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An internet site is a business like any other business, and as any business, an internet site can be set up and managed badly, or the way it should be – professionally and seriously.
Let’s review some of the processes and decisions involved in setting up a business, whether virtual or tangible.
For arguments sake, let’s assume that I want to set up a furniture store. As the initiator of the idea, I need to think about the following points:
Investigation and Study
Firstly, I have to investigate how attractive my store is going to be, compared to other stores. If there are no other stores, or very few, I need to understand why. It is possible that I have discovered a niche market that doesn’t exist, and has a high potential for success. On the other hand, the niche may not exist because there is little demand, or because a million stores before me in this niche have all failed. Even if there are many stores that have failed, this could be (as is very often the case) because the management and maintenance of the store were bad!
If I find many identical stores to the one that I want to set up, this does not necessarily mean that it is a waste to set up another one. Maybe there is a huge demand for this type of product, and there is place for many stores.
During my years in the field, I have discovered that the main problem is not the setting up of the store, but its ongoing maintenance and management. Many times, people invest most of their capital in setting up their website, and are sure that this is all they need to do. They don’t promote or market their store, and rarely update it with new products and sales campaigns. How many times have you visited a website that still has news from 3 years ago? Would you dream of buying something from such a site?
The Location of the Store
In the virtual world, as in the real world, the location in which I open my store (in the virtual world – host my site), and the monthly rental and municipal payments (hosting costs) is of great importance. I also need to verify that the building (server) where my store is, is well secured, making it very difficult to break in to the store to steal products, or, perish the thought, details about my customers, e.g. their credit card numbers. Is the store is spacious and wide enough (traffic, disk space, etc.).
And what about the response time of my site? This is like the amount of parking space near my store. I have to ensure that my customers can reach my store easily and with no unnecessary delays. In addition, the location of the store will dictate the opening hours. In the virtual world, businesses work 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. If your server often goes down, it is analogous to your putting “closed” or “will be back soon” sign on your door every hour or so. Research has shown that the number of visitors to your site drops exponentially to the number of times your site goes down.
The Structure of the Store
The importance of the structure of the store in the virtual world, and the way in which it is managed, are identical to that of a regular store. When the customer (visitor) enters the store, we will want to show him our deals and sale items, we want the place to be clean and orderly, and we will be polite and courteous in handling all customer requests. We will present our products according to categories, in a clear and focused manner, while emphasizing the items that we are interested in promoting, and we will enable our customers to ask the most basic question in the world of sales: “Do you have such-and-such a product?”.
In a virtual business, we will handle this by using an internal search engine that will help the customers find the products on our site, according to their requirements, and if we do not have the item, the search engine will be intelligent enough to give an answer like “No, but we have a similar product that might interest you …”
Advertising the Store
After I have set up my store, and ensured that it will be open 24 hours a day, I need to run and tell everyone about the new business. The virtual world offers us a number of possibilities, which may lead to irreversible damage if used incorrectly.
Without doubt, the search engines and indexes are the best marketing tool in the virtual world. Research shows that 90% of the internet users arrive at new sites via indexes and search engines, and in fact only a tiny percentage of surfers arrive at sites that are not located (ranked) in the first page of search results. The big question is how to rank myself on the first page, way above my competitors? The answer is not simple, and is discussed in full in the Website Promotion Seminars that we run.
The structure of the business (way the site is coded, and its text) has overwhelming importance on its marketing and promotion in the search engines. In the virtual world, a site that is not built according to the “rules” will not be located in a realistic position in the search engines, and will often (in most cases) require renovation in order to improve its position in the search engines.
The search engines are so “human” that if you made mistakes, generally unconscious ones, their response will make you curse the search engines, as if they were your neighbor who parked his car in your living room.
The search engines don’t like to be annoyed. Once your site is up, don’t start to shower them with information, or use perverse schemes like duplicating content or sites, masquerading as other sites, etc. You should know that some search engine, including Google, will simply mark you site if you use these types of techniques, and it will not exist in their searches, no matter what you do!!
One of the ways to grow the traffic to your site is by creating cooperations (links between sites) with a number of like businesses. This is similar to the real world: you go into a butcher’s shop to buy meat, and the butcher shows you a recipe for grilled meat using a specific grill, and will even show you the shop where you can buy this particular grill. If you went into the shop to buy the grill, the shop owner will point you in the direction of the butcher who sells high quality meat that is best for grilling on this grill. The owner of the shop selling the grill, and the butcher, came to an agreement to cooperate with each other. In the virtual world, it is very important to know which sites recommend your site – are they well-known? Are they in a similar field to you? And if so, the search engines know how to value your site accordingly.
Reports
Here as well, like in the real world, you need to gather reports on the traffic of visitors to your site: which departments are they interested in, which products did look for, etc.. Was there a lot of traffic with no sales? What could be the reasons for this, and how can they be fixed? You should never have a website for which you don’t know how many people visited your site, and what they did there!! Now-a-days, there are relatively simple methods to produce the most useful reports which will give the site owner (if s/he just knows how to read them) priceless information.
In summary, your neighbors son, a nice amiable kid, can set up your website in one hour, load it to the internet in 10 minutes, and provide you with a site for the price of 5 candies. Yes, this is also possible. We suggest that you take the matter seriously, and save the price of the candy.
There are many other issues that I have not touched upon here, but which are no less important than those discussed in this article.
We hold seminars on this subject that review all the decisions and processes that need to be made to successfully set up and manage a website. For more details about the seminar, see “An Internet Website: a business in every way”.
Translated by Debi Zylbermann |
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