Doing business online is not as easy as it seems! You may have the notion, with millions of prospective customers being only a click away, all you need is to build an eCommerce website and you will start selling your goods or services. Nothing can be further from truth! Most of the Netpreneur learn this hard way! I have seen people abandoned their online business endeavors after having worked unsuccessfully for several years. Like any brick and mortar business, online business could also fail for a number of reasons. However, many failed online businesses have one thing in common – their inability to bring quality visitors to the sites. Quality visitors in this case mean visitors that you can convert to buyers easily.

Making a site popular enough to profit from is not a simple job! According to a survey conducted by Netcraft in June 2005 there were approximately 65 million sites on the Internet. In the first six months of this year alone, 7.83 million new sites were published. Just like your site, all these other sites are also vying for attention of the Internet users. How do you attract traffic to your site? How get the right visitors, those who are interested specifically in the products and services that you offer?

Website promotion and marketing has become a thriving industry on the Internet. In a discipline where today’s knowledge can become obsolete in a month, the name of the game is to be constantly vigilant and learn new tips and tricks. Not every Netpreneur has the time or the ability to learn all the complex issues of website promotion. However, with little patience and eager interest you can acquire enough knowledge to promote your site successfully within a several days.

Before you start promoting your website, you need to work on the following points; otherwise all your efforts will be futile!

Your products or services

Whatever you sell, make sure that your products or services are of high quality! Go to your prospective competitors’ sites and check out, how compatible you are. Trying to sell an item, which has dubious quality or reputation, will take you nowhere. Ask yourself if you were the client, would you buy this product for your own use?

Your eCommerce site or Web Store

Many Netpreneurs don’t take the quality and design of their websites seriously. They reckon that first I’ll make some money and then only I’ll go for a high quality website.

This is a totally wrong attitude! It does not make any difference if your online business is only an extension of your successful offline business or it’s completely a new venture, you must take building your eCommerce site seriously. Your website is your online office, showroom and sales channel. Decision whether people will buy from your website, is based in many cases just on the look and feel of the web store. A lost visitor may never come back to your website again. That’s why it’s a good idea to spend enough time and money on the development of the right website.

If you don’t have a website yet and you would like the business to get on really quickly, try obtaining a web store from Yahoo!, Bigstep or Rusbiz. Yahoo and Bigstep both have excellent templates to create high quality web stores. If along with your web store you also would like to have features like automated procurement and supply chain management you should consider getting your web store from Rusbiz.com. Since Rusbiz is also a B2B portal, you get access to thousands of buyers and sellers without paying anything extra for it.

Website content

Your products and services should have clear specification, image and enough information for visitors to take positive buying decision. The pages should have good, interesting and fresh content so that visitors feel like browsing around and keep coming back.

Hosting

Select your hosting provider wisely! If you have to change your provider without any good reason, for example: you are setting up your own server, remember that you will loose your business for hours, some times even for a day or two. This is the time required for your new DNS to spread out over the Internet. Criteria you should take into consideration while choosing a hosting plan include:

Storage Capacity - Depending on your need you should choose a storage option that suits you most. There is no point having large storage space and not using it! Most providers allow you to upgrade to a bigger plan with more capacity if you need, anyway.

Bandwidth - Bandwidth is the measurement of the amount of data transmitted over an internet connection in a given time. Most providers count bandwidth by month. You have to know how much bandwidth you need while selecting a hosting plan. Initially for a small web store you won’t need more than 1GB.

Speed - Web hosting companies connect to the Internet through T1, T3, and, some times optical carrier lines. T1 and T3 lines, two of the fastest network connections available today, offer data transfer rates of 1.5 and 43 Mbps (megabits per second), respectively. Make sure that your hosting provider is connected to the Internet backbone through at least with T1 line and is not overloaded. Check the speed of several websites presently hosting with the provider by pinging the sites. A slow loading web store is a sure way to loose visitors.

Reliability - Make sure that the provider gives guarantee of at least 99% uptime. You don’t want to loose business because of your provider’s fault.

Customer Service - Check the provider’s customer service before signing up. You will need a quick response if something goes wrong with your site.

Once you have worked out the above mentioned points and your website is up and running, you can start working on real web promotion! Read articles on web promotion at http://ezine.rusbiz.com/topic/Online_Promotion_and_Marketing.html..


About The Author
Nowshade Kabir is CEO of Rusbiz.com, a global B2B portal for small and midsize companies. Our distinctive web stores along with many outstanding features like e-marketplace, e-catalog, supply chain management solutions, and trade leads section will allow you to build robust Internet presence and manage key business processes online. Rusbiz also develops Corporate B2B portals.