Tuesday, February 10, 2009

My Internet Business Pre-Launch Blue Print

By Trisha Frauenhofer

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.

A good web designer, I have found is always a valuable asset to My Internet Business Pre-Launch plan. If you want a professional looking online shop or firm then you will need to invest in a reputable web design firm.

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.

The other place where my designer helped a lot was getting me to realize that More isn't always Better. She took out her laptop, hooked up a cellular modem to it, and we loaded my old site. There was time to grab a cup of coffee and watch the birds before enough of it loaded for me to be able to see what the site was about. Dulls ville. By using Cascading Style Sheets (the CSS stuff I mentioned earlier), she was able to make it dynamic and much more attractive. (I was still using JPEGs of titles in a fancy font.)

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 whizzbang 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.

Before you launch into business ready to make millions, you will want to have a plan for getting customers to your site. You can not exactly make millions without any clients. You may have the best looking web site, with superior products at the absolute best prices, but without customers none of that really matters.

Related to Ad Words and related ad proxy systems is getting social networking sites to drive traffic to yours. Focus on getting people who have credibility in their online community referring to your products and web site, and you'll build a nice stream of ready traffic to your site - and eventually, to your affiliate sales or your products. - 16651

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