Anyone can start a web-based business. It really just comes down to lots and lots of button pushing… the trick is in knowing which buttons to push!
In this lesson we will review everything you will need to create, manage, promote and make a profit from a web based business.
However, for the sake of being thorough, we will first identify the two things that this course is not going to help you with:
A Good Idea, Product or Service:
The most important factor in your success with be the idea that your business is founded upon. People will be drawn to great ideas, great products and great services. However, you don’t necessarily have to have a game changing breakthrough in order to be wildly successful online. As long as you have a good product or service that people want or need, and that is comparable to your competition, then great marketing can definitely win you the market share you need to be successful. So we are going to assume that you have a decent business concept, and show you how to build an unstoppable marketing machine!
Backend Business Functions:
This course is focused on the online aspects of your business, so we are not going to attempt to discuss the real world aspects of your business. For instance, we will not spend time discussing items that would be attributed to your general and administrative expenses (rent, utilities, accounting, etc.), we will not discuss your product supply chain or logistics, nor will we get into any advice about the legal aspects of your business or anything else that is not specifically related to online marketing. For the time being we will assume that you’ve got all those other aspects of your business covered.
For the sake of being thorough, we just felt the need to get those two disclaimers out of the way. Now, let’s go through a high level overview of what you will need to build a high-powered online marketing machine!
1. Creating A Website:
Of course you are going to need a website and the paths and options that you could take to get from concept to having a live and profitable website are nearly endless, but we are going to take you down the most simple and logical path.
One of the first considerations most people make, after coming up with an idea for a web-based business, is what it should be called. There is a real art to naming a business, but there are also some important strategic and logical considerations:
- Your web address should match the name of your business. It is your brand.
- Your web address should be as short as possible.
- Your web address should not be too generic.
- Your web address should either be a short combination of relevant and descriptive words, or a catchy sounding made-up word.
- From an SEO perspective, the use of descriptive keywords in your domain name can demonstrate some relevance to that subject matter and can slightly help your rankings improve for those terms. This used to be a powerful consideration for SEO, however the importance of this element in SEO has been significantly diminished among the major search engines. Still, the use of descriptive keywords will help to quickly communicate to your target audience what your company does. Therefore, there is still some benefit to using descriptive keywords as a business name / web address.
- Using a catchy sounding made-up word is a more difficult strategy in the beginning of your business because people may not intuitively understand anything about your business just from hearing the name. Therefore it will take time and a lot of effort to establish your brand as being connected to your product and services. However, the benefit of this strategy is that your catchy sounding made-up word is not likely to have any real competition. This will make it easier to rank well in the search engines for branded terms. If you take this route, your challenge will be marketing and branding like crazy until people begin to associate your brand with the products and services you offer.
- Choosing a TLD: .com, .net, .org, etc… choosing a TLD (top level domain) is an area that is going really open up in 2014 as up to 1400 new gTLD’s will be released. However, for the next few years .com and .org will likely continue to have the most trust in the eyes of the general public.
- Purchasing an existing domain name. When searching for domain names you will quickly find that the majority of good domain names are already owned taken. However, you may find the domain name that you want is for sale. The biggest consideration when buying an existing domain name is that existing domain names can and will bring their history with them. That means that if the domain that you want has been used well over the years, you could benefit from a history of relevance and quality. However, if the domain name was used for a spammy or malicious website, it could have penalties associated with it from the search engines and that could harm your ability to succeed. One quick way to search the history of a domain name is to use “The Way Back Machine” at: http://archive.org/web/ That free tool will allow you to see a chached version of the homepage dating as far back as 1996. Another good idea is to run backlink and rankings reports, which you will learn how to do in the “Competitve Analysis” course. If the domain recently took a big drop in organic rankings and/or if the domain has a lot of suspicious backlinks, you may want to stay away from it.
- There are many domain registration services to choose from. Here is a short list of the best domain name registration services on the web: NameCheap.com, Name.com, GoDaddy.com, enom.com, Ghandi.net, 1&1.com and Hover.com
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