Launching your own website can be very exciting and equally rewarding. A site that is well planned can really give a business a positive boost, bringing in sales even during a waning economy. At times website creation can be a bit overwhelming, having so many different options and choices, and all the terminology to acquaint yourself with. But maybe this article can make things a bit easier for you.
Content Creation – We’ve all heard that on the web ‘content’ is king. That is just doesn’t matter how nice your design is, it’s the quality of your content that rules the day. This means your images, your copy, and any other forms of media are crucial to your site’s success.
If you happen to be a person who struggles in the writing department, then you can hire freelancers or professional copywriters to help you in that area. And it’s best to use professional for picking any photos, it can be a bit trickier than you would think.
Getting your content onto your site quickly should be a top priority. This way you can begin populating the site and have everything running as smooth as possible.
You Need to Set Your Goals – Setting your goals is the first step you want to take in the planning of your site. Unfortunately it is often times overlooked. You need for your goals to be crystal clear in your mind.
You may want to generate leads for sales, or sell some products, or you may have some other goal in mind. But whatever your goals are, create a mission statement from them. See if you can quantify them. Like how many inquiries do you expect to receive? Or what kind of turnover will you have three years down the road?
Establish Your Budget – You can create a simple type of website or a free blog very easily today. But there are lots of big companies pumping millions of dollars into creating their presence online. So what kind of budget should you have?
Well, if you create a turnover of around 100,000 and want to invest as much as 7%, then of course your annual budget for marketing is 7,000. You will need to decide if all of this gets invested marketing online or if you place some elsewhere.
Whenever you build a new website it requires a pretty significant amount of effort along with a substantial investment for marketing to have a successful launch. Once your site goes live, you can expect to put around 50% of your budget into the marketing rather than on the building of the site itself.
Go Live – After you’ve gone live with your site and submitted it to various search engines, you still can’t expect overnight success, but in a few months you should begin to see some results.
You can have the web developer install Google Analytics so you can track statistics and information for tweaking your site to get optimum performance. And now you’ll need to start the marketing, maybe by using social media. Twitter and Facebook are two good ones to start with, and then you want your pages to be search engine optimized, or (SEO) ready. And you can do some email marketing or use PPC (Pay Per Click) advertising.
Tags: online business, web designers, web developers, web presence, website, website development
