Your Questions About Business Online Services

Jere answers:

You can try Wal-Mart Photo Center.

Jere answers:

Advertise on Varolo.com

They have tons of viewers! Here’s a promo code for 250 free video advertisements!

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If you don’t have a video to advertise they will help you make one!

Jere answers:

You can’t have a free webside for an online dating service business.

First of all, like any business, you need to make your 5-year business plan. Look for the SBA (Small Business Administration) in the federal part of your white pages in your phone book, call them and take a short few hour course to learn how to start a business. Your 5-year business plan would probably take you 3 months to prepare it.

I would suggest you first go thru the process of someone else’s dating service before you do it yourself so you can see how it’s run. Then you’d need to figure out from your 5-year business plan how much money you’d need and then get a business loan. From that you can hire someone to put together your extensive website. Then you will have to start advertising (and need money for that as well). You’d have to remember that you can’t spend the money that people give you for 3-6 months because there might be chargebacks, bad credit cards, people doing fraud, etc. If you spend that money you will go under quickly. But basically you’d be in business not only to make money but to make matches. And you will have to have standards, policies, an attorney who will write those for you, and an accountant.

Jere answers:

Like any other online business, these are the general steps that you need to take :

1. Plan your website
Since you offer a service for locating people, fill you website with content about topics related to this.For example,
– why people need to locate relatives, long lost friends (for medical reasons etc)
– interesting cases in the news
– personal testimonials

2. Think about your webhosting options.

You basically have 2 options :
– Free webhosting / blog. These are free but come with limitations. Just Google “Free Web Host” or “Free blogs” to find one that suits your needs.
– Paid webhosting. If you’re serious about this business, then paid hosting should be your choice. When you consider the possible long term returns of your business, paid web is the way to go.

3. Find a domain name

You can find a unique domain name here : http://www.register.com
Your domain name should preferable contain keywords that are used to look for people for example : www.findpeople.com or www.locatefriends.com. Whether you’ve decided on free or paid webhosting, your domain name will play a crucial part in how people find your site.

4. Find a payment processor

Decide how you want to receive payment. There are a number of ways to receive online payments :

– Paypal (http://www.paypal.com)
– Credit cards (http://www.2checkout.com)
– Other online payment systems (eg stormpay, worldpay)

Most will charge you and annual fee for the service. They will teach you how to incorporate the payment links into your website.

5. Set up your website

If you have some website design skills, then you could do this yourself. If not, you can ask a friend or pay someone to do it. It’s always better to keep things simple. Avoid flashy widgets and plugins. They only complicate your website and make it difficult to maintain.

6. Refine your content

The structure of your website is important. You want your content to channel or focus people’s attention on locating someone by using your service. This would most likely be an enquiry form or contact form.

7. Submit your website to search engines.

When you’re site is ready, submit them to Google, Yahoo!, Ask, MSN and any other major search engine you can find. It’s best to avoid using third party submission services for this because this is a crucial step in your online business set up. Do this yourself and work through the submission process carefully.

8. Start to build traffic

You won’t immediately rank high in the search results. So what you want to do it start to build traffic. There are limitless ways to build traffic to your site :

– advertise online (eg. Google Adwords, Linkworth, Adbrite etc)
– advertise offline (eg. Newspapers, magazines, business cards, flyers, leaflets, posters etc)
– Social networking sites (eg Friendster, myspace, etc)
– article marketing. Write useful articles about locating people and submit to major article marketing sites :

http://www.ezinearticles.com
http://www.goarticles.com

– Participate in online forums that discuss topics related to your business. Leave comments and your URL. Remember to comment only if you have something positive or constructive to contribute to the discussiion.

Rinse and repeat steps 6 and 8.

Some final words :

– Building and online business is never really a plug and play thing like most people want you to believe. It’s going to take time, a lot of learning, persistence and hard work.

– Learn SEO and online marketing techniques. Sad to say that most online businesses are run on a one-man-operation concept. Unless you can pay someone to do Search Engine Optimization and marketing for you, they job lies with you.

– DON’T use black hat techniques. Black hat techniques include keyword stuffing, invisible keywords, email spamming etc. You’ve worked hard to build your online business. Don’t kill it overnight with these techniques.

Hope that helps.

Andrew

Jere answers:

I believe that it is fundamental that businesses sell online or provide services online. If you are not online, others similar to your business will be online, generating sales or providing services. You would be missing out on a potentially very large market.
If say you were a local Business looking to generate leads. You have no online presence. You use the traditional offline techniques. You will generate leads, but not as many as you could do being online. However, many people search the Web for their enquiries these days and the list is increasing every second. Around the corner a similar Business has a good local ranking online. They will receive the enquiries from a Web Site that may have been set up a year ago with little maintenance required, generating leads or sales.
The advantage is more sales, more profit, providing you create quality content to your customers.