Online Business Building Tools
Here are some great carefully-chosen tools to help you start and grow an online business. I can help out with setting up your business blog website, domain name and hosting but there is a whole spectrum of other tools and resources to consider to achieve long term success.
Domain Name Scoring
So you are thinking of registering a domain name? I can’t tell you how many duff domain names I registered on the spur of the moment in the past that ended up wasting me money and time. Not only that, I had to suffer the embarrassment of owning these duff names for up to 2 years with my full contact details in the public domain.
Don’t make the same mistakes I did, evaluate your domain name first. This software scores your domain name ideas
Traffic Building
Without visitor traffic your site will not make sales, get readers or subscribers, it will be like a ghost town on the web. Don’t let this happen to your site. With good search engine optimization (I do that as standard with my blog hosting service) you can expect a gradual increase in traffic as the search engines slowly find your site. This can take up to 6 months before your site gets out of the “sand box” as it’s called. A bit like a quaranteen period to check if your site is worthy of getting a high ranking in the search engines.
To speed up the process of getting traffic you should be writing articles and publishing them to other sites with a backlink to your site. Sorry, I haven’t got any software recommendations for you. I would manually submit articles to sites that republish articles and rank high in search engines.
List Building
Potential customers will be visiting your site every day but it is a sad fact that most may never return. It’s not that your site is bad, it’s just that there are lots of other sites to explore and people may simply forget how they found your site or not bookmark it. Also, it can take several exposures to your sales pitch before people that want your product actually buy.
One way around this problem is to offer an email service where you alert people about your latest posts, send them tips or special offers. The service I use is AWeber They let me set up unlimited autoresponder newsletter series and handle all the opt-ins and opt-outs for me automatically.
To use it on my sites I just cut and paste a snippet of code to my template. AWeber is well respected in the industry so emails tend to find their way to your subscriber’s inbox rather than their spam filter. Also, they take care of legal compliance when sending broadcast emails to your list.
Customer Service Software
If you are selling a product then people expect customer support which you may personally provide or pay staff to provide. This can be a big drain on your time and money. Plus it can be a miserable experience that can affect you mentally for the rest of the day.
Personally, I am using software that automatically answers the most common questions from customers and allows me to continually add to the system new answers to new questions. In the case of my hosting there is still emergency telephone support available but for the everyday common support questions this software is ideal in providing rapid customer support automatically 24/7.
