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One of the best things you could do when planning to start a website as an online business is to make a plan for it. If you have a bit of experience with running a business, you will understand me right from the start.

Planning should not take too much of your energy, but don’t forget about it since it is one of the most important things and it will save you big time and money on the long term.

You should plan a few things from the start, and even if many won’t recommend starting from the money point of view, allow me to start right there:

1. What’s your minimum profit you would like to have from your website? How much would you like to get back from your online business each month. By the way, think realistic, not optimistic!
2. How will you make that money? Are you going to sell products or services? How much that product costs, how many should you sell per month based on your proposed profit? (Research needed)
3. What’s your market? How large is the competition? Are there many sites offering the same product you are offering? Is it possible to find a smaller niche, to be easier for you to make a name there? (Research needed)
4. Based on 1 and 2, how many products should you sell per month to reach the target? 5? 10? 500? 5000?
5. How many visitors you need to make a sale? That’s a tough one and I am afraid I can’t answer you this question since it depends heavily on your market, on your products, on discounts, on price, etc. Just as a tip, don’t think in terms of offline businesses. Let’s say you have a regular store and for every 10 persons entering your store you make a sale!Well, it won’t happen in the online environment. Depending on how targeted your traffic is, it may take you 10000 visitors to sell a product or it may take you 50. Pretty large range, I know, but that’s the situation.I can tell you that the more targeted the traffic is, the more you’ll sell. I have a site selling a particular baby product and I sell a product every 100 people visiting the site, which is pretty good and I have another site where I sell a product every 1000 visitors, offering discounts and other advantages to go with the sale. (Research needed here too)
6. How are you going to bring those visitors to your website? Another one that you will need to figure out for yourself. I will explain you various ways to bring visitors to your site, but you will need to tweak this to match your site and your market. It will be a never-ending story and a long road to go, but you will learn a lot on the way!

These are just a few points I suggest you think about when building an online business, it will make your life easier.

I learned it the hard way, I started quite a few websites without thinking about such things, and I must admit sometimes I get carried away by my enthusiasm and also have the impulse to start a website thinking well, I’ll see on the way.

That’s always a bad idea. Think about it this way: you want to start a website selling shoes, you put it online, but you don’t succeed to bring many people to your site or to have sales. After a while you decide to turn your site into a niche store, selling only leather sport shoes. Changing the site, reorienting it, will be a difficult task, more difficult than doing it from the start. It will need people to get used to your site, search engines will need time to reposition your site in search engine results sets, etc.

Just a few basic things, not fancy, but on the long term you will come to thank me for reminding you this! You will see!

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A lot of times I have heard people around me speaking about launching a site to boost their business.

That is good and I always support such an idea.

But, in most of those cases, the persons speaking about it doesn’t know much about the subject and he or she expects a pretty fast response in terms of business benefits.

I am sorry to disappoint you but it doesn’t work quite as easy as it sounds, there is more to it that meets the eye and you’d better learn everything you can on this subject before jumping the wagon.

I am not going to tell you to stop, I am not going to do this, but I will tell you to pay attention to what I am going to say further,  because it may save you quite a lot of money, time and work.

So, here we go:

1. A website does not bring visitors just because it exists. Pretty obvious but many people forget about this so I had to put it here. You need to bring visitors to your website, as many as possible and as targeted as possible. This is not an easy task to do and often this is THE BIGGEST CHALLENGE of your site. If you build the site let’s say in 2 months, promoting the site and bringing visitors to your site will be a never ending story! Period.
2. Not the quantity of traffic but the quality really matters! Or said in an other way, you need a targeted traffic in order to have sales. Let’s say that you manage to bring 100.000 visitors on your website, general traffic, people surfing on the internet and you think that you are going to sell a lot of products, yet you barely sell a couple of products. Why is that? Because the traffic was not targeted. You’d better manage to bring 10.000 people that are interested in what you sell and you will sell a lot more products. Trust me, this is how things work!
3. Not every traffic is the same, search engine traffic is the best in terms of conversions. This is related to the above and in strong relation to it. There are more types of traffic, like traffic from search engines, direct traffic, where people know you and come directly, traffic from social media sites, like Digg or StumbleUpon, traffic from emails, etc. Which one is better? Well, the best traffic ever is the one from search engines. And you know why? Because is answering a question. When somebody searches on Google for red shoes size 10, means that he really wants that item and if you provide that, then it is likely to buy. It is a psichological thing, they ask Google for something, and Google sends the searcher to you and you are going to provide the product or service. Social media traffic does not convert well since it is made of people spending time on the internet, not looking to buy something.
4. If your business is local, get local with your site! I optimized sites for local businesses here and people asked me to promote them for some general terms. For the sake of this discussion, let’s say “industrial cleaning”. The business was local, providing local cleaning services, so I asked how somebody coming from searches from the other side of the country will become a client of a local business? Well, it won’t happen so I tweaked the promotion for targeting local searchers and this was way better in terms of conversions! If you fix cars, if you build furniture, you probably provide these services to people around your area, then get local!
5. Don’t make plans on short terms based on your website! Your site won’t bring you wealth right the very first day you launched it! A website is an investment, it’s something that you start and work on and in time it will bring money or clients but don’t bet your house on an online business, especially when you don’t know the rules of the game! This is a simple tip that will save you from a lot of issues! I have a friend that decided to start a website because he saw one of my websites that he thought he could handle. I tried to point him in the right directions, I explained him about what promoting means, how it will pay on the long run, but after a while he quit. Why? Because this was not for him, does not bring money fast…Think about it, think how much time you are going to invest in this and make sure your life does not depend on this site. Making money online is not as easy as experts makes it sound! Again, trust me on this, I should know!

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