My Internet Business Pre-Launch Blue Print

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My Internet Business Pre-Launch Blue Print

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Written by Trisha Frauenhofer

Saturday, 12 April 2008

by TrishaFrauenhofer

NASA and jet liners use a preflight check list to make sure that everything is ready to go before a jet liner (or the Space Shuttle) is ready for launch. When starting up my internet business, that same "dot the "i"s, cross the "t"s mentality is also important. You don't need to look like an extra from the Apollo 13 movie to make this work, but that sense of organized planning is going to serve you well.

The overall structure of my internet business check list is the business plan. It should cover the steps you want your business to grow through, factoring in cash reserves, cash outlay, marketing budget and operating capital. Fortunately, internet businesses are low overhead operations.

A key aspect to making your internet based business is getting on the web in the first place; you'll need a web designer for that, or you can learn it on your own. We're going to be iconoclastic here, and suggest that it's worth your time to pay someone to do this for you. The primary business case for spending money on outside people is whether or not they can do something you can't, or whether they can do something you can do - but free your time up to do something else. Even if you're an HTML and CSS guru, if you're starting your own business, having someone else do the grunt work of designing the site is worth the time.

Conversely, you'll need to park your domain name; this we recommend doing yourself, and taking good notes. Domain names and domain name registration are sort of like potato chips. Once you start building web sites and making money off of them, you'll find that you're spending odd hours looking at interesting domain names with an intention to park them and use them later.

The other place where my designer helped a lot was getting me to realize that More isn't always Better. She took out her laptop, hooked up a cellular modem to it, and we loaded my old site. There was time to grab a cup of coffee and watch the birds before enough of it loaded for me to be able to see what the site was about. Dulls ville. By using Cascading Style Sheets (the CSS stuff I mentioned earlier), she was able to make it dynamic and much more attractive. (I was still using JPEGs of titles in a fancy font.)

When designing the site (or working with the designer), remember the KISS principal: Keep It Small, Stupid. No matter how shiny the graphics are, no matter how whizzbang the Flash animation is, your goal is to have something that loads almost instantly. Take the time to hit your site with a dial up modem; if it takes long enough that you wouldn't wait for it, make a low graphics main entry page and work from there.

So, the next step, after the site is up, is bringing in visitors. This is the marketing part of the business plan, and near the end of the pre flight check list. In most cases, this means getting your shop into the top twenty results for a search engine keyword hit. There are countless articles on how to do this, but the realistic way to do it is Google Ad Words.

Traffic building is still something of a black art, but I'm focusing on keyword ad buy purchases - and believe it or not, advertising in the Daily Nickel newspapers. Since what I sell is household items, and tips on home organization, it's a natural mix of old style advertising and new. I also make sure that I'm in the Organizer's Circle of blog referrals, which helps a lot on getting on to social networking sites and builds relevance ratings.

About the Author:

Trisha Frauenhofer is an online marketing professional who loves teaching her most powerful online secrets including the Online Traffic Formula