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The online business world can be highly confusing for amateur entrepreneurs. They lack the experience or discretion that is necessary to tread the complicated and technical world of online business. Without sufficient guidance, they are sure to end up making dangerous marketing blunders that can cost them their dreams of being successful. To avoid such a demoralizing scenario, here are five things that every new entrepreneur should avoid doing when starting an online business
Marketing Mistakes to Avoid
Investing in Expensive Web Developers
When you are just starting with a business enterprise, you have limited financial resources. In such a situation, spending lavishly on swanky web developers is absolutely unnecessary. In fact, visitors would appreciate a simple and clean website for your company much more than a flashy and cluttered one.
For this reason, you must design your own website or have a friend do it for you for free. Once your company starts to make substantial profits, you can always upgrade to a more professional look for your web address.
Printing Business Cards and Pamphlets
Many young business owners consider business cards, pamphlets and brochures to be effective marketing tools. The truth, however, is that such printed materials are unsuitable for the highly unstable organizations that a new business house tends to be.
You might consider them only when you have had the privilege of working with a consistent workforce and stable business model for more than six months. Any investment on business paper printing before such a period of time is equivalent to nothing but wasted revenues. You would do much better to spend the same amount of moneyon other important needs of your company.
Buying Small Ad Spaces On Yellow Pages
Lacking a huge marketing budget, many new businesses take resort to yellow pages to gain some exposure. The sheer number of similar profiles of producers and service providers in such ad spaces, however, renders this marketing ploy highly ineffective. You can only expect to fetch few clients per year from such a financial outlay. Thus, most marketing gurus recommend against yellow pages.
Lacking Specialty
The market is flooded with products and services that are disastrously similar to one another. For instance, a simple glance at a supermarket will show you a hundred varieties of cereals. In such a circumstance, the best-selling cereal is one that has a long history of production. If a new cereal brand wants to capture the market, it must offer something different, in terms of flavor or content.
Similarly, if you are a new business owner or entrepreneur, you must focus on marketing a facet of your product or service that is unique or relatively different from the usual staple on offer.
Ignoring Marketing Completely
This is probably the biggest and most harmful, marketing mistake that you can ever make. The returns from marketing can be very slow, and negligible, at first. Yet, deciding to stop advertising, or choosing to disregard alternative marketing strategies, is simply not the answer. Rather, be resolute in your goal to create marketing wonders for your product or service.
There would obviously be some hiccups, even if you follow the above points but at least, you can rest assured that they won’t shake up your funds too much.
3 Tips to Implement
Business is no longer about setting up a shop in your neighborhood or having an office at the nearest modern building that houses all the big shot companies. The modern day business has seen a shift from the tangible world to the intangible (yet surprisingly tangible) world of online dealings and online business. This has given rise to a number of entrepreneurs making an entry into the online business arena and everyone is fighting it out to get the best out of the whole thing when it is hot.
Although there are a number of big and successful online business projects on the internet, the number of failed projects is manifold and quite depressing. As an entrepreneur in the online business arena, you must take into account the following 3 trends in order to ensure that you avoid that long list:
Diversify and Spread
One of the biggest mistakes that most failed entrepreneurs of the online business scenario committed is the fact that they reached a stage of stagnancy where their online business stopped innovation and spreading in more and more arenas of their customers’ life. This is what you will need to incorporate as the first and foremost rule in your online business bible. While it is not possible to start off with a huge project unless you have billions of dollars of financing to back you, you can always start off small and then slowly expand your business prospects with the increase in profits. This will ensure that neither you are not breaking the bank for your businesses’ diversification needs nor are you remaining stagnant and lazy while your competitors beat you to a business prospect.
Backup. Backup. Backup
Was it emphasized enough that you will need to back up every small and seemingly unimportant aspect of your online business on another remote server? In case it wasn’t, here it is, one more time. Backup! Remember that the soft copy rules the world when it comes to the online business scenarios and backing up is the online version of the photocopying technology that you exploited for your offline business or official purposes. You must have a backup of every social media interaction, emails, contracts and any other form of digital media on a remote server that will remain unaffected, in case there is any damage to the primary server. This will also help you get back up and running in no time in case your primary server decides to go kaput suddenly.
Use Agreements
Online business bunks the necessity of papers along with many other physical necessities and this leads many online business owners to play down the importance of using paper agreements for their online deals and other official interactions. This is one of the biggest mistakes you can commit and you must make sure you have physical agreements for every deal for legal purposes as well as reference purposes. It really doesn’t matter if it is something as small as selling the cheap hot holiday trends or collaborating together for offering monthly SEO services or anything else, it is important that you set up an agreement or a merger with another online giant!
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