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Starting an Internet Business - Why Careful Planning is Essential
In your rush to make money on the Internet you could lose track of more essential start-up considerations, like ensuring your business has adequate funding, arranging a business name and business bank account, obtaining Merchant (credit card) Facilities, ensuring you fulfil your legal obligations to public and government authorities. Don't let that happen or your business is destined to failure. Just a few days careful planning will make all the difference to whether your ventures online generate magnificent profits for you, or just leave you deeper in debt!
Most essential information is available in reference and business libraries, as well as from high street banks whose small business advisors can help answer specific questions and can also provide lots of useful start-up information and guidance. Even funding sometimes! Make friends with your local Small Business Advisor and lay the foundation for a profitable future with financial backing and advice.
Market Research
Market research is an essential feature of any business, before, during and after start-up. Prior to starting a business or individual project, market research determines whether a market actually exists for your product or service, and how large that market is likely to be.
Effective market research can help determine the optimum price for a product or service, the best places to advertise, the most effective means of publicising and targeting potential customers, and so on.
Spend time searching online for competing firms selling similar - or identical - products and services to those you have chosen. Study their marketing methods, note where they advertise, compare prices, send for and study information packs for ideas to emulate in your business.
Note the word 'emulate' meaning copying to a certain extent, but be sure not to plagiarise or breach rules relating to copyright, logos and business names, trade marks and patent rights.
Include your email and web site address wherever possible in your day-to-day activities and soon your mailbox will be filled with promotions and mailings from competing companies. There's no better way to keep up with the opposition and study the market at very low cost!
Planning
Be sure your computer and Internet connection work together and have the capability to support an online commercial presence today and once your business is up and running. A small memory computer with slow modem may not work well and you might find yourself having to buy new equipment and begin marketing afresh just a few months down the line.
Consider how big your site and business may become, based on products you have to sell, and taking into account your chosen range of marketing alternatives. Are you capable of including auto-responders, is there scope for organising several email addresses allowing you to have a separate box for each product and every marketing project, is there sufficient space for adding maybe hundreds of free reports, for running competitions, for adding affiliate program software, and so on, and so on?
Take a long time studying your future competitors on the Internet. You should know:
- how they market their goods;
- what special features exist on their sites;
- which Internet service providers they are using;
- do they use shopping carts (a bit like supermarket trolleys where visitors add purchases to their basket);
- do they have auto-responders (robots that do all the work for you, from accepting orders, processing credit card payments, to acknowledging and sometimes fulfilling orders);
- what ordering options exist (just automated merchant facilities, maybe also the opportunity to pay by cheque, or place a credit card order by phone or fax?)
Learn from others first, study their marketing ventures, copy (without infringing copyright and trading laws) the best features of their ventures for incorporating into your online business. Do all this before designing your own site or you may find your site won't support some specific features later.
Make a rough design of how you want your site to look and what features you want to include. This will help you create your own home page and helps professional designers get your page exactly right.
Don't be in a hurry to sell, despite this being your most important aim. Instead, attract people to your site for reasons other than to buy, such as to gain credibility and increase customers' faith in you and your business.
This can be done by offering freebies, items that are valuable in their own right, and will induce people to return to your site for more goodies and ultimately to buy. Examples of freebies which are almost guaranteed to achieve your aims: reports, competitions, updates on goods and services, industry news, shareware, e-books, e-zines.
The remainder of this book assumes you intend to follow this all-important rule of giving something free to attract visitors to your site, and to work hard at converting them into regular visitors and ultimately buyers. When they become repeat buyers you know you've won the game.
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