The internet offers unique opportunities for making money.Whether it is an established 'bricks and mortar' businesses looking to expand sales online, to work-at-home mums looking to supplement their incomes, thousands of Australians are realizing the potential the internet has to offer for reaching new markets and generating meaningful revenues. The low set-up cost of the internet makes it possible for anyone with a modest investment to start an e-commerce business.
But no matter how great the idea, how revolutionary your product or service is, unless it is backed by a well-thought-out Internet Marketing strategy, you will most likely be disappointed by your e-commerce experience.
Establishing a meaningful online presence is the biggest challenge in setting up an online business. When you set up an online business, no matter how much traffic you can generate, your visitors don't know you. You need to establish your credentials and develop an identity that tells your visitors that you are not an unemployed weirdo trying to dupe visitors from your dark and unheated basement. Your website should seem to represent a genuine business that can really deliver. In short you need to establish trust. How can you do that?
A good website is quintessential to your online presence. Even the first glance can make or break a great business transaction. Your website should be neat and clean, It should be accessible to people of all abilities and it should have a well-structured navigation system. There should be no broken links and all the essential pages should be there.
If you are not a web designer, employ one. An amateur website says amateur business. When engaging a web designer, always check their online portfolio of work to ensure they know what they are doing. Contact the owners of the websites in their portfolio and ask them about their experience with the web designer. Contact a Search Engine Optimisation company and ask them for a quick appraisal of the designer's websites. It will take 5 minutes, should cost you nothing, and will tell you whether or not the web designer has any concept of building sites that are search engine friendly - many don't! A typical web site build will cost from $2,000 upwards depending on complexity
If you can't afford to pay out for a web designer, look at a web site builder solution. This is a free tool that comes with all our web hosting accounts and lets anyone, regardless of skill level, create a decent web site. Check out the demo here
On top of web design, setting up an online business is going to require some financial investment to do it right. You should expect to pay around $1500 to get yourself set-up with a securely hosted online store that can process credit card payments for a year.
Equally as important as the design of your website, is the structure and content it contains. The internet fosters 'short-attention span browsing'. Visitors aren't going to spend time digging around your copy for what they want, they are more likely to leave your site and move to their next Google search result. Clarity is the key to good content. Keep the information succinct, providing further links where necessary to allow visitors to 'drill down' to further levels of detail. Make sure that every page contains a call to action, whether that is a phone number or a sales offer.
Remember, not many people are natural born copywriters. Be honest with yourself. If this isn't the strongest area of your skillset, draft what it is you want to say, and employ a writer to spruce it up. You can outsource the task on sites such as elance.com and have the key areas of your site polished by an expert for a relatively small fee.
It is amazing how many businesses set out their stalls on the internet expecting visitors to buy their products and services without offering basic reassurance that they are a reputable business.
Try and anticipate and remove any areas of doubt that could stop a customer completing a purchase.
Don't hide your contact details away. Have a contact page with your full address, an email contact form, and your phone details. A business that proudly displays their phone number on every page gives the impression of a 'live' business with staff ready to engage the customer. Having only an email contact is a no-no for an e-commerce business. If you can't take phone calls because of your day job, get an answer phone or better still an answering service.
Don't use PO Box address. These just add another layer of inaccessibility to your business and to build trust you need transparency.
Include a Returns and Complaints policy on your page. That goes for delivery details as well. If you are using a trusted service like Australia Post to fulfill delivery, let your customers know.
Include an 'About Us' page that goes some way to explain your history and background, perhaps even your motivation to setting up the business or a mission statement. Again, this is about filling in the blanks in the (potential) customer's mind about whether or not yours is a genuine, trustworthy enterprise.
If you are taking payments online make sure you have secure payment processing, and make sure your customers know you do as well. Establish yourself as a trustworthy business and you will increase sales.
As with bricks and mortar stores, it doesn't matter how good your store looks, or your products are, if there isn't a regular and steady stream of traffic coming your way, your store, and your interest in it, will die. We are talking thousands of visitors a month here. Lets say that you aim to convert 3% of your visitors to paying customers. According to VISA, the average Australian is spending around $130 per online transaction. This is back of an envelope stuff, but you can roughly calculate how many visitors you should be aiming for to generate the turnover you want.
A $50,000 annual turnover is going to require 32 transactions a month which is equal to 1068 unique visitors per month through your store.This is not a huge amount of traffic IF you get the right level of exposure for your website.
You have many options of exposing your website to potential customers.
In order of cost effectiveness these are:-
Building traffic takes time, but there are short cuts. The main online methods available to you right now are:-
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) Every online business should be working to establishing the strongest position possible on the Search Engines. Google provides over 70% of the search results, so this is the one to target. Either learn about Search Engine Optimisation yourself and spend at least 10 hours a week building links to quality websites, or engage a specialist company to do it for you. PlanetDomain's TheTrafficAccelerator service is the leading Search Engine Optimisation service in Australia. It costs $990 for 6 months service, and will optimize your website and aim to put you onto the 1st page of results for targeted search terms relevant to your business.
Pay Per Click Advertising (PPC) This encompasses online advertising such as Google Adwords and Overture. PPC is a great way of generating instant results by targeting people actively searching for your keywords. The challenge is to create ads that consistently turn a profit. Adwords can be hard to get to grips with and many people are frustrated because of their lack of patience with the system, but it can produce great results. For short-term traffic injections, Adwords is a great tool, but for long-tern cost-effectiveness SEO is the way to go.
Email Marketing This is a cost-effective method of communicating with your existing customer base and generating new sales amongst this group. Your website should be actively encouraging visitors to sign up to a monthly newsletter. Over time, your mailing list will be a valuable source of new and repeat sales. Don't expect to generate new targets from email marketing, because sending emails to people that haven't opted in to your mailing list is called Spamming and is illegal. There are many off the shelf solutions that enable you to manage a mailing list and easily send out HTML emails from your website, and some online store software such as X-Cart has these facilities built in.
All the above are powerful methods of marketing that are essential if you are to generate the traffic you need to keep your business ticking over. If you are not going to invest the time or money building traffic to your website, save yourself a lot of hassle and don't go into business online. If all of the buzz words associated with online marketing make your eyes glaze over, that's okay, but recognize that you will need to engage specialist companies to handle these areas.
Whilst all of the above is sound advice, the fact remains you need to be 'in it to win it' - nothing hones your online business skills like experience be it success or failure. E-Commerce can seem daunting from the outside, especially if you are not technical, but if you sit around waiting to get everything right, you'll never make progress. You are going to make mistakes, along the way, that is a given. But every day you are not online, is a day that you are not learning, progressing and improving. There is a lot of advice out there from business owners who have 'been there and done that' available to you, as well as free advice from specialist companies.
The world is experiencing an e-Commerce boom. Sales in Australia alone are expected to top $10 billion by the end of 2005. The longer you leave it, the more crowded the marketplace will be by the time you get on board. So, go for it... and enjoy the ride.