Business Pre-Flight Check Lists For My Internet 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.
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 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.
Internet speed is one important aspect of My Internet Business Pre-Launch plan that I think many people do not take into consideration. No one surfing the net will want to wait a long time for your page to load onto their computer. So unless you plan to only target customers with high speed internet access, remember all the glitz and flashiness will not matter much to those who do not have the time to load it.
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 whiz bang 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.
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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