5 Stages of Growth for Internet Businesses
Filed under: Websites
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Loading ...There are 5 different stages of business growth that most people and business go through as they are growing their internet business. It is possible to go backwards in these stages because you could have explored one part of it and thought that it just wasn’t quite right, yet. If that happens, you can just go back a stage and explore again to create different solutions until you find something that works out in the marketplace.
In an ideal world you would progress from Stage 1 to Stage 5, but sometimes you just have to re-evaluate and go back one step.
Which stage is your internet business right now?
Stage One: Claiming Your Space
The first stage that most people start out in when they come onto the internet is what I call “Claiming Your Space”. You’ve got an idea for a business, but you haven’t done your research yet or you may just want to test it out before spending any money on developing the business further.
All you really need at this stage is a basic two page website one to talk about what it is the business does or sells, and one page with information about you as a person and a way to contact you. This small website is what people would call a brochure page or a business card page.
A typical example of that may be someone who doesn’t know anything about internet marketing yet, but they really want to make sure they’ve got their name so no one else can use that same name online. For example, “JanetBeckers.com”. If I buy this domain name, no one else can use it.
Stage Two: Become a Thought Leader
The second stage I call “Become a Thought Leader”. This may seem like a pretty grand statement to you but if you’re going to be playing the game you don’t want to be playing small. Start thinking big right away. What is becoming a “Thought Leader” when you don’t have any products for sale yet?
At this stage of business, you may not really be sure exactly what you need to be selling because you haven’t really got to know your market very well yet. You don’t want to be too broad in your business. What you need to start thinking about is, what makes you unique? What do I want to be known for? This is where a blog is a really important thing to have at this stage.
By simply writing articles on different things; your opinions on your particular niche topic or things that you’re learning on your journey exploring that topic, you’ll get to know yourself better. You’ll see what sorts of things makes you unique in the industry and what you offer that other people don’t.
Stage Three: Solution Provider
By now, you’ve started to think about what you’re doing; you’ve started to interact with people and you’re getting some ideas about what would be a good solution that people might need.
Often people will test the waters and see whether they have a viable business idea by creating a single website where you can sell that ebook or whatever that solution is that you’re going to be creating.
This is the stage of business when you begin creating your very first product.
Stage Four: Branded Thought Leader & Solution Provider
At this stage of business growth you want to have one place where people can click on your website to find out more about you. You want people to be able to come to that website; they can find out about you. They can find out about what you think. It’s where you would be operating the blog and posting articles about your thoughts and opinions. People are going to be reading all about it and start wondering what kind of solutions you offer. They’ll see a link to your website where you offer all of your multiple solutions, and that they can buy it right from your website. Then they’ll want to become an affiliate to refer their friends to you, so they can get rewarded for doing that, as well.
Stage 4 is branding yourself as the thought leader and provider of solutions in your business niche. You provide multiple solutions to problems people have, and you have one place where people can find you online to see what you think and what your solutions are.
Stage Five: Branded World Domination
I call Stage 5 “Branded World Domination”, in a kind of tongue-in-cheek way! This is where you will have a website that is the first place that people come to. Then you’re going to have multiple websites linked to that original site, because you’ve got lots of different solutions that you’re providing to people.
At this stage of your business, you will have multiple websites; multiple domain names and multiple gifts that you are giving to people as an enticement to join your mailing lists.
You need to be careful at this level, that you don’t start growing your business using many different systems. You don’t want to have multiple systems handling the administration for your websites, you don’t want to deal with multiple affiliate programs or multiple methods of accepting and processing payments from your clients. You really want things to be streamlined so that it’s all in one place, and that the people who actually administer your business can do it all through one place.
This stage is called “Branded World Domination” because you’re still reinforcing your brand; your personal brand or your business brand. You may have multiple business sites but they all work together and customers know they’re buying from you. The brand is the same, and you’re operating under the same niche.
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The Problems With Hiring a Web Designer
Filed under: Websites
(No Ratings Yet) Loading ...Unless you are a web developer by trade, creating and maintaining the website for your business can be extremely challenging. Where do you start? What do you need the website to do? You end up spending far too long trying to figure it all out! It usually makes more sense to hire someone who specializes in web design so you can spend your time on business activities that will generate income. But there are a number of problems with hiring a web designer to take care of it for you.
1) You don’t know how to make changes to the site.
If you pay someone else to create the website for you, often you’re not able to make changes to the site yourself and it’s inevitable that as your business grows you will need to update and improve the website. This creates a number of problems as your business grows because you might lose touch with the original developer; and then you’re stuck with a website you can’t use effectively for your business.
Before I started Wonderful Web Women, I had an internet art gallery. When I started the internet art gallery, which I ran for 5 years, I had no idea about the internet.
I knew how to check my email – and that was it. I’d heard of websites but I didn’t really know very much about them. I had to start where I know many people with internet businesses start out – wondering “what do I need on my website?” and finding a good web developer to work with, someone who can be trusted and do the work as cheaply as possible.
2) The website isn’t designed to grow with your business.
I found I ended up working with quite a few different web developers because my business grew but the website I had couldn’t grow with it. I had to keep re-inventing it because it didn’t have the ability to just gradually grow with my business. I seemed to get to certain points in the business and to advance to the next level I’d have to start all over again with a new website.
Every time I would do that I would hand over $10,000 or $15,000 dollars. It didn’t take long for the money and the tears to add up.
One of the biggest frustrations that people have with their internet business is that you may have a website and it may look fantastic, but when it actually comes down to you being able to make any changes to it - your hands are tied. If you hire a web designer, chances are your website will look fantastic, be very artistic, but it’s designed with web programming code that you don’t understand how to use.
If you want to make any changes to this beautiful website, you have to go back to your web master. It could be six months after the website was designed originally, or a year or even a couple years since the website was built that you find your business is growing and you need a new website. When you go back to find the person who made, maybe they’re no longer doing web design. Or maybe you can’t even find them anymore! Unfortunately, many people realize only at this point that they don’t even have the user name or password or anything to go in and give someone else control of changing their website.
3) Website quotes range drastically and you don’t know how much you should be paying.
Another major frustration internet business owners experience is the wide range of prices charged for website development. It’s not unusual for you to look at getting a website made and as you go out to get quotes from developers, you may get a quote from somebody for a few hundred dollars. Then you may get a quote from someone else with the same project brief and they’re quoting $10,000 or $20,000! This can be really confusing when you start out. Why is there such a wide range of prices quoted for doing what seems like the same thing?
You need an understanding of what your website needs, and what it doesn’t need because often what happens is the higher prices are charging for additional functionality to your website that you don’t really need at your current stage of business growth. The website they create may make your site look more beautiful but they’re not actually going to make you more money in the long run.
On the other hand, sometimes the reason someone is quoting a website so cheaply is because it’s really not going to give you what you need to grow your business. It’s going to be far too limiting.
These are the big frustrations that I’ve personally had with growing my internet business and with hiring a web designer that I know most of you have been experiencing, or may experience as you grow your internet business.
In fact, there are about 5 stages of growth an internet business goes through, and you’ll need different things and different website requirements at each level of growth. It’s a good idea to understand the growth stages and website requirements so that you aren’t paying for things you don’t need on your website in the early stages.
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The Basics of A Business Website
Filed under: Websites
(No Ratings Yet) Loading ...In order to have a business or personal presence on the internet, these are the things that you must have:
1) Domain Name
A domain name is simply the name of the website. It may be your name. If you don’t have your own domain name yet, go and get it. I’ve got JanetBeckers.com.au, for example.
If you don’t already have your own name, get it before someone else does. If it’s already gone then it might have to be something like Janet-Beckers, or janetbeckerslive; therealjanetbeckers. When you have a business name, you’ll want to get that domain as well.
2) Hosting
The domain name is the name of the website. It’s like the address that people might put on a letter but it has to end up at a house or a post office box, right? That’s what your hosting is – the home or the post office box that holds your letters.
When you’re looking for hosting you want to get hosting that’s going to grow with you. You want to find out when you’re talking to your web host if it will be easy to create additional websites under the same hosting account without spending a fortune hosting each individual site.
If you go to Wonderful Web Hosting you will be able to see what we offer there and you get something like 50 websites in the one package. The ability to host multiple sites under one package means you don’t have to keep spending money on hosting every time you get an idea for a new website.
3) Website
This is where it can get expensive.
What we use now for every website we create for other people and every website we create for ourselves is a program called Wordpress. Wordpress is free. As with most hosting accounts you just go into the hosting area and it will have what’s called CPanel; which is just the administration area of your hosting. Within the Cpanel section, they’ll have an area called Fantastico. When you go in there there’s lots of free software for you to choose from and there will always be Wordpress. You can put that on your website hosting.
Like everything else, Wordpress has a basic use and then you can do other things to make it even better. There are so many wonderful things you can add onto Wordpress to make it a really sophisticated site. Another nice thing about Wordpress is that search engines absolutely love it. I can put something on my Wordpress site and it will show up on Google in just a few minutes; it’s really, really powerful.
4) Gift
You need to give something valuable away so that people will join your mailing list. “Join my newsletter” is not going to cut the grade any more. You might give away an eBook; you might give away an interview that you’ve recorded. Whatever you decide to give away to encourage people to join your mailing list, you need to make it downloadable from your website so it must be a digital product.
When you’re just starting out that’s often the thing that really slows people down – not knowing what to give away. We’ve actually created something that you can use that is something really relevant to every niche you can think of. If you go to http://www.wonderfullawofattraction.com,we actually have a book that has been written by Gold Members of Wonderful Web Woman.
The book is full of articles about how you can take action for attracting success into your life using the Law of Attraction. You have the rights to give that away on your website. You may decide to always have that or you may start with that and once you develop your own then you can replace it, but it’s something you can give away to get started building your mailing list.
5) Mailing List
Once you have something to give away, you need a way to collect people’s email addresses. There are four programs we recommend:
- Aweber -Â That is what we use to run our newsletters for Wonderful Web Women and I absolutely love Aweber.
- 1ShoppingCart – This program is very powerful.
- AutoWebBusiness – which is just a private label one. It’s owned by a woman called Jenny Amato and she gives extra back-up support. We like that because you kind of get support in two places.
- Chameleon Mail – which lets you collect email addresses offline, as well and is run by a very good friend of mine who is also one of our experts on Wonderful Web Women, Belinda Jackson.
6) Autoresponder
Once you’ve collected email addresses you want to be able to follow up with people because they need to develop a relationship with you. People buy from people they trust and they will continue to interact with people they trust. They can’t trust you until they get to know you – so using an autoresponder makes it possible to build online relationships.
When you send an email to people on your mailing list, you want to provide them with valuable content, for free, so that they start thinking you must really know what you’re talking about. They’ll know you are a Thought Leader in this area, and when they have a problem, they’ll come back to you for a solution. You don’t want to be writing and emailing this content out all the time, so you need what’s called an autoresponder. Once they’ve joined your email list, you want everybody to automatically get the same series of emails that build that relationship.
7) Affiliate program
When you become a “Solution Provider” , you need to process payments for the sales of your product. In addition, you’ll want to make it possible for others to go out and start advertising for you. People who advertise other products are called Affiliates.  If you’re going to go to the trouble of setting up a way for people to send you money for your products, make sure you can also attach an Affiliate program to it.
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