting is ideally recommended and if you have an ecommerce business, cloud hosting can be a most preferred option for your growing business.
Create a Marketing Plan
Initially, your website will gather low traffic. This is so because search engines take time to crawl new content on the web. So, how do you grow your business?
a) Devote a part of your marketing budget to paid traffic.
b) Establish your brand awareness on social media platforms like Twitter, Reddit, Medium, Facebook, Twitter, etc.
Getting Feedback
In your initial days as a business owner, ask for feedback from your friends, colleagues and other people in your community. Find out from them about what they like about the website, product catalogue, etc. Feedback from your community helps you to make tweaks to your product.
DIY
Do it yourself- It may take some time before your website turns profitable. Until then, we suggest you manage your website on your own. Don’t delegate your site maintenance to a developer, rather do that work yourself. Maintaining and updating your website is tiresome but possible. Most of the work can be accomplished by plugins while most analytics related problems can be solved by talking to a Google representative over phone or chat.
To summarise, you just need to follow up on a few basic steps while launching your website. As it grows in size and scope, you can delegate its maintenance to a developer.
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