Nowadays, the internet is a very important part of all kinds of businesses regardless of their size. There is wide-ranging traffic on the web – from social media ads to new approaches of marketing online, and an increasingly new generation of businesspersons. Internet entrepreneurs are people who are looking at the huge potential of the internet to either start or grow a business.
Obviously, every entrepreneur seeks to succeed at online business. So, the question is: what does it take to become an online success?
Every day, thousands of entrepreneurs start an online business. However, it is only a handful of them that actually succeed. Fortunately, there are certain guidelines you can follow and run a successful online business.
The following guidelines will help you avoid some of the pitfalls:
- Ensure That Your Website Design Remains Simple And Well-Organized.
Some people have the tendency of wanting to over-design their website, hoping that it will be noticeable or look impressive. They may even go to the extent of adding effects like animation, back ground sound and load the site with huge graphics.
This is a big error, more so for business-oriented websites. Actually, what matters most is to ensure that your design is organized in such a way that your visitors are able to easily find what they are searching for at one glance. Many internet shoppers actually find blaring music a nuisance, and particularly if they are browsing at work (as many do). You should also see to it that the text is readable. Dark text on a simple light background will do the trick.
You can get great ideas from other websites, such as apple.com, which are perfect examples of well-designed websites.
- Respond to Your Visitors in a Jiffy
Getting back promptly at visitors, potential customers’ emails or contact forms is very important. People are always sensitive to the time an online business takes to respond to them. If you are vacationing, you should arrange to have an employee answering the emails on your behalf, or else you can take your laptop with you to be responding to the emails from wherever you will be.
You should keep in mind that there is far too much competition out there and you just can’t afford to let prospective clients slip through your fingers just because you were not too diligent to follow through.
- Ensure That You Engage Your Visitors
One of the ways you can increase loyalty and sales is to turn your visitors into active participants. Adding blogs to your website and opening it up for comments from your visitors is the simplest way to do this. For instance, you can advertise your posts in your newsletter and solicit for comments. If your website is large, you might want to add a discussion board to allow your visitors to create their own topics.
Apart from that, you need to set up several social media platforms such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Pinterest, and converse/share/inform your customers by providing excellent answers and content. Your website should have a follow, Pinterest or a Fan Page “Like” widget to enable people to follow you through their favorite social media platform and keep up with your progress and updates.
You can really learn a lot from guys like Gary Vaynerchuk, who are experts in the online business world.
- Provide Something That Will Lure Your Visitors Back
There is no doubt that repeat visitors to your online business will grow your sales. There are several ways you can use to give your visitors a reason to return. One of the ways is to inform them that you post a one-day sale just once a month. Alternatively, you can write an article and inform the readers that there will be a follow-up the following month. The topic should be on something that people are very eager to know.
A good way to get repeat visitors is to just keep adding quality content to your site.
- Avoid Over-Selling To Your Visitors
Generally, people don’t like a pushy salesperson in business and online business is no exemption. Over pressuring people to make a purchase tends to make them feel upset. As such, all you need to do is simply emphasize on the advantages of your product or service and leave it at that. Never try to oversell. Also, avoid a superlative spammy language because it will normally be counter-productive.
- Avoid Over Optimizing Your Website
You must be familiar with the term “SEO” or search engine optimization. It is here that people design their webpages to enable them have a higher ranking in the search engines, and especially Google. There are some online businesses which overdo it. Consequently, their websites get demoted or in some instances banned from the search results. This is because the search engines mistake their efforts for spam. Besides, over optimizing pages makes them unpleasant and less readable by genuine humans.
- Avoid Listing Your Website in Bad Neighborhoods
It is something obvious that for quite a while, Google and other search engines look at the number of links a website has. This is a major factor when it comes to determining how to rank a particular website in the search engine results. Consequently, online business owners want to get numerous links and even at times go to the extent of paying for the links in directories and blogs. Be careful because in most cases, these paid links are spammy sites. The search engines know them as bad neighborhoods. Having your website listed in them is risky because instead of them helping you, they can really hurt you.
- Keep a High Quality Mailing List
When your visitors come to your online business website, request them to sign up for your newsletter. You can motivate them to do so by, for instance, giving them a free report or free e-course on a topic that is relevant to your business. However, you should avoid sending your newsletter too frequently. For example, you can just send only once a month, and once in a while send a special announcement. Your newsletter should have quality content as well as provide your subscribers with an easy way they can opt out.