The Key Points of Successful Online Business

Starting an online business is not a simple thing, though there isthe 3U rule bearing the following three simple points, which should beobeyed to make your online business successful: Unique Offer, UniqueService, and Unique Design. As you can see, Design is not the first, asOffer and Service go before it. Make a Unique Offer After researching your competitors, you may feel rather confused, asthere are so many of them and each one states that he is the best inthe field. Don't despair. The information you gather is necessary onlyto help you build your offer. You should not use it to build a caseagainst yourself! Simply, you need all the information you can get. Acompetitor's website is not the only source of information. Try to findout what his customers think about him. Do not trust testimonials; trysome posts on forums, where you will get real testimonials! Find yourcompetitor's weaknesses and try your best to avoid them. His weaknessesshould become your strong points. Your offer, however, is not the onlything to make your customers return. Your service should be unique aswell. Provide a Unique Service The key point of Unique Service is constant feedback. Find out who yourclients are and what they like or dislike about your service. This isthe information for improving your service.Do a little research on how your competitors work. Competitormonitoring is the best way to be up on what's new on the market. Youshouldn't miss anything about them: who their customers are and whythey stay with your competitor, details about their affiliate programs,who their partners are, where they get traffic, etc. - any kind ofinformation that may be useful.However, competitors are not the only source of ideas for improvingyour services. Try to study how hosting companies work. They have beenin the business from the very beginning, so their experience will be ofgreat use to any newbie to online business. Create a Unique Design One of the problems which rise before a newbie is the creation of afront office or website, which is almost the same thing as a frontoffice on the Web. This is not a big problem.Online business is not limited to website design. While having a uniquewebsite design is good, it will not make your brand unique. The realquestion is how can you make your brand unique?There are several ways to solve this problem. But first you mustunderstand that as the process of site development is rathercomplicated, it usually requires a team consisting of a projectmanager, designer, coder, and programmer. And you need only go to anyone of them to begin your project. The only thing that may hamper youis the budget, as it usually costs $1000-$3000 to develop a really goodwebsite. Very often money becomes a real problem for newbies to online business,as their budgets are not equal to the cost of website development. Theyshould pay for not only hosting but also domain registration, anadvertising campaign, etc. But this not a dead-end situation; there's asolution that a newbie can afford - website templates. A ready-madedesign is the only thing you need. Simply convert it into your websiteby filling in the content. Though you may assume that using a websitetemplate will dilute your brand to nothing, as you won't be the onlyone with this template, it is not the case. The number of downloads,which is usually displayed on a website templates provider's site, isnot the real number of the sites which have been built on the template.How can it be so? Do website templates providers knowingly lower thenumber of downloads to stimulate purchases? The answer is no, asreliable providers regularly update databases with new templates. Theproblem is, the moment you put your site online is the moment it can beripped off by anybody! Besides, the largest templates providers, suchas Template Monster, Cool Home Pages, OSWD and others, constantly suffer from piracy.Therefore, unique design is virtually impossible because anything canbe copied or stolen and used with slight alterations. Even custom webdesign is not safe from intellectual parasitism and predation. Which is preferable? Should you choose a Web Design Company or useready-made templates? It's up to you to decide, though using templatesis not as frightful as it is considered to be. It greatly saves yourmoney. Remember that Unique Design is not the synonym for Unique Brand.To stand out from your competitors, you should obey the 3U rule, whichwill deliver you the best and cheapest advertising - word of mouthadvertising.