When you’ve been poring over an idea for a while, putting it out there in the world can feel like the easy part. Running a business, however, is the hard part. You put in a lot of work to write a business plan, to get staff on board and to put out feelers on social media to gain traction from prospective customers who are interested in your product. You’ve done the market research and the research has dictated your social media posts, which by the way have been beautifully scheduled! The next step? Launch!
Whether you plan to launch now or in a few days, there are some things that you need to understand before you go ahead and press go on your new business. You need to know where to find the best ecommerce website solutions so that your new business site can go off during launch time without a hitch. You also need to be ready. The work has been hard so far, but that’s nothing compared to actually running the business you’ve spent so long envisioning. There are plenty of tips out there for building a profitable business online that you can run from the comfort of your own home, and here are my favourite!
- Understand your business. It’s a fairly straightforward tip, but you’d be surprised the number of people who haven’t decided whether to run their business on Etsy or eBay or via their own independent site. You could even choose to straddle all of the above, but before you hit launch, you need to understand exactly how you want your business to go.
- Pick a focus with your products; trying to sell everything on day one of your launch is going to cause you to trip up on yourself. In the lead up to launch day, you should advertise the range of products that you are pushing on day one across social media platforms.
- Figure out what makes your business unique and centre the limelight on that! Your business is fresh and exciting, and you need to work out what makes you stand out from other people who do a similar thing. Customer service should be the most unique thing about you, and it should be impeccable!
- Never go into a launch assuming that just because you’re online, you’re going to get sales and hits from your customers. A website doesn’t guarantee you visitors, which is why social media marketing and laying the groundwork locally is so important. You may be working from home, but that doesn’t mean that you can’t canvass properly.
- Speak to your marketing team to make sure that your business blog content is on point: there’s one place that you don’t want to mess up and that’s your brand. Your blog is the more personal side of your brand; make it count!
Launching a new business online doesn’t have to be a frightening experience. You should have confidence and be excited about this new launch: Thundercats are go!
