Web Business Overview from Business Plans to the Bank

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Web Business Overview

Resources - Tutorials and Articles

by Tad Coffin
MediaTitan.com

So you've decided you'd like to go into business on the web, eh? This article will give an overview of options that are available for your web business and will help to give you an idea of what goals should be set for your project. Topics include creating a business plan, researching your business, getting web hosting, creating and maintaining a web site, and various forms of web marketing. In articles to come, we will expand on each of these topics offered here.

After deciding to be a web entrepreneur, the next step is to create a business plan. Business plans are as essential to a web entrepreneur as blueprints are to a construction worker. To build a business most efficiently, you must first be an architect and plan how you would like your business to look, what it will do and how your goals will be accomplished.

There are many ways a person can go about making money with the Internet. Options include selling products as a wholesaler or retailer, selling services, promoting products or services as an affiliate partner, selling advertising, selling email or demographic information, selling subscriptions to sites and any number of other ways and combinations of money making ideas.

A good business plan will include details on the service or products you will be offering, growth goals for your new business, projected expenses and losses, employee projections, and any other information you will need to clearly outline your successful business. Though there are many approaches to the actual construction of a business plan, a month by month or quarter by quarter analysis is common.

For example, if your online business will be selling widgets, you may want to go through, month by month and estimate the total number of widgets you will sell, the cost of selling these widgets, expenditures on marketing, hosting and overhead, and any other foreseeable factors you can think of. If within six months you want to begin selling skyhooks as well as widgets, this should also be accounted for in your business plan.

Before moving on to our next topic, it is important to remember that business plans are constantly changing. Some of your projections will be difficult to make accurately, so do the best you can with the information at hand. As more data becomes available through research and experience you will be able to make revisions to your business plan. I am of the belief that it is generally a good idea to make profit projections on the low end to start with. If you believe you can sell between 10 and 100 widgets your first month, it is better to plan to sell only 10, and be pleasantly surprised when you sell 55, rather than to plan for 100 and fall short of goals that have become unrealistic yet necessary for the survival of your business.

After you have a good plan for your business, the next step will be to research your business. Are people actually buying widgets? To find out, you could check stock of stores and Web sites, ask for friends' opinions and find more data online, in media, and at the library. If it turns out people are not buying very many widgets these days, now may be a good time to change you business plan. Also research what your competitors are doing and if there is any way to improve upon their business models.

After you have a business plan and done some research, it is time to begin building your business. Though it is not essential for a web entrepreneur to have a web site, for our purposes we will assume one will be required. Other methods of making money on the web are quite possible, such as by creating an opt-in mailing list, or selling products though services such as eBay.

In order to have a web site one must have a host and a domain name. Think of the host as the home of your web site, and the domain, such as www.widgets.com, as its address. Domain names can often be registered for less than $15 per year. Media Titan offers several high quality hosting solutions, and there are hundreds more available. Free hosting is even available, but a user of such services is required to have the host's banners on their site, which is not particularly desirable.

A host should have reliable customer service, have very high uptime, meaning your site is accessible on the web as close to 100% of the time as possible, and give your business room to grow. You don't want your host to crash if you get ten thousand visitors in one day. If you need programming or ecommerce, you will want to make sure your host will support your needs. Server stats are also very handy.

After you have a home and address for your web site, you will need to build it. There are two roads you can walk down. Many web entrepreneurs choose to build their own sites and learn as they go. This is often desirable if you are interested in HTML and programming, have time to spare and don't require a professional polish. Many sites that make money promoting affiliate programs attract an audience that expect a rough, non professional site to lead them to a polished sponsor site where they will spend their money.

The other road is to have a professional design your site for you. This is the best solution for many. Like a construction worker who knows the best way to build houses and can do it better and faster than the average layman, so it is with web design. If you are planning on selling a product or service directly, it is essential to have a sharp image by which your potential clients will judge you. With so much information and so many web pages available, surfers often move on after only a few seconds. A professional design, such as one by Media Titan, will ensure you will be making the most of each visitor that views your site.

Now you have a plan, a product or service and a web site to sell it with. This is all very nice and all, but without people viewing your web site, you can't make any sales. You need a solid marketing plan to get the visitors to you site, by which you can make sales.

There are many ways to market a web site. One of the best ways is through search engines and directories. Search engines ensure pre-qualified traffic, meaning that if someone finds your site through a search engine, there is a good chance they are looking for the widgets you are selling, provided you've done your homework and optimized and submitted you site to search engines correctly.

There are several types of search engines and directories. A spider search engine uses programs called spiders to go around the web and collect data and bring it back to the engine. Altavista is one such engine. You can submit your site to Alta Vista for free.

Then there are pay-per-click search engines, which require the site owner to pay for every click received from a list of search terms the site owner provides. Traffic can cost anywhere from a fraction of a cent to a few dollars per click on pay per click engines.

Then there are the directories, such as Yahoo. These directors have reviewers that check submissions for quality and categorize them in folder-like branches of information. Directories such as Yahoo require a payment for listing, whereas other directories, such as DMOZ, do not. Some directories use a combination of human and spider review as well.

Another way to get traffic to your site is by trading links with other sites. A banner or text link is placed on your site to another relevant site, then you kindly request that a link to your site be placed on the site you have linked to. If you ask nicely, you just might get it.

Other methods of web promotion include web rings, banner exchanges, print advertising, banner advertising, TV and radio advertising and good old networking.

Now that you have a good plan, done some research, provided your service or product for all to see with a web site, and marketed your site to no end, there is nothing left to do but sit back and rake in the cash. Until, of course, your competitors start moving in on your customers and you have to start the cycle all over again. ;)

If you have further questions or would like Media Titan to assist you with building or marketing your site, please contact us - webmaster@mediatitan.com.