As a website is a kind of business (only on the Internet), the rules of its creation and development are similar to the rules of creation and development of traditional kinds of business.
Any business starts from documentation, to be more precise – from a business plan. Experiences businessmen know that a well calculated and drawn up business plan comprises at least 70% of success of your future business.
Let us consider the fundamentals of drawing up a business plan for a commercial Internet project.
The process may be divided into three stages for convenience:
- drawing up requirements specification and website development;
- website promotion;
- website commercialization.
On the stage of website development it is very important to carry out competent preliminary research of the target niche in which you are going to promote the site. For this purpose specialists carry out analysis of words and word combinations which are most frequently asked for in this subject sphere, study competing websites which occupy leading positions in the target niche, make the list of sites which can become your potential partners etc.
You should exactly determine the kind of your future online business: b2b (business-to-business), b2c (business-to-consumer), c2c (consumer-to-consumer) etc. You should also determine which electronic payment systems you will need and how your site will communicate with customers.
Website development includes making up a semantic core (the set of keywords and word combinations which will be the basis for optimizations of site pages) and development of web design with well-thought-out site navigation.
It is important to determine necessary technical characteristics of hosting properly. It is vital for maintenance and further development of your project.
Choice of the domain name for your site should not be random because today it is one of essential parameters in formation of relevant search engine results page in different search engines. The domain name should contain a topical search query of the highest frequency if it is possible.
The most laborious part of website development is copywriting – preparation of texts for the WEB. Materials of the site should be interesting, unique and brief (if possible). The business plan of the site should include such paragraph as “content update”. It is one of the main conditions of success of your future Internet business.
The stage of website development is concluded with testing of the site in different browsers, on different monitors, with different screen resolution. Usability testing is also very important.
The second stage of the marketing plan is website promotion (including promotion of the site in the search engines). During drawing up of this part of the plan the results of preliminary analysis of the target niche can be extremely useful.
Website promotion starts from registration of the site in the search engines, subject directories and rankings.
It is necessary to include a very important paragraph into your marketing plan. It is link exchange. Link exchange permits to increase the rating of your site. It consists of making up the list of sites for link exchange, working out the link template, distribution of e-mails about link exchange, placing links on your website.
The second part of the marketing plan also contains detailed description of the following forms of website promotion:
- identification of the methods and frequency of site updating;
- forming of the list of topical forums, message boards and article directories for publications;
- study of banner exchange programs, preparation of your own banners, banner exchange;
- website promotion via e-mail: forming of the mailing list, writing the message itself;
- forming of the list of sites for conclusion of partnership programs;
- website promotion with the help of press releases;
- use of techniques which stimulate repeated visits (questionnaires, competitions, greeting cards, jokes and funny stories, tests, horoscopes etc).
Commercialization of the site. The most important issue is correct determining of optimal CTR (click through ratio; i.e. conversion coefficient) and ways of achieving it. On the third stage of the marketing plan it is necessary to plan active work with partnership programs, use of contextual advertising, organization of periodical actions (discounts, bonuses), creation of the customers club on the site, target e-mail distribution, client servicing.
If the site is designed for sales you should assign a special section for logistics.
As a rule, all paragraphs of the second and the third stages of the marketing plan include such section as “presumable results”. It helps to control the course of website promotion by responding to changes on the Internet.
If you are interested in our approach to construction of online business, you can order a site in web studio WebStudio2U right now!
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website promotion,
website development plan,
marketing plan,
website development,
website business plan,
website creation,
domain name,
hosting,
copywriting,
website commercialization |
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