Running an Online Business
Running an online business is no more complex than running a normal, street-based business, but it is different, and requires the application of different skills and knowledge. For instance, think of when you exit a supermarket - do you notice the up-sells next to the cahier points? Generally they are impulse buys - chocolates and drinks. But there are also small gift products at a higher piece level etc.
What else do supermarkets and restaurants do? Here are a few pointers
- Advertise widely so you know about them and are attracted to them for specific special offers - creating brand awareness
- Make the whole entrance look inviting and convenient
- Arrange the store so that you can find what you want as fast as possible
- Offer you memberships for discounts to keep you coming back
- Implement absolute security for your credit card details
- Restaurants use clever psychological tricks like making the price small-print and leaving off the $ sign (notice that?) to make you less price sensitive
- Use color psychology to increase your spending
- Make product complaints easy and provide no-quibble guarantees
- Stay up to date with product trends
These are just a few of the more obvious methods to generate and keep business- there are many, many more.
One final example: In its early days, MacDonald's had a very clever strategy: (1) Make the store really, really inviting from the outside with its lights, and red and yellow color schema and (2) Make sure customers did not hang around inside taking up valuable space by making the lights bright enough to encourage people to leave quickly after eating - no one wants a discussion under spotlights!
Online Methods
An traditional business owner will know most of these tricks but will often stumble in effectively implementing their online equivalents. In online-speak, these issues are summarized as:
- Business models - Drop-Shipping, 3rd Party Shipping (Amazon eBay etc), Freight Shipping, Stock Holding, Import/Export, Local Business, National Business, International Business
- Online Business Planning - how much is needed for every stage of the plan and what is the Return on Investment calculated to be at each phase? This is the online business owners' guiding star.
- Traffic generation - SEO - Advertising. Local Web Presence, National Web Presence, International Web Presence, Competition, ROI estimations. This is genuinely a business-critical, multi-layered and complex business activity. Warning: There are far more opportunists than professionals offering these services.
- Business Website Optimization - Speed, User Experience, User Interface, Trust, Reputation, Branding, Consistency, Conversion Optimization. Here's how not to do it!
- Customer communications planning - offers, rewards, complaint response, product tracking, email marketing.
- Website maintenance and updating
- Performance monitoring and course correction in every online activity.
Many business owners convince themselves of one of the following:
- I can't afford to implement a full program so I'll just do a bit of it e.g. a cheap but pretty website that is usually not optimized for business. This is a wasted sunk cost. We get many calls from people asking for help with websites that do not generate business.
- I'll do cheap SEO and scale up later. This can actually sink a site with spammy links that search engines hate. it can cost more to undo this damage that to start again with a new domain.
- Advertising on Google is easy. It's not if you want to get a return on your investment. Many businesses see little or no return at all - just costs. Advertising online requires expertise, planning, monitoring, course correction and patience in most cases.
- Advertising on Facebook is easy. It's not, if you want a return on investment. Facebook ads can be very successful or simply burn through your money like a forest fire.
- Selling on Amazon is easy. It's not. This is a real concern of ours as we see so many 'get rich quick' courses offered for this business model. It's really, really tough and competitive.
- My website looks great and cost me a lot of money, it must be fine. Wrong! Potential business problems with a website extend far beyond the pleasant appearance. A builder would not build a house without an architects plan, and a website is no different in that respect.
Those are some of the key issues. We have solutions for them if you are interested - first consultation is free.
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Business Professionals Online
Our Business Professionals Online is a program intended for business owners and managers who need not only online solutions, but professional guidance and mentoring to steer those solutions to sustainable business success. This means that you have access to professional coaching at every step of your online business journey. We have a very limited capacity to provide this service because it's a personal one-on-one coaching facility. However, if you don't need the coaching you can still benefit from our range of online business technologies and services and obtain brilliant results. Click on the thumbnails to learn more.
Consultation
The first part of our process is designed to establish whether or not your business is a good match for our program. It takes about an hour of discussion for us to explore each other and there is no obligation for doing this - you can call us to make an appointment at any time and we will be pleased to talk to you.
Our main concern is that we can understand what you want to achieve with your business, the time-scales and your expected ROI (Return On Investment). We need to assess your current knowledge of online operations and assess our capacity to help you. If we think we cannot help then we will do our best to advise you on an alternative course of action.
Online Business Plan
No business, be it online or offline is likely to succeed without a business plan. Although the elements are the same, the methods of determining the critical data and the actual methods of execution are different. Even experienced business people (and sometimes, especially experienced business people) often need professional advice for online business. Here's what we'll take you through step by step:
- Your products - Price, competition (is it even relevant), buyer demographics, price sensitivity and more.
- Your selling reach - local, national, international
- Your traffic generation strategy - SEO, Advertising, Social Media
- Your Business Identity - Logo, Corporate Colors
- Your budget and cashflow planning the feasibility of achieving your goals
- Your points of business differentiation
- Your selling channels - Website, Amazon, Dropshipping etc
Each plan is tailored and unique and designed in close cooperation with our customer.
Professional Business Website
Your professional business website is your shop, your consulting room, your display case. The following are absolutely critical to success (in no particular order):
1) Fast loading - buyers are very, very impatient
2) Easy navigation - visitors must find what they seek with a minimum number of clicks right through to the buying process
3) Beautiful, clear, branding - the identity of your business
4) Trust - your website must contain the element that say subconsciously - 'you can trust us'
5) Optimized On-Site SEO - if the back-end data on your site isn't right then ranking on Google will be much, much harder
6) Fully mobile optimized
7) Secure - and visibly secure to visitors
8) Backed up and supported for minimum downtime
9) Able to support your business model - no matter whether you are selling professional services, products or courses or whatever. This means integration with modern selling tools such as Zoom (consulting), payment channels such as PayPal and credit Cards, email facilities, chatbots and more.
A professional business website doesn't just look good - it performs, and converts visitors to buyers.
Australian SEO
SEO is an expression that now turns people off in droves because of the hype, the unwanted emails, the unwanted cold calls and the insane claims made by some agencies. However, unless you intend to rely only on advertising and social media for your website traffic, you need SEO. You need SEO that is tailored for your business operation specifically based on keyword analysis, competitive analysis and a further analysis on your expected Return On Investment. Without this, you're shipping in the dark and wasting money. We'll explain your campaign in great detail so that you fully understand the process.
Mentoring
Mentoring and reporting is a critical part of our Business Professionals Online Program. Every month, we report back to our program clients on their business progress - their online expenditure, their revenue vs their business plan and possible changes we need to make in response to competition, Google changes etc. This allows our clients to gather increased knowledge and confidence in their online business, sets expectations and measures performance. It also provides increased independence from consultants like us in time, and empowers our customers to devise their own strategies.