If you are an infopreneur who wants to set up shop on the Web, you need to sit down and decide from the beginning which aspects of the e-commerce part of creating/maintaining your website you will handle yourself, and which administrative parts you will hire an expert to do for you.
Researching the best e-commerce options and deciding on how you will proceed with each phase or aspect of setting up shop technically is a crucial foundation for any ‘for profit’ business. Here’s what you have to decide and/or do on the technical front to get your small business up and running online:-
1. Build a great website. Great means highly functional and efficient, entertaining, relevant and informative. If you are not tech-savvy, you need to hire a web developer who can develop your vision clearly.
Hire someone who has a reputation for creatively and effectively reflecting the small business owner’s particular brand, content, and business goals. Also, make sure the design includes several places on the site where your target market can participate actively (whether it be buying an ebook or other resource promoted on the site, commenting on a blog, registering on a forum exchange or responding to a survey, etc).
Every visual and practical aspect communicated/structured on your website should reinforce your brand and supply value to the visitor/purchaser so that it will become easily recognizable from the sea of ‘same’ and that visitors will always receive something valuable for their time or money invested.
2. Select a website hosting company and register your domain name. There are numerous companies offering this service. You can either do both with the same provider, or register your domain name with a different company than the website hosting service.
Ask other small business owners who they are currently using and get feedback about the companies; choose the service options that seem right for your business needs.
3. Decide on a shopping cart, set up a payment gateway, arrange for credit card processing and open a merchant account. I would recommend that the small business infopreneur simply pay for this service from a company specializing in reliable delivery, rather than simply buying a software package and installing/maintaining it yourself. Given the complexity of maintaining this highly technical aspect of e-commerce, many things could go wrong that you may or may not be qualified to fix.
Saving a few dollars initially during the start up phase of your small business will not be worth the frustration and lost business revenue while your clients flock to your competition who have reliable and secure e-commerce applications on their websites.
It’ll free up your time as an infopreneur to develop creative and informative content for your website, invest in social marketing practices and participate more effectively in all other aspects of moving your small business forward.
