Categories
Web Budget

Build a Beautiful Website on a Budget

Build A Website On A Budget

Of course, that doesn’t mean you should build a shoddy website
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Building a website may be the most confusing aspect of starting an online business, so we’re going to make it as easy for you as possible. Remember that the most important thing is sales. It doesn’t matter how much traffic you can generate if that traffic generates no sales.

It may be tempting to build a website with a beautiful, complicated, unique design for your store. You may want to spend money on fancy widgets, a custom template, and all the bells and whistles. However, the best thing to do is keep it as simple as possible. All those bells and whistles may make you feel fancier on the website’s back end, but do most of them make any difference at all to a potential customer? The answer is no.

It’s best to build a website by creating a simple website from a template. The most popular websites to do this are Shopify, Wix, and SquareSpace. They will provide you with an easy-to-customize template and free tools to help get you started. By going through these websites, they help you set up your domain and hosting as part of the deal, freeing you up to deal with the fun stuff: making sales.

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When you build a website It’s important to not put in too much time or money in the beginning because you don’t know how your business is going to do in those first couple years. Ideally, it will be a smashing success, but that isn’t guaranteed. It is not good business sense to spend hundreds or thousands of dollars making a fancy website for a business that may not succeed and isn’t yet turning a profit.

Of course, that doesn’t mean you should build a shoddy website. It is perfectly possible to build a polished and professional website on the cheap, so that’s what you should do, at least in the beginning. When your business has some years under its belt and is turning a tidy profit, it has earned an extra investment into its website. Until then, it just has to be functional, not fancy.

Hosting & Cloud

As we discussed, to build a website you need a host and domain. The easiest thing to do is pick a service you can build your business on, such as Shopify, Wix, or WordPress. With these, you can purchase hosting and a domain name all in one place. For the sake of this article, let’s say you choose Shopify, but these tips apply to all of them.

Business Model/Strategy

Since this is our first business and we want to keep it simple for now, let’s go with a simple template and a dropshipping-based store on Shopify. You’ll need an extension like Oberlo to import products into your store. You can set prices and create descriptions for your items. Make sure each item fits a certain theme. You don’t want your website’s products to be unrelated to one another, or you’re an online Wal-Mart.

Theme

We will create a website that matches what you want to sell. Pick a basic free theme to customize. You can customize fonts, categories, images, and colors, all for free. Even with a basic template, you can create a stunning website. You can create pages for certain collections, upload a logo, and more.

If your build a website for E-Commerce you’ll also need to set up payment settings. Shopify makes it easy by connecting you to payment providers and PayPal to receive payments. PayPal is the easiest payment gateway due to being able to use it with all cards and even checking accounts. You’ll also need to set up taxes, and know each transaction will have a small fee.

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Product Descriptions & Prices

Once you build a website and set up your online store, you can set it so that all your products are imported into your shop with a certain percentage of markup, or you can price each thing individually. You don’t want to price so high that no one will want to pay it, but you also need to make sure you’re making a profit.

Give your products catchy titles and descriptions that include your target keywords. If you copy paste a description, search engines will know and you won’t know up in searches. You can even pay a freelancer to write descriptions for you. Your items must also contain pictures of what you’re selling. In the beginning it’s fine to use the stock images, but it would be a good idea eventually to order the product yourself and take a professional and unique image, or hire someone to do it for you. Unique images will award you higher search results.

When you import your items, you can choose shipping methods. To keep costs low, always use ePacket shipping if available, because it’s the cheapest. Disclose on your product pages how long shipping time will be.

Some Web Tools

Though it’s tempting to buy all the fancy extensions and apps that Shopify has, stick to the basics. Anything you can pay for, there’s likely a free version available. Once you have build a website and start to make money, you can invest that back into your company and start to get professional images and apps. Until then, stick to the basics. Stock images and basic tools can be amazing if you’re creative enough.

Here are some great apps to have on your website:

1. Mailing list
2. Social sharing buttons
3. Dropshipping app like Oberlo
4. Marketing apps like Kit
5. Product reviews
6. Announcement bar, such as one advertising free shipping or a sale

Categories
Online Success

What it Takes to Succeed as an Online Business

Online success or failure are a few clicks away

Do What You Know Best - Outsource The Rest!
XPRiWEB™

We are living in the world of anyone can start a business with a few easy clicks. Unfortunately, before they can call it online success many of those businesses fail early. Starting a business and successfully running it are two very different animals.

From having to build a website, to running social media profiles, to order listing and fulfillment, there are many facets of running a business online. Here are some easy steps and tip to launch a successful online business.

Invest in fast Internet

It may go without saying, but you can’t even think about online success and have an Internet-based business if you have bad Internet. Your connection must be fast and reliable, so you can respond to any business immediately.

A slow connection could mean missing out on customer questions, interaction, and even orders. Another question is if you are selling one particular big-ticket item, or a large amount of items.

One way to achieve online success is by keeping all your items to a single theme or niche. You could build a shop selling one particular vanity, or a shop selling vanities and popular vanity accessories, but always make sure it fits a theme.

What are you selling?

It may seem like a no-brainer, but on of the first things about building a business is what that business is selling. In online commerce, most niches are thoroughly filled by awesome companies.

The important thing to do is discover what you can sell that doesn’t have too much competition.

If there is a lot of competition, you need to hone in on what stands out about your product and market the heck out of it.

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Sourcing products

If you’re good at crafting and can create furniture with your bare hands, that’s great. However, many people don’t have those kinds of skills.

This is where product sourcing comes in. Online success depends also on they type and level of collaboration, be prepared to work with many suppliers to acquire exactly which items you’re looking to stock in your shop. You’ll also need warehouse space (if you sell larger items).

An easier option for the new business to gain a quick online success is dropshipping. This is a very popular business model. Many have achieved online success using this selling method.

It eliminates the need to keep physical inventory. Think of yourself as a middleman between the consumer and the supplier. You create the website, market the product, and sell to customers.

That order gets sent off to a supplier who will then ship the order to your customer on your behalf, and you get the lion’s share of the profits.

This is a less risky option because you don’t risk having physical stock you can’t sell off. You can switch up the items you sell without needing to worry about inventory.

You can find many apps that will automate the dropshipping process for you, making your path to online success much easier allowing you to focus on marketing and design.

If in the future you choose to create your own products to sell, you can easily incorporate those into your store as well.

The Technical Side

What is Hosting?

Unless you own your own server, which is very expensive to purchase and maintain, you will need to have your website hosted on another server. Remember, online success is what you are left with after your business expenses not how much sales you’ve generated.

You pay to have your website and all its contents (layouts, pages, images, etc.) hosted on a server so that others can see it. Every website you’ve ever gone to is hosted on a server.

When you build a website using a service like Wix or Shopify, you can purchase plans which include a domain name and hosting.

It’s a good idea to keep these services all in one place to streamline business matters and make it all easier to remember.

What is a Domain Name?

Put simply, a domain name is what you type into the address bar to go to a website.

Think of the domain name as an address. On the Internet, every computer has its own IP address, which is a series of numbers separated by dots.

You can go to a website by typing its IP address, but those are hard to remember.

Remembering a string of numbers is hard, online success requires an easy way for people to find your business online, so domains were invented to make it easier to remember where a website is on the Internet by using words instead of numbers.

What is the Cloud?

To many people, the meaning of the term “the cloud” is an unclear enigma. The cloud is basically the Internet.

It is every software and service that runs on the Internet, and not locally on your computer. If you have iTunes installed on your computer, that is on your computer, not the cloud.

If you use Google Docs, those are in the cloud, not on your computer. If you store photos or documents in Dropbox, they are in the cloud. If you use Internet Explorer, it is installed locally on your computer. It’s not in the cloud.

Using the cloud has a lot of benefits. You can save space on your machine by storing documents, pictures, and almost any file in the cloud. As discussed your online success depends on good business partnerships.

There are even cloud-based computing services that allow you to mimic running on a powerful machine even if your computer isn’t high-end. And that website you built? That’s in the cloud, too.