Setting Up An Online Business - Tips, Tools and Techniques

This is a guest post submitted by cashback.co.uk. Initially their director, Neil Durrant, approached me and asked if I would include a link back to their site from mine - a good technique for off-page search engine optimisation (SEO). I agreed on the basis that it formed part of an article which would be useful to Online Business Consultant readers. That article follows below - at the end I've added a few SEO notes and tips for you too...

Today, as many people are looking to set up their own business, going online has a number of advantages:

• Your market is everyone with an internet connection.
• You can get going cheaply and quickly since you will not need expensive premises
• Your costs and prices will be cheaper

But the key to profitability is thorough preparation.

Here are 10 useful tips to help get your business going and profitable:

1. Write a business plan. Who are you trying to sell to, will they buy online, where are they based, can your product be sold and distributed online, are delivery costs low? If your idea stands up to scrutiny, you might be in business.
   
   [For more information about scrutinising your ideas, see the Business Ideas Litmus Test]
   
   
2. Find the right ISP provider to host your website. There are hundreds of businesses ISPs. Look at issues such as speed, customer service availability, back up services as well as cost and ability to switch.
   
   
3. Register your domain name. Before you establish your company name, do a search to make sure your chosen URL is available and make it memorable. Your ISP may be able to help register your domain name.
   
   [Tip: when choosing a domain name, try to ensure it is strongly related to your brand or contains keywords relevant to your market - which is good for organic SEO]
   
   
4. Set up your own website. You can find DIY site builder solutions on the net. These sites may not be as distinctive as you might like. Otherwise use a web designer but ask for samples first. They will advise on content, customer engagement tools and on navigation to make it for customers to buy from you.
   
   [WordPress is becoming increasingly popular for general website building as well as blogs. You might want to look at the Thesis theme (and why it is considered to be the best available) or have your site set up for you.]
   
   
5. Display the following information:
   
   - Contact details
   - VAT registration if applicable
   - Privacy policy
   - Terms and conditions of sale
   - Exchange/refund policy
   - Up to date prices and stock availability
   
   
6. Set up a virtual shopping cart to allow customers to select items for payment later through the check out page. Again your ISP may have an integrated shopping cart or you can buy specialist shopping cart software.
   
   
7. Set up an account with a provider like PayPal to collect payments. Charges are usually a percentage of each transaction.
   
   
8. Promote your website. Use your URL everywhere... business cards, brochures, letter heads, e-mail signatures, adverts. And make sure you capture customer e-mail addresses to let them know about new products and latest offers and promotions.
   
   
9. Market yourself on search engines. Either by paying for an ad linked to your site on a pay per click basis so you are only paying for visitors or by working with a specialist to optimise your content so that you appear high on search engine rankings against selected key words. Both approaches should be used in the early days.
   
   
10. Finally, test your site just before you go live and regularly. Do all the features work? Is the end to end process slick and straightforward?
    
    [Make sure you site is tested by your intended customer with no instruction from you. Even if everything works, if they don't 'get it' and end up buying from you, all your time, effort and money will go to waste!]
    

You are now well on way to having your online business up and running and giving you the ability to earn money. As with most things in life, you will rapidly learn 80% in the early days and spend the remainder of the life of the business learning the finer points. But it is a rewarding journey.

...

So I promised you a few SEO tips and already mentioned that the reason Neil approached me was not only to promote his site, but also to improve his site's rankings in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs). You see, the fact is, that no matter how well you do your on-page optimisation (those things on your site within your control), inbound links to your site have a much greater impact on your ranking position. However, it's not quite a simple as that...

The quality of inbound links matters greatly. You can actually be penalised by Google for trying to cheat the system with 'black hat' techniques (and your pages will go down the ranks or even disappear from the indexes altogether). The good news is that you get bonus points for:

• Links that appear on relevant sites -
  I.e. if the topic of the page the link appears on is the same as the topic of the page it links to, this is good.
  
  
• Good use of anchor text -
  Anchor text being the words you click on to follow the link. A terrible example of anchor text would be 'click here' - it means nothing. Notice how Neil's researchers used 'earn money' for their anchor text above. It tells Google that the page being linked to is about earning money, i.e. it contains keywords they're trying to rank for. Also, it is much better for the anchor text to appear in context within a paragraph (ideally high up a page) than in a bullet list.
  
  
• Variety -
  It's the spice of life, and Google knows this. If all of your inbound links go to the same page and have the same anchor text, Google will get suspicious - it's all a bit too convenient. Google wants to see things happening naturally. For example, Google doesn't want to think that Neil approached me to try and get cashback.co.uk in the number 1 spot. Google wants the most popular relevant site to appear in the number 1 spot, and that is the site that people are talking about on their blogs and linking to because they want to. Everyone is different, so everyone would have different anchor text. Google rewards these patterns of behaviour. On that note, it's also worth mentioning that providing facilities to make it easy for visitors to promote and link to your site is therefore very wise indeed!
  

Here are a few links to articles and videos on the subject that you may ind useful. I posted all of these on my Twitter account, so you may like to follow theOBC on Twitter.

• Link building guide
• Link building stimulus plan
• How to get awesome links (video)
• Why you shouldn't create a link farm (video)
• More about off-page over optimisation (video)

P.S. I changed the link I was originally given to the cashback.co.uk site when I noticed that they had an affiliate program. If I'm going to include a link to their site, why not a link that I get paid for - this article is all about making money online afterall! I hope you found it useful.