I hope you are all having a good start to week! Today, in this new Entrepreneurial Monday post, I am going to keep on talking about how to start an online business. In the first blog post of this series, we talked about analysing the needs of our audience to adapt our products and copies. Today, we are going to put all this data into practice. How does that sound?

Grab a piece of paper and a pencil, and keep on reading!

4. Design and build an easy-to-use website

Easier said than done, right? Let’s do it step by step.

• Create your brand to start an online business

Your brand is the first thing you have to think about. If you want to stand out, you have to pay attention to your business internally. Then, you will have to elaborate the emotional appeal that your brand is going to adapt, they way you are going to describe this and communicate it to your audience and the functionality of your brand within the huge and crowded ocean of brands out there. I will talk about it later on, as I would need a whole post just to talk about this.

Once you have a clearer picture of your brand, you will have to create a professional logo for your website, and adapt all the graphic elements to your website in order to create harmony between what your brand offer and its visual elements (colours, voice of your copy, typographies, pictures and so on and so forth).

• How are you going to use your website?

You always have to bear in mind what you want to achieve with your website. Are you going to use it as a platform to sell services? Do you want to reader to subscribe to your newsletter? Do you want your audience to complete a contact form?

Attracting readers to your website isn’t enough. We have to think how we want our audience to behave while they navigate through our websites.

Why? Because we have to keep this process as simple as possible. Our potential clients/subscribers must be able to complete this process in less than three clicks. Also, we have to keep the navigation in our website as easy as possible.

• What does your audience expect to find in your website?

Don’t forget the data that you have gathered about your audience! If you want your audience to stay in your website, you have to offer them an added value; something that they really want.

Now that we have done our market research and defined our niche market, it will be easier to get to know their interests and what they expect from you.

• What are your limits?

You have to know your own limits, what you can do and what you have to outsource. I already talked about how important investing in your website is. If you do everything, even those things that you don’t really know how to do, your website won’t have the impact that you expect from it.

If you don’t know how to design a logo, hire a designer; if you don’t know how to write a website copy, hire a copywriter; if you don’t know how to translate your website into different languages, don’t use Google Translate (please, just don’t) and hire a translator.

Write a list in your piece of paper of everything you should do to create your website and then think if you can or not do every single point. For those points that you can’t do, look for the way to outsource them.

A small inversion in your website can make a big difference.

5. Use search engines to drive traffic to your website

Here we have to know the difference between SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) and SEM (Search Engine Marketing).

• SEO

To keep it simple, SEO is the process of making your website visible through search engines without paying for it. If we want our website to be SEO-optimised, we will have to bear in mind different aspects:

We have to know what keywords are going to use our audience to find our website. That’s why we need to do a keyword research within our industry. In this post, I talked about Semrush in order to research our competence and the keywords that they are use and how effective they are.

Once we know the most effective keywords, you will have to implement them in your website copy, but you can’t do this randomly. We have to integrate them in a way that doesn’t affect the tone of your message and in the key part of your website.

If you have a multilingual website, don’t forget to do a keyword research in each language. You can’t translate keywords just like that, because maybe they aren’t as effective in the target language. You will likely have to use different keywords. Writing website copies aren’t as easy as it seems, right?

Also, you may consider implement a content strategy in your website. If you create more content, you will be able to focus on different keywords and your content will be more visible through the search engines. Think about the impact that your website will have if you have a content strategy in different languages; you will be able to target different countries and their respective audience.

• SEM

If your budget allows it, you may consider invest in SEM to be more visible on the different searchers. However, you will have to do a keyword research to see how you are going to approach every campaign.

Here you can find more information about SEM campaigns.

I know that all of this can be a bit overwhelming at the very beginning, but if you go step by step, you will be close to have a successful online business. Remember, next Monday I’ll publish the last part of this series of blog posts. Don’t hesitate to post any question or suggestion below!

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