Getting Your Small Business Online - Step by Step Guide

As people become comfortable being on the Internet, businesses are expected to be online or have some sort of web presence be it simple email or a complete web store. If you've decided to take your business online, you need to know how. We'll show you how over the next installments of this three part series. Expect to be educated about:

Part 1   -           Planning Stage

            -           Domain Names

Part 2   -           Developing Your Website

            -           Managing and Maintaining Your Website

Part 3   -           Promoting Your Website

Let's get started!

Part 1

Planning Stage

As starting any business endeavor, you need to plan. One of the most important issues to review is your reason.

Why are you getting online?

The public may want you to be online, but what precisely do they expect? “Getting online” is a very loose term. Do they want the option to contact you via email, do they want to be able to research your product at their convenience before purchasing, do they want to settle their accounts online, or do they want to buy online? Also ask yourself what you want to achieve. Each results in different types of online presence.

There are many types of websites. Most websites fall into these categories:

• Web store
• Brochure ware
• Customer service

Let's look at each in detail.

Web Store

This is probably the most well known form of online presence. For example, Handango.com a web store selling mostly software for personal digital assistants or PDA's such as Palm and Pocket PC was from day one a business run entirely online in the form of a web store. All its operations, from product catalog to purchasing are conducted through their website. Web stores are very exciting. You get to reach customers your store can't, you get to give your customers flexibility of ordering at their convenience, you can also get a piece of the growing e-commerce pie and more.

This is sounds like a very attractive proposition for any business but keep in mind, if you have a physical store, your web store should be considered as a separate profit center. Maintaining, promoting and running a web store requires many man-hours and certain amount of specialty knowledge. Very likely a small percentage of your existing customers will shop online. They know you and are comfortable with your physical setting. The web store would be an added convenience rather than main shopping venue for them especially if you allow in store pickup.

On the other hand, you're likely to attract a new set of customers such as those out of town or state. They might also have different income or education levels compared to existing customers who'll respond to different marketing techniques.

Once you decide on a web store, you'll need to figure out the operations.

• Merchant Account
  • Does your existing account allow for online payment processing?
• Order processing
  • A suitable shopping cart although this can be further discussed when developing the website
• Order fulfillment
  • Where do you route the order? Who packs and ships it assuming you have a physical product. How do you track order status?
• Delivery
  • If a physical product, which shipping company should you choose? Should you enter into a contract or pay as you go? Should you have more than one company? Determine your shipping costs but don't forget packaging costs too. If electronically delivered product, do you email or provide a download link? How would you minimize piracy? Should you have a unique key per customer?
• Customer Support
  • Most online buyers expect to have some way to track their orders. How would you handle pre and post sale questions? Live chat, toll free number, email or help desk? Regardless of which you choose, effort must be made to respond quickly. Purchasing online by itself is a very impersonal process. Imagine how neglected a customer might feel if they're made to hold or use automated response when they call. This is of utmost importance if your sole sales channel is done online.

Brochure Ware

Ford.com is a type of brochure ware website. They don't sell directly on online but fill it with information to educate buyers and help find a suitable dealer. The website also serves investors, job seekers, press or anyone interested in the company.  This is very typical of companies who sell their products through franchisees, agents or dealers.

On first impression, brochure ware sites do not seem to be a powerful reason to be online. That was true of many early websites. However businesses are realizing the Internet is a fairly inexpensive way to educate customers. Buyers also like the feeling of first hand contact with the manufacturer especially if the product is of significant value like a car.

More websites are also beginning to utilize their website as an outlet to gain feedback, announce jobs, post press releases, give investors up to date information and even as a marketing channel. Consider M&M's. While they do have a web store, their main website has a lot of marketing/advertising related activity such as games, e-cards, wall papers, screensavers all around their latest commercial, a clever way to increase an advertising campaign's effectiveness.

Customer Service

These are websites that exist as a contact point for your customer. Typically utility companies and software developers have such a website. These websites offer the customer a convenient way to review their account, pay their bills, and ask for help or request a quote.

In most cases, a website will have a combination of these elements. Usually, the main reason for a company to be online determines the website's theme.

After considering your reasons and responsibilities, you are ready to assemble the parts and start getting your website off the ground.

Domain name

Your domain name is like your online address. Domain names need to be registered through an ICANN accredited registrar such as GoDaddy.com. Domain names cost anything from $8.95 and up, depending who you register with.

How should you choose your domain name? Typically, businesses use their company name; example Microsoft.com that+ instantly identifies the business. Sometimes, your product or brand name is more prominent than your business name so you'll want to use the brand name. Or you could register it all. It could pay to register more than one domain name and routing them all to a single website. Doing this will ensure that you get maximum exposure and coverage, making it easy for your market to locate you online with a name that they best remember about your business.

Some experts advise to register a keyword rich domain name. This means a domain name that is composed of likely words someone might use when searching for a product similar to yours. For example if you sell work boots, steel-toe-boots.com is a keyword rich domain. The idea is, search engines are more likely to pick up and position your website fairly high in a search. However, search engine technology is focusing more on website content. We'll cover more about search engine positioning later.

Domain names are universal, meaning anyone in the world can register a name and it is first come, first serve. Many common English words and terms have long been registered. Often, you'll find the domain of choice is already taken. If so, you'll have to modify or rethink your name. You could try to approach the existing owner of the domain to see if they'll sell it to you. This is however unlikely if the domain is a highly desired one or is home to an active website. 

Another alternative is to look for expired domain names. These are names that have previously been registered but been ‘released' either due to closing of the website or failure to renew on time. Some believe if you find a popular existing domain name, you would jumpstart the hits to your website. Sometimes you'll find gems among expired names but you'll have to exercise caution particularly if the domain is a misspelling or very close to a copyrighted name. A good place to search for expired names is DeletedDomains.com.

Web Hosting

Just like your business needs a premise to operate from, your website needs to reside on a web server. There are numerous companies who rent out computer space to businesses and individuals to serve web pages therefore known as web hosts. They provide and maintain the hardware and software to run and present your website online. You can also host your website from your own computers however there is extensive cost involved and rarely do small businesses benefit from doing so, especially if the website is new.

Many designers offer web hosting as a package. Remember, if you decide to change designers or bring it in house, you'll have to rely on the designer's good faith to access your website files while you move your website. Though not always a problem, moving web hosts can be stressful. Be sure to read our exclusive on changing web hosts and our article, “Don't Make These Hosting Mistakes!”.

Finally, when ready to purchase web-hosting plans, you can quickly obtain quotes from several web hosts using HostVoice free, interactive service. It works simply by submitting a quick one-page questionnaire about your hosting needs and budget. This information will be channeled to the appropriate web hosts who will then contact you with a quote. You get to decide which company is best for you.

Now that we've covered the basics, it's time to develop the website itself. Join us in our next installment, when we'll go through

• The development process
• Managing your website

Getting Your Business Online - Part 2

In Getting Your Business Online – Part 1, we discussed

The importance of planning of your website, the reasons for getting online and the type of websites a business has.

We also discussed choosing and obtaining a domain name and

Web Hosting

This installment, we continue with

Developing your website and

Managing and Maintaining your website

Developing Your Website

This is probably the most exciting part, you finally see your website taking shape. Before jumping in, who's going to build it? Getting your business online requires a certain amount of time, expertise and money. Most of us would rather have a hands-off approach and outsource the job of creating and managing our businesses' online presence. Cost is on the other hand important to small businesses. To save money most will try to do it themselves. Each approach has it's own plus and minuses.

In-House vs. Outsource

When you outsource to a web designer, you are bound by their knowledge and capacities of handling the job. Not all designers are created equal. Consider how much they know about e-commerce if that's your plan. How much to they know about business in general? Some designers are excellent in programming and design but fail to understand your business. One design and development company to look at would be Design Velocity. Their team consists of designers and marketing professionals so you get to tap the expertise of both.

Consider also how involved you want to be with your website. Do you want to be able to update it yourself such as news and announcements? Do you want to be able to maintain your inventory yourself? There are many solutions out there that allow businesses to post news or update their catalog without the need to extensively involve the designer. In this case, a good solution is to outsource work that is time-consuming and what you are not familiar with such as creating the website interface, scripting and the underpinning software applications and website hosting.

If you choose to do it yourself, remember to factor in the cost of software and time to learn the application, time to install, build and manage the website. Also time to learn about keyword optimization, security and other technical items. If you are familiar with them, chances are your time cost to do it yourself will be low. Otherwise the cost becomes more than it would to outsource because it'll take you away from doing what you do best.

In almost all cases, it's best to manage customer interaction in house to build customer confidence. The rule of thumb is to let professionals handle the technical details of creating your online presence and keeping in house your core business operations. Think of it this way. If you build a new store, you would hire a building contractor. In this case, your web designer would be your building contractor.

Site Map

In beginning the design process it's best to draw up a site map to guide yourself. The site map relies heavily on your objectives (More on this in Part 1 - Why are you getting online?) and illustrates how your pages link together. Decide what your visitor sees on the main page. Should there be an introduction page, company page or a news and specials page? Regardless what your focus is, your pages should be simple to navigate. A quick draft will give you a bird's eye view of the site and helps to pull the pages together.

This map should also be made into a page on your website to aid search engines as their robots visit the site. More on this in Part 3.

Design

Many times new websites strive so hard to achieve their individual look or design that they lose sight of the fact people online are used to finding what they want instantly. Unlike a brick and mortar business, there's no one to help them as they enter the premises. Some key things to consider when designing your website:

Familiarity

Ease of Navigation

Speed

Familiarity

Many websites on the Internet have a common way to display pages (Fig 1). If a designer gets too creative it disrupts the visitor's expectations. If they don't find it in a few seconds they'll leave and the business loses a sale.

Fig 1

Logo	Advertisements, Shopping Cart, Customer Service or Important Links
Main Menu and important links. If it's a store you'll find store departments or product category links.	The main body of the page is usually dedicated to product, news, deals, announcements and so on
Company information, Privacy Policy, Terms of use

Ease of Navigation

If you have to make the layout drastically different, keep your key links highly visible or available. Put the most important links as high up on the top of the page as possible because many people still don't scroll.

Don't clog your pages with advertisements, yours or others. That is a major put off and just looks unprofessional. If you participate in affiliate programs, use your banners wisely; set a section in your side bar for partners and affiliates. It's easy to clog your pages; there's so much to tell but remember to focus your website. Keep the most important items the most visible. Review your objectives. What do you want the site or page to achieve? Buy your product, read your article, buy your affiliate product, give you their email?

Don't make your fonts too small; the computer monitor isn't conducive for reading. Don't make it too large either. Use headlines to emphasize the most important points only.

Keep text length to a minimum. People don't have time to read through a web page where there's endless scrolling to be done. Learn how to write effectively for the website. Learn what the elements of good web design are. Vincent Flander's Web Pages That Suck is a great resource to help keep you away from what will hurt your business.

Speed

It goes hand in hand with ease of navigation. Despite the growth of high speed Internet access, the majority is still on dial up. If your web pages load too slowly, your visitors leave and you lose. The biggest way to ensure your website loads quickly is less graphics, less audio or flash extensive website. Websiteoptimization.com has a very handy tool to help evaluate how quickly your website loads at different speeds. It also gives you summaries about the size and number of images all designed to identify your speed blocks.

Managing & Maintaining Your Website

So! Your website up and running. Your work is far from done. A website is a live thing and requires a fair amount of maintenance.

New Content

The biggest thing to keeping a website alive is the freshness. People are easily bored. If your content hasn't changed in as little as a few weeks, they make the assumption they've seen all there is to see and won't be back. Some ways to keep your site fresh new are

Adding new products

Announcing company news

Featuring one product per week

Give a new hint each week how to use your product

Technology & Security

As technology advances you'll also want to adjust the site so it will load properly. Hackers and viruses also unfortunately exploit technology advances. You'll need to close the gaps or be aware of them. If you outsource your web development, the company you hired should take care of software updates and security patches. If they don't, you should consider looking for one who does. Try HostVoice to obtain quotes from reliable web hosts. It only takes a few minutes and one form. If you use email, you're open to all sorts of viruses pretending to be customers. Be informed. Keep up with security threats and virus warnings even if you've got someone to handle it for you.

Customer Privacy

Keeping your customer information private is not only a good idea but also a must according to the law. If you collect customer information even a simple name & email database, you should have a privacy policy in place.

Privacy policies are only a start. You need to ensure you do all you can to protect your customers information. Again, you need to be sure your web host or designer is up to date with website security issues and they plug the hole in a timely manner.

Data Integrity

Last but not least, always prepare for disaster. After you've worked hard to build your site, traffic and customer base, what happens when you visit your website one day and find you cannot access it at all? Worst still, you're told all data has been wiped out. You not only lose business, you lost a lot of time and effort. Hackers, viruses, hardware failure, natural or unnatural disasters and so much more, can easily corrupt data.

The key? Backup frequently and don't rely solely on your web host's backup. Learn how to make your own. If you hire a designer, include in your service package a scheduled backup routine. Get a copy of that backup so you'll always have two sets in two different places.

By now you've thoroughly planned and built your website, it's time to promote. Join us in our final installment when we cover the different ways of website promotion including:

Pay Per Click Advertising

Linking

Search Optimization

Newsletters

Banners and

Offline Advertising.

Getting Your Business Online - Part 3

In Part 1 and Part 2, we walked through

· The importance of planning of your website, the reasons for getting online and the type of websites a business has.

· We also discussed choosing and obtaining a domain name and

· Web Hosting

· Developing your website; doing it in house or outsourcing it, good design practices and

· Managing and Maintaining your website

As promised, in our last installment we'll help you through the basics of Promoting your website using:

· Search Engine Optimization and Linking

· Pay Per Click Advertising

· Newsletters

· Banners

· Articles

· Offline Advertising

Search Engine Optimization

It's every web master's dream to be on the first page of a search result and rightfully so. Searching is one of the most frequent activities on the Internet (http://www.spiderhelp.com/) but most websites never make it near the top 5 pages. According to the Association for Interactive Marketing, Search Engine Optimization is “the process of choosing targeted keyword phrases related to a site, and ensuring that the site places well when those keyword phrases are part of a Web search.”

To do that, you'll need to review (again) your objectives and your product. You might find there is more than one relevant keyword or key phrase you think best relates to your website. That is ok but avoid ending up with a huge list. How do you narrow them down to the most relevant? This requires a combination of discipline, keyword research and good old trial and error.

Look at your list of keywords. Do they include typical marketing speak? Industry jargon? Leave them out. No one ever uses them and marketing speak just doesn't sell. Here's a short and sweet article at SearchEngineGuide.com about buzzwords vs. effective keywords. Think natural language. How they would express themselves if talking to friends, family or someone on the street.

Once you cut out the tech and marketing speak, research it to find out how often the keyword is being used. The more often tells you the keyword is popular and is a good keyword. On the other hand, it also means more websites are competing for the searcher's attention. Many webmasters have resorted to optimizing using a less than first place but still very popular keywords.

Now you got some solid keywords, apply them in your Meta tags such as title tags, description and even Alt tags. Also don't forget to use the effectively throughout your content. Search Engine Watch is a resource to help get started on optimization and search engine submission.

Linking

Search engines today put a good amount of weight on links. Not links from your site but links to you. This is based on the popularity principle; the more people talk about you or find you interesting enough to put a link on their website, the more likely you have something really good to offer.

Of course, your site has to be worth linking to in the first place. Then you need to find websites who are willing to link to you. Visit the sites and politely ask the webmasters if they'd like to trade links with you. Now you might think, there are so many out there! I'll just harvest the emails and put them on a one shot mailing list. No go! This could land you in a spammer's list. Reciprocal link requests by email are a very touchy thing because of so much spam going around. Spend time to visit and research the website and craft a personal email. This makes them more likely to read your email and hopefully more willing to responding.

Beware of wrong ways to find link backs such as free for all pages and link farms. Spider Food has an excellent tutorial on this issue. Learn them lest you do your website more harm than good.

Pay Per Click Advertising

It might seem at this point optimization and building links takes a lot of hard work and time. What can you do if you need your website to be seen right now? As with most any promotion, paid placement can get you there. Pay Per Click Advertising (PPC) is paying to be included in a search based on your keywords. Depending how much you're willing to spend, you be very visible in a search result every time your choice keyword is utilized. Most popular search engines clearly distinguish these under a “Sponsored listing” section.

The best thing going for PPC advertising is you pay only for visitors. It is assumed if someone searches for something they're a pre-qualified target, not casual surfer. The not so hot part is the most popular keywords such as “hosting” can cost $10 per click. It's pretty much like paying a guy on the street $10 to visit your store and he may not even buy anything.

So how could a small business afford this? For one, you might want to use it as a kick-start campaign or seasonal according to the season of your business, or holiday seasons. Another way is to buy the lesser-used keywords, those usually cost less or very specific key phrases that only a person who's truly interested will use. Sound contradictory? Yes and no. You can use different keywords for optimization and pay per click. Site Point has some good points about building your PPC strategy.

You might also want to consider paid inclusion but this can be very costly for a small business. If you do, choose the one search engine you think is most promising. Remember, a combination of optimization and wise pay per click strategy works better than relying on one method alone. For further reading, visit Pay Per Click Search Engines

Other Online Advertising

So far, we've concentrated on search engine related promotion tactics. Some other ways to promote online are,

Banners

Probably the oldest form of online advertising. Banners have been deemed distractive, ineffective even downright rude when it appears as pop-up, pop-under, fly-in and every imaginary form that's in your face. The demise of banner advertising has been predicted over and over but banners still command a huge section of the online advertising market.

Since most small businesses don't have a very large budget, how do you maximize your banner advertising dollars? Don't advertise where it's not relevant. It's tempting to advertise on large popular websites or portals but you run the risk of casting your net too wide. In the end your ads fail to impress the viewer. Choose the sites wisely, such as those where your target is most likely to gather. You could also barter for advertising space with other complimentary websites. Whether you use pop-ups or other interactive ads, keep in mind these usually frustrate viewers. Some even see it as trickery because they happen to click on your ad as it pops up, not the link they wanted. Weigh the return and objectives of your advertising campaign carefully.

Newsletters

Again, be sure to choose the right newsletter, and consider the readership. Also look at frequency and placement. Will one ad bring you results? The placement of your ad is also important. Does the newsletter cram all the ads in one section where it's easy to skip over or is it well distributed over strategic parts of the newsletter? If the newsletter is formatted well e.g. requiring readers to scroll to the bottom to obtain a weekly giveaway, then a lower placement can work yet save you money.

You might also want to find out the publication schedule. Using this, you can tailor your ad to the topic, increasing the ad's effectiveness. Next, look at the number of ads per publication. The more there are, the easier you get lost.

Articles

Contributing informative articles to newsletters or websites is a good way to get your name out there too. Not only is it easier on the wallet it can establish your business as an expert. Do remember to write good articles the reader can use and benefit from rather than making it sound like a brochure.

This concept can even be carried a step further into a workshop or tele-seminar.

Offline Advertising

Just because your website is online doesn't mean it must be confined there. Include your website as much as possible in other parts of your business. If you have a physical presence, display banners, signs and posters in store. Have your URL printed on promotional items, carry out bags, shirts, business card or on your vehicle.

If you advertise in the traditional media like newspapers don't forget to include your URL too. Be creative. Tie in your offline campaigns with your website for example giving an incentive for customers to utilize a feature on the website, encourage asking for help online, telling your customers you have a wider selection in your online store. You could even have web only specials. Do keep in mind; you'll be limiting your reach to those with Internet access in.

As we close this three part series, we hope we've given you a meaningful kick-start to putting your business online. It is a large project on all counts but with knowledge, research and perseverance, we'll see you online soon.