March 20, 2009

Running an online business? Don't make these mistakes

photo by h3nr0

1. Not having a well prepared business plan

You can pretty much define a business plan as a resume for your business idea in mind. Some may say it’s like your company’s calling card. When you need money to start your business, or when you need an office space, your business plan is what will do most of the talking to convince your investors / lenders or property managers to believe in your business and give you what you need.

2. Not having thorough knowledge of the chosen product or service

Being passionate about the chosen product or service is important, but knowing the chosen product or service will build up your credibility to your prospects.

3. Not having appropriate goals

Setting the wrong expectations can often cause frustrations. If you are expecting to earn $1,000,000 in the first month it is highly unlikely, especially when you are new to the Internet business field.

4. Not choosing the proper domain names

Some people pick domain names that are too long for people to remember. Try not to exceed 15 characters. Some people pick domain names that are too hard for people to type. For example: www.businesssuccess.com is very hard to type and causes frustrations to the users. Some people pick domain names that are not related to their product or service. A lot of people use their own names as their domain names. Unless you are a celebrity, avoid it.

5. Not choosing a reliable web hosting service

Many people just purchase a domain name but host their websites at home. What if your Internet goes down or is not fast enough? What if your home server gets hacked? What if your computer gets stolen?
 

6. Not having a professional and simple website

A professional website will show that you’re serious about your product or service, and build up credibility to your customers. A simple website will bring comfort to your customers. It should not take more than 5 seconds to load up your website. The close button on your visitors’ browsers is just 1 click away.

7. Not having a place for people to contact you on the website

Your visitors want to know if there are real people working behind the theme and are serious about the business.

8. Not having a navigation menu on your website

Having a menu on your website will help users to navigate easier.
Try to use text links for the menu rather than graphic links.

9. Not having enough text on your website

Many people think by having a full flash integrated website will attract more visitors. It is true that your website will be attractive, but only if they can find your website. Search engines prefer text instead of graphics and flash because they can crawl and index text better than graphics and flash.

10. Not having a search engine optimized website

Traffic is the key to the success of your Internet business. More traffic means more visitors, more visitors means more potential prospects that will turn into customers. Try to design your website with search engine optimization in mind.

11. Spamming keywords in <title></title> tag, META tag, and image ALT tag on your website

1) Having too much of the same keywords in the TITLE tag of your website can result in having your website banned by search engines.

2) Having too much of the same keywords in the META tag (example: Meta Name=”keywords” content=”spam, SPAM, spam, SPAM”) of your website can also result in having your website banned by search engines.

3) Another spot where people spam their keywords. (example <img src=”image.jpg” alt=”spam SPAM Spam sPaM”> This can also result in having your website banned by search engines.

12. Using hidden text on your website

Some people have keywords with the same color as their background so visitors don’t see but search engines can see them. Search engines go down very hard if they find people doing that.

13. Not seeking Enthusiasm, but Profit

Profit is important to a business, but non-enthusiasm-driven profit will not last long. After all, the trend is: enthusiasm breeds happiness, and happiness brings in profits.

14. Not having a separate computer, place, and time for Internet business work

1) Even though you have the freedom to work at home to run your Internet business, having a separate computer, place, and time is very important. You want to treat your Internet business like a regular business, even at home.
2) By having a business use only computer you can avoid distractions such as videos, music on your personal computer. By having a separate place for business work will reduce distractions such as TV
Time management is a key to business success; it is important to dedicate certain amount of time a day to focus on your business.

15. Not dedicating time for your family and your loved ones

A successful entrepreneur is successful in both personal and business aspect of his/her life. Don’t spend all your time on your business. You need to find the balance between business and family.

16. Not dedicating time for relaxation and eating proper food

What is the use of all your profit in your business if you lose your health?
10 hours of work straight is not as efficient as 5x 2 hours of work with 15min breaks in between.
Proper relaxation will help reducing your pressure (even if you don’t feel any) and give you more strength to continue.
 

17. Not updating your website frequently

1) Updating your website frequently will bring continuous readership for your visitors which will also build up your credibility to your visitors.
2) Updating your website frequently will ensure search engines to crawl your website more often, increasing your overall search engine ranking over time.

18. Not updating related content on your website

1) Related content will not only bring continuous readership for your visitors, but also increase the relevance of your website content and increase your overall search engine ranking over time.
2) People will bookmark and come back to your website because they are interested on the topics that you present. By having too broad of contents there is a good chance that you will blow away a lot of visitors.

19. Not updating quality content on your website

1) Quality content will be valuable to your visitors and will build up the trust between you and your visitors over time.
2) Try not to have content that is too long. Be simple and effective.
3) Use graphics and videos to the content of your website.
4) Bold important keywords to help users to read through.
5) Avoid using slang

20. Not organizing website content

Organizing the content on your website, such as putting them into categories, will help users to navigate easier and will increase the quality of the internal linking of the pages on your website, which will result in better search engine ranking.

21. Not using graphics and videos in the content of your website

Graphics and videos will bring more attention to your visitors. Sometimes pictures means millions of words. Also, by adding videos on places like YouTube and display them on your website, you are not using your website’s bandwidth.

22. Not understanding how PPC works (Google Adwords)

Google Adwords is a very good service for people to advertise their product or service on the Internet. Do this right you can gain a lot of traffic without spending too much on the advertising cost, and gain profit from the traffic. Do this wrong you can lose a lot of money without getting much traffic to your website.

23. Not putting valuable comments on blogs and forums

When you post comments on blogs and forums you are making yourself known on the Internet. People will consider your comments as spam if they find nothing out of them.

24. Not adding website links in your signatures

Make sure you are adding links to your business website in your signatures when you post comments on blogs and forums. Forgetting about this will result in having your work to get yourself known vanish.

25. Not involving in communities in your field

Aside from posting comments on blogs and forums, reading on the web on subjects related to your product or service is essential. This way you can get to know your competition. Know what others are doing right and wrong.

26. Buying Email lists

Email marketing is quite effective. However, you want to have a quality email list. Buying email lists is one thing to absolutely avoid. Why? Because you will be buying email lists that have already been bombard with thousands of junks from others who have bought the lists.

27. Not focusing on the conversion rate of your website, but marketing.

Increasing your website's conversion rate should be your top priority before spending your time and money on Search Engine Optimization, or Search Engine Marketing. It is true that traffic is important. However, without a good conversion rate, the traffic that you paid for, means absolutely nothing!

28. Pushing yourself too hard

Knowing when to seek for assistance is very important. After all, business is all about team work, even if you start it by yourself at home: you are using someone else’s expertise to register your website, to host your website, to promote your ads online.

29. Not being generous on affiliate commission

The more commission you give to your affiliates the more they will sell for you. Basically you are getting free and automated income, it doesn’t really hurt to be generous, does it?

30. Hiring someone because you know him/her

I'm talking about friends and relatives. Sometimes it is, indeed, hard to reject them when they offer themselves to your business. But you have to keep personal relationships apart from your business and focus on people that can be beneficial to your business

31. Asking someone to be your partner because you can't afford to hire him/her

There could be a lot of potential to your business. For example, if you are running a business that sells software and you can't afford to pay a programmer to develop the software for you just yet. This may come across your mind: "Hey I can make him as a partner and tell him he can share 49% of the profit so he can develop this program free of charge." What if your software sells for $1million in the near future and you know you could just pay someone $5000 to develop the exact same software? You gave away $485,000 right there because you didn't have the "patience" to gather enough income to hire a programmer to do it for you at the first place.

32. Hiring people just to help them out

Empathy does not grow your business. If you really want to help the poor, make your business a success first and make donations to them. Isn’t that more practical? (Just as an example)

33. Not giving back to the community

A lot of times, giving back to the community (e.g. donating to charities) can result in achieving a sense of accomplishment, giving you courage to do greater things. What can you do with all that profit? You are one of the human race and helping the community is quite important. Statistics say 95% of the millionaires online donate to charities or non-profit organizations.

 

 

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