5 Easy Steps to Starting Your Own E-Commerce Business

As we continue to journey through the information age with technology traveling at lightening speed, many businesses are scrambling to keep up to date with the latest technological trends. At this point in our technological evolution having a business without a website is almost like having a business without a phone number. To remain on top of your game, you need to be keeping up with the Jones.' And now more than ever, online businesses are springing up in every industry because of the low overhead expenses and convenience of running and maintaining an e-commerce company. In fact, many companies that have done most of their business offline previously are trying to direct more business to their websites to cut costs, offering special promotions for ordering their products and services online. Here the managers of Logobee.com outline five easy steps to help you get your e-commerce business off the ground. Step 1: Do Your Research Before going full speed ahead with your brilliant business brainchild, proper planning is required. While being an entrepreneur involves taking risks, you can significantly improve your chances of success with the right preparation and development. First, you need to research your target market, product and services, competitors, the demographic of your potential customers, popular key words associated with your business and the costs involved. After compiling all this information, you need to honestly ask yourself, "Will it be worth it?" If the answer is yes, you can be confident in going forward. Step 2: It's All In the Name You have your business idea, you've conducted your market research, preparation is complete, and now you are beginning to get butterflies in your stomach from all the excitement that comes with starting your own business. So what's next? The Name. You should start considering names for your company in the beginning stages of your business' development. Use a serious name for a serious company and a fun name for a creative company or a company that is geared towards children. But keep in mind that the name of your business must earn the attention, interest, and trust of your potential customers. While selecting your company's name, bear in mind the qualities you would like your company to portray. If you want to represent a high tech, corporate, and cutting-edge company, obviously you don't want the company name to be something like 'Sloopy' or 'Scroochy'. Important Points To Consider In Name Selection: Shorter is better. It is easier to remember names like Nike as opposed to a name like 'Kransferst Bayer Colombo Association of Michigan'. Make sure the name is easily pronounced. It's very hard to pronounce 'Shmakhtnik', 'Kchichkus' or 'Xsassassas'. It may be helpful to have the name associated with your company's philosophy. For example, a strong solid company should use a strong, bold name such as 'Bamm', 'CastleDom', 'Gong'. A high-tech company could use a more creative name such as 'Ampex', 'Freebee', 'Ciriu'. Design companies can use even more creative names such as 'Venturius', 'BlueFrog', 'BlackInc'. Try to relate the name to the field of business. For example, 'Bacon House' is a good name for a food supplier, BluePin' is a good name for an office supplier, and 'GoldenBrick' might be a good name for a construction company. Create a recognizable image that is easy to visualize. Some example could be: 'Penguin Solution', 'Flying Frog', 'Walking House', or 'Yellow Pot'. Do not forget your business's target market. Home insurance companies target a more mature market. It would be absurd to use a name like 'HipHop BangBang Solutions'. A good way to test out your company name is to tell it to your friends and ask them if they remember it in a week. Step 3: Designing Your Website Marketing should start immediately after the company is created and a name has been chosen and officially registered. You want people to remember your company in a positive way. You need to make an outstanding first impression. So, the first thing you have to work on is your name and your company image. In the e-commerce world your website is the name and face of the company. The website is the most important marketing tool for an e-commerce business. The website needs to look legitimate and provoke a sense of trust. It needs to be appealing, simple to use, eye-catching, competitive and unique. Therefore, it is worth it to spend a good amount of effort and money on your website design. If you are not savvy with website design and development, then invest in a talented website design company or independent designer. Step 4: Marketing Your Website A. Search Engine Optimization Search engines use algorithms (mathematical formulas) to rank website listings in response to a particular keyword query. In order to protect themselves from webmasters and search engine optimizers manipulating the search engine results to their advantage, search engines do not reveal their ranking criteria. However, there are many factors that are speculated to be important influences in determining the position of a website on search engine result pages. Here are a few tips to building a better website: Build a content-rich website: Search engine spiders and bots like websites filled with informative and relevant text and content. Use incoming links. Build up incoming links from relevant or complimentary sites. The more relevant and authoritative the incoming sites, the better your site will be in the eyes of the spiders and bots. Use keywords. Try to place as many keywords in the content of your home page as possible without losing the sense and aesthetics of the page. Meta Tags. Meta tags are html text containing information about the website that is not seen by human viewers. Meta tags include title, description, and keyword tags. Considering that a title tag is the text that appears, representing your site, on a search engine result page, it is very important to choose a title tag that emphasizes keywords on that page. Header tags: Header tags (H1, H2, H3, H4, H5) are used to designate headers and titles. H1 tags should be used to represent the first and most important header, H2 as the second and so on. Search engines give importance to text that differs from the text on the rest of the page. Bold, italics, underlines, and various font sizes are useful as well. Make the site simple, easy to surf and navigate, and eye-catching. Keep your website updated on a regular basis with fresh content, new pages and information. B. Free Advertising Search Engines As a business owner, your first priority should be to get your website listed in the major search engines such as Google, Yahoo, MSN and Alta Vista. This can be done simply by submitting your website to various search engines. Directories You can also submit your site to web directories, which are databases of categorized listings of websites. Focus on directories that are popular and specialize on your industry. Link Building Considering that the World Wide Web is a huge network of interdependent links and connections, link building is an important factor in optimizing your website for search engines. Effective link building consists of exchanging links with authoritative and information websites that relate to and/or compliment your e-commerce business. Specifically Google, but other search engines included, believe that when web page A links to web page B, web page A is casting a vote for web page B. The more votes web page B has, the more important that page is perceived to be by search engines. The value of the web page linking to the web page B also determines how important that vote is. Google determines the importance of a web page by giving it a Page Rank (PR). Page Rank is another factor that plays a significant role in determining the position of a website on the search engine result page. To view the Page Rank of websites, you can download the Google toolbar at