How to Start and Grow an Online Business (Text Version) Slide 1 Welcome to How to Start and Grow an Online Business. The content in this presentation is a gift from the student non-profit organization, Online Business Guidebook, at Virginia Tech’s Pamplin College of Business. The U.S. Small Business Administration acknowledges with gratitude the contribution of Virginia Tech's Pamplin College of Business and its students. In this presentation you’ll learn how to start and grow an online business. Slide 2 Let’s begin with establishing your business. You’ll need to: Register your website and get it hosted, as well as Create your logo. Slide 3 Every great online business has a website with a memorable domain name. You should select one that uniquely identifies your businesses and sticks in your customers mind. Determine if the web domain address you wish to purchase is available. Once you have determined that no one else has a claim to your desired domain name, the second step is to actually register that domain. Your hosting company (domain registrar) will handle this process for you. You’ll need to pay a regular fee required from you to hold onto the domain name. This fee is typically paid annually. Your hosting company may offer you additional features such as professional graphic design, online shopping carts, payment processing, or promotional services. Finally, build the content that you wish to publish on your website. Slide 4 A logo serves as the visual representation of your business, therefore it is important to choose one that compliments the mission and goals of your business. The first step is to choose a logo creation vendor. The internet provides numerous different vendors that will provide you with the tools and professional advice necessary to create your logo. The second step is to choose a logo creation package. Most vendors will let you pay more to have additional graphic designers provide multiple logo concepts for you. Once you have selected a logo, you will be asked to input your company information, preferences and ideas for the logo design. This will give them a better idea to create a logo that best suits the marketing needs of your business. Professional graphic designers working for the logo vendor will typically generate multiple logo concepts for you to choose from. Slide 5 Analyzing your competitors helps you understand your marketplace better. Slide 6 Competitor tracking tools let you automatically monitor the web for mentions of your competitors or mentions of your product category. Various free and paid services are available. Next, decide what keywords you want to listen for. For instance, the name of your competitors, your product category, or perhaps even your own company name. Competitor tracking tools track news websites, company websites, and even blogs. You’ll receive regular e-mails when your competitor or product category is mentioned on the web. Slide 7 Website demographic analysis tools let you see who is visiting your competitors, how they got to your competitor’s website, and where else they are going. First, choose a website demographic analysis tool. Basic reports are typically available free – you pay more to see additional details. Next, feed in your competitor’s website address, and your own website address. This will allow you to compare your websites activity to your competitors’. Various reports will let you see who is visiting your competitor’s website, how they got there, and where else they go. This information can be used to inform both your online and offline marketing strategies, and can help you to increase the traffic to your website. Slide 8 Developing your website is easy. You can either build your own website or outsource the design to a professional web designer. Pre-built templates and beautiful stock photos and stock icons make it easy to make your website look great with relatively little effort. A web content management system lets you easily alter the textual content of your website without needing to know anything about how to program web pages. Slide 9 There are a variety of companies and freelancers willing to work on spec. They are willing to design either the entire website, or simply a few pages or particular graphics. Determine how you want to outsource: you may choose one company or many different freelancers. Slide 10 As a website owner, you want to present a beautiful website to your web visitors. However, you don’t need to hire an expensive professional graphic designer to get a great looking website. Templates (also known as skins or style sheets) are reusable, professionally created website layouts that you can customize to suit your business. All you need to do, is insert text specific to your business, and alter images and colors in the template as you see fit. Your web hosting company will provide a vast gallery of gorgeous, professional designs, many of which are free. So, browse the template category, choose one that fits your business, and customize it with your content and colors. Slide 11 Stock photos and stock icons are a great way to add some professionalism to your website or your product. Online stock photo galleries are huge, searchable catalogues of millions of professional photographic images in thousands of categories. Online icon galleries contain thousands of professionally designed graphics. You can, for instance, find icons that: highlight a special offer; illustrate your purchase process concisely; and, provide attractive buttons for visitors to your website to click on. Browse through the images online until you find something that fits your needs. Once an image is selected, the next step is to download and pay for the picture. Be sure to observe copyright laws: make sure you choose a legitimate website to download from, and always respect the usage restrictions that apply to your particular image purchase. Slide 12 Content management systems allow you to add content easily to your website. They also make management of content easier when you have multiple sources contributing to the website. Choose a paid or open-source CMS. Your web hosting provider may offer a free CMS, or you can download one and upload it to your web hosting account. Most CMSs will allow you to choose from a set of standard, graphically pleasing layouts. Individual content authors can log into the CMS and easily upload text and graphics to their assigned areas on your website. As the CMS automatically takes care of font faces, sizes, colors, standard menus (navigation), headers, and footers, you can be sure your content will display in an attractive, uniform format across your website. Slide 13 If you’re making and selling your own product, you’ll need to: find reliable, cost effective, and high quality suppliers; develop attractive and robust packaging; and, create animated or interactive product demos, if you’d like to showcase your product. Slide 14 If you want to show your customers how your product works and the many fantastic features your product offers, you’ll need to create a product demo. You can easily do this yourself, using product demo software, or you can hire a professional company to create a product demo for you. Demo software lets you easily animate your product, annotate it with textual commentary that describes particular features, and deploy your demo on the web – so that it is viewable in any web browser. Slide 15 To sell your product, you’ll need various transactional features on your website. Let’s take a look at some things you may need to allow customers to select, pay for, and receive your products! Slide 16 Most shopping cart vendors will allow you to log into a demo site, or see examples of existing customers who use their shopping cart software. Try out various alternatives, and see which you like best based of features, appearance, and ease of use. Most vendors charge monthly fees, and you’ll pay more if you have thousands of products in your product catalogue. Shopping cart software allows you to list your products. Your customers can then browse your product offerings, and place items in their cart. Shopping cart software provides standard sales reports, such that you can see your best selling products, biggest customers, and other interesting sales information. Slide 17 Online marketplaces are established websites that already attract large numbers of buyers. You can take advantage of these established audiences, by listing your products on these online marketplaces. This is especially helpful if you are a new seller, and your own website is not attracting many visitors. Slide 18 Live Chat allows you to communicate with customers in real-time giving you the ability to help them with any issues or questions. A variety of free (open-source) and commercial live chat systems are available. These allow your customers to type messages while visiting your website, and receive responses immediately from you or your staff. You’ll need to provide service representatives that staff your live chat desk. These can either be in house staff or staff from an outsourcing provider. Have your live chat service representatives feed useful sales leads to your sales department, by asking customers during their chat session for their web address, and by offering to send a transcript of the live chat session to the customer via e-mail. Monitor live chat scripts to see what questions are commonly asked by customers and which questions are poorly resolved. Share best practices among your sales team. Slide 19 A forum gives participants the feeling of being part of a club where they can share personal experiences and information concerning products online for everyone to see. This can help build product visibility and allow users to be better informed of new releases and product updates. Forums allow customers to ask questions, search your knowledgebase, and engage with customers with similar interests Slide 20 Payment processing is one of the most important features that one web site can have regardless of the purpose of the site. You can accept payments over the internet via various means, including credit card, debit card, personal check, and direct deposit. Sign up with a trustworthy payment processing vendor. Your shopping cart software may have one or more available payment processing options built into it. Alternatively, various 3rd party payment processing solutions are available. Your service plan will typically involve a monthly fee, a per transaction fee, and a small commission (typically 1% to 5% of the transaction amount), paid to the payment processing vendor on each transaction. Make sure you test your payment process before you start promoting your business. Slide 21 Don’t want the headache of picking and packing your own orders? Fortunately, as an online business, you can easily pass customer orders directly to a manufacturer or distributor who can then ship the products directly to your customers. With drop shipping, you never have to purchase inventory. You simply pass your orders directly to the distributor or manufacturer. They ship the product direct to the customer, and pay you a commission. Many drop shippers and outsourced fulfillment vendors will allow you to request special customizations to their fulfillment process. For instance, they may offer to repackage items before they ship, so that that the package is branded with your logo. Even though you don’t physically stock the product, you’ll need to list it in your online catalogue, so customers can see and order it. When your customer places an order, your shopping cart system can automatically forward the order to the drop shipper or outsourced vendor. Slide 22 There are millions of online businesses on the web. How do you get customers to notice yours? Let’s take a look at some ideas for promoting your online venture. Slide 23 A directory is a list of sites sorted according to category and subcategory. A link from a directory not only helps customers to find you, but will often help your ranking on search engines. For the directory, prepare a concise summary of your business, products and/or services. Be sure your summary is clear and concise. Try various listings and track the success of your listings. In addition, look for the “bounce rate” reported by your web analytics software: this is the number of visitors who arrive from a listing, but rapidly leave your website without buying anything. This is important! Slide 24 E-mail marketing software lets you get your company’s information out to prospective clients by sending targeted promotions via e-mail. Design the promotional message to send out. Many e-mail marketing packages provide you with templates to allow you to quickly design attractive e-mails. Only send your message to individuals who have explicitly opted-in to receiving e-mail communications. Once you have a list of intended recipients, upload it to your e-mail marketing software. The software will let you filter the list. Analyze the results of the promotion and whether any benefits were received. Your e-mail marketing package will typically provide basic, but very helpful reports. Slide 25 Affiliate marketing can be a very powerful tool to increase the amount of traffic, publicity, and sales your company gets, through a network of referring organizations. An affiliate is a company that refers potential customers to you, in return for a commission on referrals. You can set up your own affiliate program by simply offering partner organizations a commission for referring customers. It’s often easier to use an online “affiliate manager.” An affiliate management company is an organization that provides online affiliate management tools – these tools help you find affiliates, cement specific relationships. You will need to decide on a reward program that you and your affiliate will use. Usually, you reward your affiliates on a commission basis. Next, outreach your affiliate program. Finally, monitor the success of your affiliate program, by reconciling traffic to your Website as a result of your affiliates. Slide 26 Online advertising is a form of promotion that uses the Internet for the expressed purpose of delivering marketing messages. Advertisers pay each time a unique user views and/or clicks on their listing and is redirected to their website. Choose a Pay-Per-Click company and decide how much you are willing to pay per click or per day. When internet users search using specific keywords, your ad will show up if you have a bid for that keyword. Also, your ad may be displayed on content-based websites alongside web pages that are relevant to your keywords. First, you need to determine what keywords are relevant to your business. Track your conversion rate for each advertisement. Your web analytics package or online advertising company should provide free online reports showing the click-through rate and return-on-investment of all your keywords, so you can easily see which work and which don’t. Slide 27 Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, is a set of techniques that are free or cheap to implement and can help improve your rankings on internet search engines. Being ranked at the top of page one, when a user searches for your product on the internet can increase your website visits, and your sales, exponentially! Since you can’t get a high ranking for every possible search, you’ll need to decide which keywords are important, and which aren’t. For example, if you’re a home-based bakery company, you might choose keywords like “brownies” and “chocolate cake.” Use an online “keyword suggestion tool” if possible, to help you create your list of target keywords. Once you’ve decided which keywords you want to improve your ranking for, you’ll need to make your website more relevant to those keywords. Start by incorporating those keywords in your website, particularly in headings. Next, find other relevant sites that rank high for those keywords. Try to obtain links from those sites to your website. Search engines raise your ranking if other important websites mention your site. Slide 28 Blogvertising is a relatively cheap or free way to advertise your product or service to an interested community of readers. To launch your own blog, create an account on a blogging website, and write and upload articles. You’ll want to write articles relevant to your industry. And, you’ll need to promote your blog, and update it regularly, to win a community of avid, interested, readers. Slide 29 Social Networking sites have taken the world by storm in the past several years and can be a very powerful marketing tool if used properly. Establishing a group for your business can be a great way to spread knowledge about your business to the masses. It can serve as a forum for your old and current customers to provide feedback and experiences to new prospective customers. It can also be a medium for your company to market specific information and details about your company’s product. Post information about your company or direct links to your company’s site. Invite/encourage friends and customers to join your group. Search the social network and join communities that your current or future customers may already be participating in. Post updates to your group and to other related groups for people with similar interests. Slide 30 As the internet becomes more and more prevalent in the lives of people, so does internet marketing. The first step involves getting in touch with an online marketing agency to determine the services that they offer. Online marketing agencies can help you design and implement pay-per-click campaigns, e-mail marketing campaigns, social media marketing, search engine optimization, and other processes that increase your website traffic and sales. An internet marketing agency can suggest a variety of ideas for improving your sales. Pick the services you think will have the best pay-off, and work with your agency to help them implement the campaigns. Always track how your marketing campaign performs. Slide 31 Want to know what your customers like and dislike, or what promotional campaigns paid off? It is important to track your performance! If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it! Slide 32 Online feedback tools help companies create a survey to collect user suggestions and complaints in a structured fashion. First, you need to create and customize a customer survey. Online survey tools will let you quickly create questions. You don’t need any programming knowledge: simply choose whether you want the question to be multiple choice, true false, or free text, and type in each question. You can launch the online survey with the simple click of a button, and start collecting customer responses. Analyze the responses and react accordingly. Slide 33 Web analytics software helps you determine who is coming to your site, where they came from, and what they visit on your site. A variety of web analytics packages are available. Some are free and some charge upfront and/or monthly fees. For many web analytics packages, you’ll need to insert a section of code, provided by the web analytics vendor, into your website, to enable the analytics software to track your website visitors. Some web hosting companies and shopping cart vendors automatically include this code for you. Your web analytics software will provide you with a vast array of pre-built graphical reports. These may include: • the total number of visitors your website had over a given period • the most popular pages on your website • the referring websites and search engine keywords that brought the most traffic to your website, and • the pay-per-click campaigns and other promotion campaigns that brought you the most revenue or profit Slide 34 This course has covered a great deal of material. And, there is much to learn and understand about starting and growing an online business. If you have questions, contact the SBA or one of our resource partners. We will help you. If we do not have the answer to your specific question, we will direct you to a resource that does. Slide 35 Many resources are available to assist you. The following SBA resources can help you build a foundation for your new online business. • SBA has over 60 district offices located throughout the country to help you start and grow your business. http://www.sba.gov/localresources/index.html • SBA Website http://www.sba.gov • There are more than 1,000 Small Business Development Center locations around the country. SBDCs provide management assistance to current and prospective small business owners. http://www.sba.gov/aboutsba/sbaprograms/sbdc/sbdclocator/SBDC_LOCATOR.html • SCORE is a powerful source of free and confidential small business advice to help build your business. More than 10,000 SCORE volunteers are available to share their wisdom and lessons learned in business. http://www.score.org • Women’s Business Centers assist women in achieving their dreams by helping them to start and run successful businesses. http://www.sba.gov/idc/groups/public/documents/sba_program_office/sba_ro_do_wbc.pdf • And finally, the Small Business Training Network is a powerful virtual campus. http://www.sba.gov/training Click on these resources to learn more and access their assistance. Slide 36 Many helpful tools and techniques for growing your online business have been discussed. But there’s lots more to learn. For more information, visit the business-guidebook Website by clicking on the hyperlink or icon. Thank you for your participation in this program.