Each successful company has its own experience and recipe for success. All of them are unique and work to achieve a good result. Business can be compared to life, which is a very complex system in which hundreds of factors affect success. Therefore, neither professional managers nor consultants can guarantee you the effectiveness of any ideas and development paths.
All modern business sciences such as marketing, HR, management and others have a large percentage of uncertainty, and their teaching is designed to minimize this uncertainty. They do remove all uncertainty; mainly they will reduce it. Having studied the prominent ideas of these sciences, we can conclude that when starting a business, you must understand the main mechanics of its work: the development of a hypothesis, its verification in reality by small efforts, analysis and conclusions and then the decision to apply positive experiences toward the scaling of the company. Therefore, in this day and age, any developing online business is a factory for developing and testing hypotheses.
Why is an online business the most popular type nowadays?
Work while sitting on the seashore instead of in a stuffy office. It offers a convenient schedule. There is good news and bad. Good: it really is possible. Bad: huge profits from the start are hardly possible.
If you analyze the development strategy of successful online companies and current trends, you can identify several key elements that will help make a business more successful in the next 3-5 years. The more items on the list that are implemented, the higher your chances of development.
The principles of online business can bring about a stable income. Integrate with the proper approach, and you may just be a future success story people talk about.
Decide on the direction of a business
First, before proceeding to the study of main ideas and principles, you should have a clear vision of the main direction of the company’s development. Your detailed position will help you and your company to envision the goal and put forth relevant daily tasks, which will lead to the success of your company. If you miss this step, then all the other recommendations will be useless. It is by defining the vector of work that any business, including online, begins.
Content is the most important part of the website
Your business will take place on a website. Therefore, you should pay diligent attention to it. The effectiveness of a site is almost completely dependent on its content, because a visitor goes to a web resource searching for useful information.
“Quality, interesting and unique content on a site is already half the success for an Internet site,” says John Breese, the founder of Happysleepyhead.com.
Any information the site offers to the user should be useful. Practice shows that advertorial articles do not instill great confidence among readers. Reliable and up-to-date content of expert nature which discusses all the pros, cons and features of goods, services or companies, on the contrary, makes people stay on the site. This leads to them potentially pressing the ‘buy’ button. The level of sales is influenced by factors such as ease of perception and clarity of content, the use of visual elements (illustrations, video materials), the quality of the internal structure of links and the size of the texts. Excellent content sells better.
Design and usability
The site should be logically organized, convenient and attractive, and it is important to understand that in 90% of cases a visitor (perhaps your future client) visiting your site for the first time should be interested in your product. Therefore, you must focus intently on this task. Website design is the first thing that visitors will see when they come to your site. According to statistics, you have no more than 10 seconds to get the most interest from them and keep their attention, so develop a decent website design. The most important part of your site is the section that is visible on the monitor without using the scrollbar. This does not mean that people will not use the scrollbar; they will if they are interested. However, they should be highly intrigued by the part of the page that is initially visible on the monitor.
Understand the speed and quality of innovation and trends
The world moves very quickly. We can observe changes even when they were not expected. And this is only the beginning; with each year the acceleration will increase. Therefore, the forecasts, based on the experiences of the past and their dynamics, are no longer relevant and do not bring about the desired results. You should understand that in business there is a principle called the snowball effect, where the effect of systemically introduced changes does not happen immediately or quickly, but always on an increasing basis. You need to be willing to spend time waiting for visible results and remain rigid with the intention to let the dynamics turn around and give a tangible result. Learn and be interested in innovations as well as trends from other industries and countries. Attend conferences, seminars, trend reports and other sources. You should always be at the center of informative events.
Customer insights
Cultivate a deep understanding of the needs of customers, the proximity to them, an honest desire to make their lives better and give them some value. A company’s products should have this principle at its core. Success will only come from the multi-channel, two-way emotional dialogue with customers. And, do not forget about an upscale service.
Experiments
Invest in a culture of disciplined experimentation. 70% of the budget should be invested in projects with a known payback, 20% in projects that are not readily available at the expected time, and 10% should be allocated without expectations for entirely new experiments.
Your online business is unlikely to become successful in a few hours. You can start with the use and adaptation of existing templates and gradually become a professional online business owner.
