One of the big advantages of starting a business online is how relatively easy it can be to get it set up, as well as how little capital it can take, compared to a brick-and-mortar setup. However, that doesn’t mean that you don’t need anything at all. Here are the foundations that your business is going to be built on.
The Business, Itself
If you plan on running a business for profit, you can’t simply start selling goods and services out of the blue. You need to make sure that you register your business, with an address, a contact number, an idea of what kind of business formation you want, and some other details. You can easily research the steps for starting your business online but, if you want to skip doing any of the legwork, there are also company formation services that can take care of everything for you.
A Professional Looking Website
You don’t necessarily need to pay some professional code monkeys to get your website built for you. There are plenty of good website builders that you can get to grips with, yourself, and a decent no-code website builder can help you put it all together with no need to learn HTML. All you need to do is build and link the pages you want, then use drag and drop elements to construct the pages themselves.
A Good Host for Your Website
Building the website isn’t enough, you need to make sure that it has a place to host it. The web host is, as the name suggests, the company that manages the servers that the website is actually hosted on. Making sure that you choose a good web host is crucial to keeping your website operational, online, and accessible, with limits on things like page load speed and how much data you can host on your site being determined by your choice of host.
Some Great Graphic Design
You might be able to make a swell-looking website with the tools mentioned above. However, to really give your brand a unique look, that you’re not going to see on any site using the same site builder, you should look at hiring freelancers for graphic design. You can start relatively low with your bids online, but it’s worth investing to make sure you get something that is quality and unique.
The Right Marketing Tools
This is more of a range of tools, or even an entire discipline, than a single component. However, if you don’t have a physical storefront, you can very easily get no traffic unless you put your brand out there. You should get started with social media, making sure you have a presence that is active and open to users, as well as on-site search engine optimization and, to get the traffic really flowing, look at some PPC advertising for your site.
Of course, you may need to invest some extra time and money into components that aren’t listed here, depending on what the business you’re providing actually is. However, at a minimum, you should consider these.
