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Part 7: 7 Steps to Successful Website Development
STEP 7: Maintain Your Website and Grow Your Web Business
1. Continue to find ways to grow your web business.
The Web is a goldmine of opportunities – if you know how to look for it. The key is to explore ways to diversify revenue streams, and the continuously changing Internet always provides new ways to earn money. It is important to diversify your revenue sources and make sure that you are not putting all your eggs in one basket.
Here are ways you can grow your web business:
- Be open to new revenue opportunities.
- Always be on the lookout for strategic partners.
- Think of new content that will resonate with you audiences.
- Find ways to repurpose your content in ways that will feel fresh and new — e.g. bundle articles into ebooks; create infographics from articles.
2. Always find ways to improve the performance of your web business.
You have your website analytics installed, but are you actively linking your analytics with your business goals? What percent of your visitors are actually converting into buyers? Do you really know what your target audience wants? What is the best way to make the visitors respond and do what you want them to do?
Always, always test. What you think may work and what you think your audiences want, may not necessarily be what they really want. From things such as the color of your buttons, the specific call to action in your email newsletters, to the type of layout your audiences prefer — these are things that you can test to see the best option for your web business. You may think that orange is the best button, but a test can show you that the red works better and can lift up your sales by a certain percentage.
3. Be sure to maintain the optimal performance of your website.
Keep track of how your website performs and what are the ways you can do to improve it. Here are some things you can check:
- Do you have a caching software used to speed up the loading of your website
- How do you optimize your website databases, if any
- Are all the software used in your server updated, especially security patches?
- Are all the plugins and applications installed in your website updated?
- Does your website have the technical requirements of search engines, such as sitemaps?
4. How do you intend to continue your education on web development?
The Web as a business medium is young and fast changing: what works today may not necessarily hold true tomorrow. Your task is to keep updated with developments on the Internet, new applications that can improve your website, and other opportunities that may arise.
There are many ways to gain more knowledge of the workings of the Web. Some of them include:
- Do networking online or offline with like minded groups and individuals;
- Actively participate in social media groups forums/discussion boards, mailing lists and online gathering of other webmasters;
- Do offline networking with other webmasters or industry members; and
- Read books, white papers, magazines and other publications on the topic.
7 Steps to Successful Website Development
- Set Your Website Goals
- Develop Your Web Site Strategy
- How to Set Up Your Website
- Operational Requirements of Setting Up a Website
- How to Get Your Website Ready for Launch
- Promote Your Web Site and Measure Its Results
- Maintain Your Website and Grow Your Web Business
Recommended Books on Successful Website Development:
- Best Website: Simple Steps to Successful Websites
- Web Project Management: Delivering Successful Commercial Web Sites
- The Complete E-Commerce Book: Design, Build & Maintain a Successful Web-based Business
- Convert!: Designing Web Sites to Increase Traffic and Conversion
- Web Style Guide: Basic Design Principles for Creating Web Sites
- Like
- Digg
- Del
- Tumblr
- VKontakte
- Buffer
- Love This
- Odnoklassniki
- Meneame
- Blogger
- Amazon
- Yahoo Mail
- Gmail
- AOL
- Newsvine
- HackerNews
- Evernote
- MySpace
- Mail.ru
- Viadeo
- Line
- Comments
- Yummly
- SMS
- Viber
- Telegram
- Subscribe
- Skype
- Facebook Messenger
- Kakao
- LiveJournal
- Yammer
- Edgar
- Fintel
- Mix
- Instapaper
- Copy Link