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Starting an online business is
not a simple thing, though there is the 3U rule bearing
the following three simple points, which should be obeyed
to make your online business successful: Unique Offer,
Unique Service, and Unique Design. As you can see, Design
is not the first, as Offer and Service go before it.
Make a Unique Offer
After researching your
competitors, you may feel rather confused, as there are so
many of them and each one states that he is the best in
the field. Don’t despair. The information you gather is
necessary only to help you build your offer. You should
not use it to build a case against yourself! Simply, you
need all the information you can get. A competitor’s
website is not the only source of information. Try to find
out what his customers think about him. Do not trust
testimonials; try some posts on forums, where you will get
real testimonials! Find your competitor’s weaknesses and
try your best to avoid them. His weaknesses should become
your strong points. Your offer, however, is not the only
thing to make your customers return. Your service should
be unique as well.
Provide a Unique Service
The key point of Unique
Service is constant feedback. Find out who your clients
are and what they like or dislike about your service. This
is the information for improving your service.
Do a little research on how
your competitors work. Competitor monitoring is the best
way to be up on what’s new on the market. You
shouldn’t miss anything about them: who their customers
are and why they stay with your competitor, details about
their affiliate programs, who their partners are, where
they get traffic, etc. – any kind of information that
may be useful.
However, competitors are
not the only source of ideas for improving your services.
Try to study how hosting companies work. They have been in
the business from the very beginning, so their experience
will be of great use to any newbie to online business.
Create a Unique Design
One of the problems which
rise before a newbie is the creation of a front office or
website, which is almost the same thing as a front office
on the Web. This is not a big problem.
Online business is not
limited to website design. While having a unique website
design is good, it will not make your brand unique. The
real question is how can you make your brand unique?
There are several ways to
solve this problem. But first you must understand that as
the process of site development is rather complicated, it
usually requires a team consisting of a project manager,
designer, coder, and programmer. And you need only go to
any one of them to begin your project. The only thing that
may hamper you is the budget, as it usually costs
$1000-$3000 to develop a really good website.
Very often money becomes a
real problem for newbies to online business, as their
budgets are not equal to the cost of website development.
They should pay for not only hosting but also domain
registration, an advertising campaign, etc. But this not a
dead-end situation; there’s a solution that a newbie can
afford – website templates. A ready-made design is the
only thing you need. Simply convert it into your website
by filling in the content. Though you may assume that
using a website template will dilute your brand to
nothing, as you won’t be the only one with this
template, it is not the case. The number of downloads,
which is usually displayed on a website templates
provider’s site, is not the real number of the sites
which have been built on the template.
How can it be so? Do
website templates providers knowingly lower the number of
downloads to stimulate purchases? The answer is no, as
reliable providers regularly update databases with new
templates. The problem is, the moment you put your site
online is the moment it can be ripped off by anybody!
Besides, the largest templates providers, such as Template
Monster, Cool Home Pages, OSWD and others, constantly
suffer from piracy.
Therefore, unique design is
virtually impossible because anything can be copied or
stolen and used with slight alterations. Even custom web
design is not safe from intellectual parasitism and
predation.
Which is preferable? Should
you choose a Web Design Company or use ready-made
templates? It’s up to you to decide, though using
templates is not as frightful as it is considered to be.
It greatly saves your money. Remember that Unique Design
is not the synonym for Unique Brand.
To stand out from your
competitors, you should obey the 3U rule, which will
deliver you the best and cheapest advertising – word of
mouth advertising.
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