How to build your website for online business

Basic components to online business.

Marian Costita

May 29, 2008


	5.0/5.0 (2 votes total)
	Rate:

There are basic components that you need when starting your online business:

Get a Domain Name and Web hosting.

The domain name is the address of your website on the internet. Having your own domain name indicates for your visitors and potential customers that you are a serious businessman.

Depending on what you want out of your domain name, this will determine how you choose it. You will want to take out a piece of paper to write down ALL the keywords related to your Internet Business.

Your domain name must to be:

-short, simple and easy to remember,

-relevant to the product or service you're selling,

-include keywords of your product or service to improve search engine rankings.

Next, check whether the domain name has been registered or not. If the domain name has been registered by someone else, you will have to use another domain name. Once you register a domain name, it is yours, as long as you pay the annual fee.

Now, you need to set up a virtual web space. You need to find a good web hosting company.

Do not be tempted by FREE hosting. The risk of your site having downtime and lousy support far outweighs whatever you can save by not having a proper hosting company. Also, this would give a bad impression to your customers. Free accounts are not for anyone even half serious about doing business on the Web. Not when you can get a perfectly acceptable commercial host for as little as $10 / month.

Most hosting companies provide a range of services, starting with low-budget packages and moving up to more advanced and expensive features. Generally, you want to make sure that your host has a fast connection to the Internet and can handle large numbers of simultaneous visits (bandwidth) to your website. And you’ll need secure server capabilities. As is the common practice now, they should be offering you a variety of related services (cgi. capabilities, ftp. accesses) and support for your business use.

Payment Processing Systems.

The next phase of building an online business is to integrate it transaction systems. Transaction is the most important aspect of any online business! Payments with credit card are the fastest and the most efficient form of a transaction on a website. The most vital aspect of the complete transaction process is security and authentication of the transactions on your website. You should incorporate a payment system that accepts all major credit cards. After all, you wouldn’t want to lose a sale just because you do not accept a certain credit card.

Your Follow Up System.

As good as your website conversion rate may be, a big number of your prospects will not buy your products at first contact. They might want to do a comparison between your product and other people’s product, need more time to think about it, or leave your web page for whatever reason. And the truth is that we all can hardly remember where we were ten web pages ago.

So, you need to set up an automatic system that follows up with your prospects to continue persuading them to buy your products. A good followup system will allow you to close sales even after your prospects have left your web page.

1. Write a Series of Follow-Up Letters.

Your short newsletter must contain valuable information that is especially useful to your prospect because he would not like to be followed up on to reconsider. However, he would not mind receiving something of value to him through your newsletter, which will enable you to end with a reminder of the value of your product to him at the closing of your letter.

2. Sign Up For an Autoresponder Service.

If you’ve ever asked for information online about a product or service, or signed up for an e-list or group membership on the Internet, and received a nearly instantaneous response in your e-mail inbox, an autoresponder program was responsible for delivering the reply.

An autoresponder is a computer program that automatically sends out prewritten e-mail messages to subscribers within its data base. You can determine the sequences and intervals of each of your messages, sparing you the time to manually follow-up with your prospects.

3. Store Your Follow-Up Letters into Your Autoresponder and Set Intervals between Your Letters.

Add all of your pre-written letter templates into your auto responder system. Set your first follow-up letter to go out immediately - 0 days. This means that your prospects will receive your first letter as soon as he subscribes to your follow-up series. Your second letter may be set to go out on the 2nd day, and the third 2 days after the second letter is sent out.