The first thing you need to decide about Internet Business

I was with a new friend today, sharing about how can he take his brick and mortal business online again. He used to have a website similar to a store/catalog with all the goods he has in his store. He is selling balloons and other party-related goods.

Though we didn't really have anything materialized, I do learned something during our conversation. I think is good that I put it down for future reference.

During the discussion, we have the following pointers:

1. We have to decide what is the purpose of our website. Be it to inform our customers, educate our customers, sell something, build brand awareness, get them to visit other sites, call us for a quotation, make a donation, sign-up a newsletter, etc. From my point of view, if we don't decide at the early stage, we'll lose track of what we are doing later on. We build a website not for our own use, is for our visitors. If we are not clear, how can our visitors be sure, they can't read our mind!

2. There are 2 ways looking at his online business. One is to take it as a department that complements his existing business or take it as a totally new business. A separate department will be doing what he did before, an online store/ catalog model that sells what he has in his store. The challenge will be the stock he need to keep, manpower and logistics issue that he'll need to consider. No point having plenty of orders yet fulfillment is an issue. As a new business, he can create an information products that teach people how to hold a theme-party. The info product can be in downloadable form which the above issue can be minimized. And for info product, the advantage is that we create once and updates won't be happening every month.

3. Why he dropped his website has many reasons, but the main issue is the website consumes a lot of effort to create, maintain and market. I think in any business, you can either take a crash course for DIY, use a bundle service to avoid the headache of technology or totally outsource to a company that specialize in this. Well, the catch is that they all come with a price tag!