The online business offers what is in many ways an entrepreneurs dream come true: Startup costs can be nearly zero, startup time can take as little as a few hours or less and marketing opportunities are nearly limitless -some of them also costing nothing if you?re clever about your business promotion. Compared to the typical brick and mortar venture, your typical online business is a complete winner in many ways and much more flexible, scalable and rebrandable; all at very low cost.
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One of the only potential disadvantages of starting an online company is the low barrier to entry and international scope that the internet provides; while these factors are both benefits to your business, they can also be problematic because they offer the exact same benefit to everyone else who wants to offer the same thing you do, meaning much more possible competition and a deep need to be flexible unless you were creative enough to offer something that?s hard to duplicate despite its online presence.
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Now, although starting and running an online business can be pretty much easy enough to get off the ground in less than a day, running the business at maximum effectiveness is a different story altogether. Meeting this second quality requires a bit more work and inventiveness. To help you out, here are a few essential tips.
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1. Pick the Best Possible Hosting Provider
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The basic platform on which your web based company will run is your site hosting server. Do not settle for an unreliable, non-secure or slow hosting service because almost nothing else will hurt your little company as badly if it?s not done properly right from the start. Also, avoid the common mistake of thinking that since your startup is small, it doesn?t need much; you can never be sure how successful and popular you?ll become later, and changing hosting to something better down the road can lead to you losing a lot of SEO value, in addition to all the technical headaches of switching a large website from one hosting server to another.
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For your web hosting you want to go with a well-known company with international presence -including servers, and a well-designed online security package that will protect your website data. You should also be sure to look for a company that offers very large data packages, high bandwidth allowances and upgrade options that allow for increased site size or bandwidth usage.
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If you?re unsure about who to host with, look through some online reviews and once you?ve found a candidate, ask plenty of questions to their customer support before handing your money over. Some reliable options include Bluehost.com, Hostgator.com and Rackspace, which dedicates itself specifically to enterprise level hosting making it more expensive.
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2. Don?t Shirk on your Domain Details
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This means three main things: First of all, you should register a business domain that is easy to remember and if possible, related to your business as closely as possible; this last quality isn?t as important and you can register your web domain as your own name or even something offbeat (after all, look at Google, Yahoo and Boing.com; all odd, all successful as heck). However, keeping your domain easy to remember and uncomplicated is very important if you want maximum mental stickiness with your customers.
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Secondly, secure your domain as much as possible by paying for your hosting for at least a few years in advance. This will secure it for a long time from missed annual payments or domain sniping from third party thieves. In addition to this, securing your domain also means registering all other well-known suffixes for the same URL name to prevent copycats from using them to ruin your reputation accidentally or intentionally.
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Finally, just as with your hosting, buy your domain from a well known and reputable registrar. Godaddy.com is a commonly used and reliable option. It may be surprising but there are companies on the internet that offer fraudulent domain registration by selling you a domain that they have no legal right to hold on your behalf.
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3. Learn Quality White Hat SEO
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More than advertising, marketing or any other kind of paid promotion, search engine optimization will offer you some of the best possible long term value for the cost invested in it. While you can hire a third party company to optimize your web page, the bottom line with optimization is that it is a never ending process of offering high quality content to the web in exchange for backlinks, visits and high relevance ratings through the search engines.
This means that anybody else offering SEO services will either charge you a fortune for long term maintenance of these services or they will offer a one-time optimization that only gives you limited results.
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Instead, your best bet is to simply learn about the latest mechanics of high quality, non-spammy site optimization and apply them yourself on a long term basis to your site.
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4. Learn and Practice Strategic Marketing
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Aside from the much bigger value of SEO as a promotion tool, you?ll probably also decide to advertise your business for extra visibility. If you?re going to do this, then you at least need to keep it as cost effective as possible. Don?t jump into any online advertising campaign unless you?ve learned everything you can about its mechanics and how to do it right.??
This applies to all forms of online advertising and includes learning how to target your niche audience effectively, finding the most effective online advertising keywords, and advertising to the websites, search terms or directories on the web that are most likely to lead to high sales conversions.
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Trust us, jumping into something like a Google Adwords PPC campaign without first doing your footwork and learning everything possible about the above key points can easily cost you thousands of dollars per month without so much as a single sale. To put it bluntly, without a strategy to it, online advertising can make you go flat broke in no time as a reward for all the money you spend on it.
About the author: Carl Petoskey has been involved in small business technology for many years and has developed a wealth of knowledge during his time writing within that field. When he?s not busy writing, you can find him covering business internet service providers. Visit their site for more information.
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