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My Internet Business Pre-Launch Blue Print
Category: HOME BUSINESS
NASA and jet liners use a pre-flight check list to make sure that everything is ready to go before a jet liner (or the Space Shuttle) is ready for launch. When starting up my internet business, that same “dot the “i”s, cross the “t”s mentality is also important. You don’t need to look like an extra from the Apollo 13 movie to make this work, but that sense of organized planning is going to serve you well.
One of the basic pre-launch steps you want to have covered is a detailed business plan that will cover even the most minute detail. Remember you can never have things too planned out.
A key aspect to making your internet based business is getting on the web in the first place; you’ll need a web designer for that, or you can learn it on your own. We’re going to be iconoclastic here, and suggest that it’s worth your time to pay someone to do this for you. The primary business case for spending money on outside people is whether or not they can do something you can’t, or whether they can do something you can do - but free your time up to do something else. Even if you’re an HTML and CSS guru, if you’re starting your own business, having someone else do the grunt work of designing the site is worth the time.
Conversely, you’ll need to park your domain name; this we recommend doing yourself, and taking good notes. Domain names and domain name registration are sort of like potato chips. Once you start building web sites and making money off of them, you’ll find that you’re spending odd hours looking at interesting domain names with an intention to park them and use them later.
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 fontoy.)
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.
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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