Running a successful online business can be a complicated task. Each company will be faced with its own specific challenges. However, there are some things that every online business need to get right to thrive. A topic you can find out more about in the post below.
Your product
First of all, the online stuff like your website is essential, as you will see below, but so is the product that you will be selling. Of course, by product, we mean any physical or virtual item or service that you will provide for your customer in exchange for payment.
It’s also worth noting that there are some specific advantages of choosing an industry where you can offer a virtual product or service over a real life one. This mainly being the immediate access your customers can get to the product, and the removal of the need to use logistics and delivery services to fulfill your orders. Both things that can keep your overheads very low and help your business to thrive.
The keystone is your website
In architecture, the keystone is the middle stone in a bridge structure that keeps everything else in place. That is why it is such a good metaphor for your website when you are running an online business. After all, if your website isn’t right then all the other things around it won’t be able to work as effectively for the success of your company.
With that in mind, there are several things you need to consider when designing and building your site. The first is whether to go for a cheaper drag and drop option or to choose something custom made. The advantage of the latter being that will allow greater customization of features both at the front and back end, as well as more flexibility. Of course for this extra functionality, you will inevitably pay more.
You also need to consider both the aesthetics of the site, as well as how users experience it. After all, there no point having a lot of high power tech behind the scenes if the customer-facing part isn’t clear and easy to read and use.
Finally, when your business is working solely online, it’s also crucial that you choose your hosting company with great care. Otherwise, you could end up without more downtime than you bargained for, and this could seriously affect the ability of your business to thrive online.
Getting people to visit your site
Once you have your site sorted it’s time to attract as many people to it as possible. The reason being that then they will engage with your content and marketing message, as well as hopefully buy the product that you are offering there. Of course, the primary way of doing this is to use SEO tactics to increase the amount of traffic that visits your website.
Now, many people think that SEO is simple because all you need to do is get your business’s result on the first page of the search engine results. However, just because the theory behind it is simple it’s doesn’t mean the task and the work involved is. In fact, SEO is a complex, ever-changing process and many business owners decide to hire a specialist like SEOEXPLODE to help them. Something that can make this part science, part art subject a lot easier to get right.
Of course, if you do want to have a go at this yourself, then you need to cover the two different type of SEO, onsite and offsite. Onsite is all about what you can do on your business website to make it easier for search engine bot to find you.
One way of doing this is to include tags on the pages and content that you produce. In fact, by doing this, you can make it much easier for search engines to index your websites, especially if you include a geotag which is something that the last update from Google is currently prioritizing.
Alternatively, when it comes to offsite SEO, the key thing to focus on is backlinks. These are hyperlinks from other websites to yours, something that can also help to strengthen your search engine rank.
Be warned though, the bots that index websites are seriously sophisticated pieces of kit and that means if you have a backlink from a non-reputable web page, they will be able to tell and will demote your accordingly! It’s no wonder people choose to get professional assistance to help them with such tasks is it?
Choosing the right merchant
Next, when running an online business, you need to carefully consider how you will set up your shop on your website, and how you will take payments. After all, no customer wants to have to spend 15 minutes on the open giving you their credit card details.
In fact, many consumers have become so used to instant purchase and payment options that if these aren’t available they can navigate away and you will lose your sale. To that end, it may be the best choice to pick a service like Apple Pay or Paypal that hold the customer’s card details and allow fast payment without having to enter all of their information. Of course, the additional layer of security that such service provided because the individual vendor sites never get the financial information of the customer can be really beneficial as well.
Your delivery methods
Finally, while we have already discussed the possibility of delivery in virtual product or service, if you choose not to go for this option, you will need to work out how you will fulfill your order to your customers.
Of course, larger online businesses like Amazon run and manage their own logistics divisions to ensure their products are delivered quickly. They are even trialing automated robots and drones for this job as we speak.
However, smaller online businesses do not always have the resources to be able to do this, meaning that will need to team up with a more prominent player such as UPS, Hermes, or even Amazon themselves to ensure the orders are fulfilled promptly. This being essential if they are to thrive when running a business online.
