Part One. Expansion. Ok, so you have your market selected,your business online and the money is coming in slowly but surely. You are offto a good start. But where do you go from here?
In this post we will look at “Expanding your Business”:
- Promotion and Advertising
- Joining forces – partnerships and investors
- Investments
- Franchise
- Utilizing the Web’s Potential
ADVERTISING
Right, so first and foremost– advertising. Getting word around of your products and services is not alwaysthe easiest of tasks. It is very disheartening when potential customers let youdown by never getting back to you – they are always too polite to say “no”, sothey leave you on edge for weeks, before you give up all hope of them evercalling you back. Word of mouth is the best way of getting your business known,word from a friend is a very trustworthy advertisement, but not always the mostpractical. Other than that, you really need to focus on some strong advertisingcampaigns and promotion if you wish to increase your businesses prospects andrevenue.
When it comes to advertisingyour online business, the first advertising programme you should start is aGoogle AdWords promo. Google AdWords, granted are not the most visually stunningof ads, but when it comes down to it, you only pay-per-click. You pay for acertain amount, and then bang, you only get charged when someone clicks the ad!Not only that, but there is NO MINIMUM CHARGE for a Google AdWord – you canspend as little or as much as you want. These are a perfect place to startadvertising for any small online business that can’t afford to spend/riskmassive amounts on flashy looking posh graphical adverts.
If you do have a bit ofextra cash on hand and you think that it will be beneficial to pay forexpensive, graphical advertising, I highly recommend that you do – but ONLY ifyou have the cash to do so. Paying for expensive advertising campaigns couldend up being the death of your cash reserves and they may not be as effectiveas you hope.
If you are going to opt forexpensive forms of advertising like graphics, make sure you set aside an“Advertising Fund”. Do not go dipping into your personal cash, and make sureyou monitor what the adverts are bringing you. If your paying £1000 per monthon 5 adverts across a range of sites, you want them to make you at least £150profit. Any less and I’d say it wasn’t worth the hassle.
Another No-No for Internetadvertising is NEVER to have too much money tied up into a single advertisingagency. Once they have bound you to a contract and they have your money, you’llfind they soon start throwing your ads out willy-nilly and neglect the factyou’re a small business. It is always best to limit yourself, and spread your“Advertising Fund” across multiple sites – but make sure you keep a record ofwhat they cost and what they bring!
PROMOTION
Yes, promotion istechnically the same as advertising, but for the purpose of this post, I’mpretending they are two different things, ok?
A fantastic way of gettingyour business known is to offer out free promotion downloads or products, whichwill generate interest about your business and intrigue people to come and havea look at your site. Not only that, but if you are giving a free product away andit is of high quality, this will prove to your potential customers how trustworthy and excellent your products are. If you are selling hardware productsthen it will be more costly for you to give samples out for free, especially ifyou include delivery costs, however if you are giving away software products,I’d advise you go crazy on the free downloads – it will bring you thousands ofvisitors.
If you are going to promoteyourself through free downloads, don’t just offer the downloads from your own site,there are hundreds of sites that make their money from indexing your freedownloads, a brilliant example is www.apple.com/downloads- if you get one of your free downloads submitted onto theere, you will beastonished at how many other sites take your download from it and add it totheir own. Give it a week or so and type yourself into Google – you will belisted on every page!
It’s all good being able topromote yourself with free downloads and advertisements across the web, but youneed to have an image that people will be able to just glance at know – “oh,that’s sucha company”.
Building yourself a corporate identity that sticks in peoplesminds is not the easiest of things to do. For this you may need to employ aprofessional graphical design company and get them to do it for you, and I’dhighly advise that you do. Make sure that you have a fresh corporate theme thatincludes letterheads, high quality business cards, banner ads and a flawless,memorable logo.
If you have the money aftercompleting the above, another fantastic way of promoting your business isthrough sponsorship. Sponsorship wins peoples hearts. If you sponsor a localschool, parish, charity event – you will win the hearts of many and the rewardswill be yours, as well as that beautiful sense of achievement 
. Don’t gooverboard with this though; sponsorship can be very expensive so I would onlydo this if you really do have the money. Not only that, but sponsorship canhave the complete adverse effect if it becomes too much for you. Can youimagine how the local community would feel about your company if little Johnnycame home upset because soccer practice was cancelled? “The sponsors havewithdrawn their funding, so the playground has had to shut” – not verypromotional at all.
JOINING FORCES
With your site up andrunning to its potential and you’re putting everything you can into it, to thepoint your running out of fresh content and skills, teaming up with an expertfrom another field is brilliant way to expand your business. If you have asimple HTML/PHP Blog, team up with someone who can help develop it into a sitethat can handle members and an interactive networking community, then the moremembers you get, the more you can charge for the advertising space on yoursite.
You don’t just have todevelop your own site, you could simply just start teaming up with other sitesof a similar interest, an “affiliate programme” – you put there text link onyour site and they will place yours on theirs. So basically, you start swappingtraffic. You could even go extreme and merge your site with another, but doingthis loses you “YOUR” business and turns it to a partnership, if its worth itgo for it, but personally I like to be the one calling the shots.
INVESTMENTS
You’re only just on yourfeet and on the road to being an Internet entrepreneur. Investments will bevital to your success. However, I don’t mean investments as in putting yourmoney into someone else’s ideas, I mean purchasing yourself equipment andsupplies that in the long run will serve you in good stead. As soon as I hadsaved up enough, the first purchase I made was a fast, powerful and reliablecomputer that I could take with me anywhere – a MacBookPro. This was not thecheapest of laptops, but it is powerful and has never let me down, a perfectinvestment when I need to ensure mobile reliability. The second investment Imade was an office – I converted half of my house to an office to give me apleasant, organised and professional work environment – a key to success.
Investments are fantasticwhen they work, but if they go wrong, you will end up in the dumps. You cannever be 100% certain that an investment will be profitable. Make sure youweigh up the pros and cons before you commit to anything, if there are manycons to what you are doing, I’d opt that at this stage, you leave it out.
FRANCHISE
Now, I bet your probablythinking, “How the hell can you franchise a website?” Well. You cant. But youcan franchise the products and services which you are offering! A great way toget word of your company around is to franchise your software and service toother websites and companies to sell on your behalf. Draw up a contract withanother online business in a similar market and allow them to sell yoursoftware for you, and on each sale they’ll get a cut of the takings. Yes, itdoes lose money for you in the short term, but in the long term it will buildyou a strong, healthy and well-known corporate image and bring you more saleswithout lifting a finger. Secondly, you can also set up contracts with similaronline business so they can showcase your work on their site to bring them morebusiness, however on the circumstances that they must subcontract to you,therefore gaining you more work, and them. It doesn’t hurt to share a little,right?
UTILIZING THE WEB’S POTENTIAL
The web is one big massiveresource. It is a reservoir of potential and possibilities, especially when itcomes to expanding your business and/or its profile. With social networking andblogging at an all time high, you can’t go wrong when you want to get noticed!No matter what your online business specialises in, the first place to go whenattempting to expand your profile is MySpace. When you want to meet new people,teach them about yourself and show them what you can do, create a MySpaceaccount, upload a bio, pictures, add friends and even blog. It is the perfectway to get yourself known. Other than this, there are of course many otherservice which can be utilised to create a massive online portfolio of sites,simply there to promote one business. There are sites such as FaceBook, Beebo –job finding sites like The Ladders and Monster – its an endless pit! Make sureyou get on the web to maximise your online businesses potential!
A word of warning whenutilising the web, people expect a lot from the Internet today. Make sure anysite or MySpace you create has sharp, clean cut and crisp detail within itsgraphics, an eye catching design, a user interface which will guide the eye andmost of all, make them simple to use. A potential customer who arrives on yoursite and has to squint their eyes to find a link will have left before theyeven think about putting on their glasses. People don’t like struggling whenthey are browsing the web, they browse for fun and leisure – not for work. Maketheir time enjoyable and they’ll re-pay the favour.
*Additional – NEVER usespam. If you use spamming you will destroy your own image and people will hateyou. You will be perceived as a virus or malicious website and people willsteer clear of you!RESOURCES:
If your business revolvesaround graphic designs you may want to expand your business image through sitessuch as:
www.psdtuts.com – write a tutorial and putyour link on the bottom, even better that you get paid for doing it!
www.cafepress.com – add your designs tomany types of product, sell your products to advertise yourself whilst alsogenerating incomewww.zazzle.com – add your designs to t-shirtsand spread them like wildfire! They are high quality and you set the mark-up!
www.spreadshirt.net – another fantastict-shirt site, this one especially – You can completely customize the interfaceusing html and css! You also are not limited to products and you can set themark up to whatever you like. The shirts are of very high quality and ship worldwide.
www.aiburn.com – If you use Adobe Illustrator,this site is dedicated to Adobe Illustrator tutorials, just like PSD TUTS.If your business is advice,writing or blogging related, some fantastic site to help you brush up on yourwriting skills are:
www.wikipedia.org – yes, an obvious one –full of content, tips and inspiring articles.www.editorialservice.com – an onlineservice to help you with your writing skills.
www.performancing.com – a site full ofadvice dedicated to bloggers and their success!
For general business tipsthere are lots of good sites out their! For the younger business learners here are some good ones:
www.bized.co.uk – a huge archive of info foranyone wanting to learn business at an educational level.www.nytimes.com/pages/business/- topical, up to date business advice and news.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/- Another up to date, topical business news site, but a British version!
The second part of this post is coming soon, hope you liked it!Adam.
In today’s Internet driven society, there is this constant push on being more interactive, more transparent and more mobile. It seems every time we turn around there is some new application that promises us true connectivity no matter where we (or our clients) access it from.
