And nothing happens.

Except, perhaps, that your sales fall off a bit because you’ve spent so much time creating and marketing your website that you’ve neglected to make the contacts you usually use to generate business.

Take heart. Making your website do what it is supposed to do doesn’t cost much and doesn’t take long. You just need some practical advice on how to make it work right.

Start by Making it Easy to Place Orders

Having a website doesn’t mean you no longer have to market and sell your products. What it does mean is that you can have an order taker standing around 24/7 to take people’s money.

If your objective is actually to close sales online, the process of ordering your products and services online has to be effortless for your customers. If they go to your site knowing what they want, they should be able to find it in two clicks and they should be able to order it in one more.

If this is not how your website is working, then you have found a key reason why your sales are not what they should be.

Sometimes the problem is your page design. It spends more time talking about you and your team than getting people to the products and services they want to buy. Having articles and blogs online does help bring people to your site, and can keep them there until they decide to shop, but a sluggish or confusing ordering process “unsells” people. It is so easy to get online commerce right these days that most folks have no confidence in people who get it wrong.

How do you make placing orders though your site easy?

Paypal makes it easy to create “Buy Now” buttons for any product on any page on your site. People trust PayPal. The PayPal checkout process is quick, secure, and predictable. If you have under ten simple products to sell on your site, just stick Buy Now buttons on your pages and you should see sales go up. If your products require people to pick sizes, choose colors, select shipping options, or specify other parameters, Buy Now buttons probably aren’t the best choice.

Online ecommerce solutions like Yahoo Stores, Pro Stores or EventBrite, make creating full featured catalogs of products and services easy. You can be online in minutes with these online store solutions, even if you nothing about HTML or programming. These tools handle size, color, shipping and most other purchase options quite handily.

Open source catalog solutions like Magento work well for people who just believe, very strongly, that they have to host their catalog on their own servers. You can install them in a matter of hours, add your products and services to them, and start taking sales in under a couple of days. You can customize their look and feel completely.

It almost never makes sense for a small business to create a custom online sales solution when there are so many that can be had for next to nothing, that customers already trust, and which are so easy to customize. Your time will be better spent driving traffic to your fully functional site.

Marketing & Selling Products Online

Once you can take orders for your products and services on your site, you can begin pouring customers onto the site to take orders from.

If you have been taking orders for your products offline with some frequency, then you already know who your customers are, why they buy your products and where they can be found. You can tell your existing pool of customers your website address and you’ve effectively given them an order taker they can turn to at any time to get your products and services.

When you want to get new customers via the internet, your understanding of who your customers are and why they buy your products will remain, for the most part, unchanged. You will just need to determine where your customers lurk online.

If your products and services are delivered to local populations, then you may find tools like Google’s Local Business Center useful. It lets you geographically locate your business in Google Maps, so that when people in your geographical area search Google for “florist”, “plant nursery”, “child care center” or “computer repair” a link to your business pops up along with a pointer to your location on a map. This gets them to your page where they can place an order.

If your products and services are, by and large, location independent then you will use other mechanisms to drive traffic to your site. You may decide to:

• Place ads on Google and other search engines that will display when potential customers are searching for the products and services you provide.
• Use Search Engine Optimization techniques (SEO) to get more links to your business high in the normal listings for your target keywords.
• Place advertisements on the websites that your customers go to for news or entertainment.
• Advertise in print magazines or newspapers that your customer read.
• Work to have articles and blogs written about your product or service by writers that your customers read.

If, after several weeks, you find that your website is not helping your company earn more, the cause is almost invariably one of the following:

• Your site makes it hard to place an order.
• Something about your site makes customers doubt that you can fulfill their order (inaccurate information, misspellings, unattractive layout or design, etc.)
• Your site doesn’t provide the information customers need in order to decide to buy.
• The wrong people are visiting your site because your marketing is funneling the wrong people there.
• No one is visiting your site because your online marketing is ineffective or non-existent.

If your website is equipped with a page counter or Google analytics toolset that lets you track how many people are coming to your site, what pages they look at, when and if they click the order button then you should be able to discern which of these issues is effecting your online sales.

A methodical approach to resolving these problems will result in increased revenue for your site.

Closing Sales Online

In designing and developing a functional website to sell your products it pays to take a very analytical, very practical, very limited approach to deployment.

Start with ensuring that purchase of a product is a matter of a few clicks, that customer’s you’ve met in the real world feel comfortable buying through your online interface, then work on driving more traffic to your site so more customers can be closed. Make sure it is very easy for people to ask you questions about your products and services, and that you request feedback on the order process after every sale. Your online customers are the best people to provide you with advice and guidance on how to sell more online.

Related posts:

1. An Entrepreneur’s Quick Guide to First Investors: Family & Friends
2. Google PageRank & Search Engine Optimization
3. An Entrepreneur’s Guide to SEO Through Press Releases

Those who know my preference for investing in startups understand that I do so because startups are the best way to make little numbers turn into big numbers fast. In under a decade Google went from a few guys in a dorm room to the backbone of worldwide internet commerce. That is my kind of business.

The Challenge That Faces Innovators & Inventors

Because I invest in startups, I often work with those who imagine the details of a better world. Often their business ideas are about far more than making figures on some ledger spiral up. In fact, I would call the best of them visionaries, philanthropists and idealists.

They are all about clean water, safe kids, new ways to socialize and entertain, new solutions for transportation, energy and food production. I admire these people, and I enjoy working with them. I enjoy seeing the world through their eyes.

But when it comes to business, I must say that having an objective that is not based on simply increasing profit as quickly as possible often slows or stalls a business’s financial success.

People with a “plan to change the world” often get rather stubborn about how they want things to happen. They frequently want to make people like their product, as they envision it, as they produce and distribute it, and as they price it.

That is a somewhat take it or leave it mentality, and the market punishes it brutally.

I can be helpful to these professionals, when I am helpful to them, by finding good ways for them to listen to, communicate with, and respond to the market more effectively. Implementing a few simple strategies that streamline these important communication operations does a new business a world of good. With the right data coming in, innovators and inventors can often figure out how to achieve their basic humanitarian or technological objectives while making a tidy profit.

If You Want a Successful Business . . .

If you are just starting your business, or you have a business that is struggling, think hard about your objectives.

Personal objectives like “increase my profits”, “support my children” and ” pay my bills” are easy to reach. Non-personal objectives like “I want to help people find jobs” or “I want to help people care for their children” also work.

Objectives like “get rich quick from selling a super specialized widget that no one but me is smart enough to understand” is a non starter. “Become massively wealthy by making people buy this thing they repeatedly tell me they don’t want” also does not work well. The market does not like complex self-centric objectives.

Let’s look at Google again.

They had one simple objective. “Let’s make a database that lists all the websites on the internet.” All the other things they do now are things their customers asked them to do.

Simple objectives, simple strategies, simple success. That is what good startups are based on.

Are you starting a business? Do you have a business that’s struggling?

School for Startups delivers practical, pragmatic, instruction in how to launch and grow more successful enterprises. I hope you decide to attend one of our upcoming courses or online events.  We look forward to helping you succeed.

Related posts:

1. Living Without Air: Ship Early, Ship Little, Ship Fast
2. Practical Q&A With Doug Richard — Cambridge Starting & Growing a Successful Business Class
3. Choosing a Social Enterprise Legal Structure: CLS, CLG, CIC or Cooperative

START HERE! STARTING & GROWING A SUCCESSFUL BUSINESS

IN PARTNERSHIP WITH NACUE

DATE: TUESDAY 15TH JUNE 2010

TIME: NOON TILL 7PM

Following the huge success of our seminars around the UK, Doug and the School for Startups team are taking their nationwide tour to Brighton. A must-attend event for any budding or established entrepreneur, “Start Here! Starting and Growing a Successful Business” is hosted personally by Doug Richard and is the cornerstone of the School for Startups curriculum.

At “Start Here! Starting & Growing a Successful Business” you will learn:

• The key questions every entrepreneur must be able to answer before starting or growing a business
• How to write the perfect business model
• How to identify your product and your market
• How to start an affordable marketing campaign to increase your sales leads
• How to treat the recession as an opportunity, rather than a threat
• How to make money and secure investment
Find, Pitch & Close!

What’s included?

• 6 hours of business tuition with one of the UK’s leading entrepreneurs
• Access to online resources and materials, including membership of VentureNavigator
• Accreditation as a Graduate of School for Startups (web-badge)
• Free refreshments reception

Start Here! Starting & Growing a Successful Business -…
Start Here! Starting & Growing a Successful Business – Hosted by The University of Brighton & In Partnership with NACUE

Tuesday, June 15, 2010 from 12:00 PM – 7:00 PM (GMT)
Brighton, East Sussex

Ticket Information

* University of Brighton Ticket – These tickets are for anyone affiliated to The University of Brighton. Set discounts available at the universities discretion.
* Standard Entrepreneur Ticket – These are for anyone outside of the University
* Student & Staff Discounts – students & staff using discount codes must show their ID at registration, failure to do so will result in none entry to the event.
* Online bookings policy – We only accept online bookings with a credit or debit card. Unfortunately we do not issue invoices for future payment or allow attendees to pay on the day. Anyone who has not paid for their ticket in full before the event will not be granted access.
* Refunds and changes to ticket details policy – Unfortunately we cannot offer refunds or change the name on the booking once tickets have been booked.

Who Should Attend

* Anyone with an idea for a business
* Owners of small businesses that want to grow
* Students interested in starting a business

Event Information

* Registrations Starts: 12:00hrs
* Event Starts: 13:00hrs
* In conjunction with NACUE & The University of Brighton

For more information see our full Terms and Conditions

Money Back Guarantee

We are confident that you will be completely satisfied by this event. If you are not completely satisfied with the event, we will issue a 100% refund, no questions asked. Requests for refunds must be made via email within 24hrs of the event taking place.

Nacue

School for Startups

University of Brighton

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1. Start Here! Starting & Growing A Successful Business, Leicester, May 10 – Home
2. Practical Q&A With Doug Richard — Cambridge Starting & Growing a Successful Business Class
3. University of Essex & School for Startups to Jump Start UK Small Business in Colchester

Every serial entrepreneur has a set of precepts that govern most of their business decisions.  These “general rules” may not apply to every situation, but they apply to almost every situation and the exceptions are so few and so far between they are almost impossible to anticipate.

While these principles may vary from one business owner to another, almost every successful business owner can agree with all of them.  These principles underpin what I teach at School for Startups. If you are starting a business, or are new to running one, the following set of rules may hold you in good stead until you come up with ones of your own.

Financially Frugal

No matter how much money you have, you have no “extra money”.  A business never has money to waste.  It just can’t happen. Any thought that you may have to the contrary is wishful thinking.  Extra profits from this month are not extra money, they are money you need to hold you over in a poor month that lies directly ahead.  Until you have more than a year of your business’s gross income banked against a future financial hardship, you are living on the very edge of failure.  A few bad months will put you out of business and will put your employees on the street.  When you do have a year of income banked, you will be facing the dangerous prospect of expansion or diversification that kills many great businesses every year.  That process is expensive, so you’ll need to have money to pay for it.  Once your business expands you will need to bank more income for that rainy day that could come at any time.  Grim as it sounds, get used to the idea that there is a reason that so many business owners refuse to pay full price for anything.  It is how they became successful.

Permanently Pressed for Time

You don’t have time to waste either.  In fact no one who works with or for you has time to waste, because time really is money.  If you spend a year making what you need to make in a month, you’ll be going out of business soon.  You have to make more money in less time. You have to save time wherever it is economically responsible to do so.  Two sales calls a week usually means a sales professional earns half as much as he would make if he had four sales calls a week.  So, all other things being equal, he should do more calls every week.  The only time this rule doesn’t apply is when haste is likely to cost you money.  Don’t send products to customers by expensive overnight delivery services unless that expense pays for itself.  Don’t use being pressed for time to avoid shopping for a way to get some product or service you need at a substantially reduced cost.  Don’t hire someone when you can cut back on activities that take time but don’t make money.

Committed to Customers

Unless your business earns its keep by knocking people on the head and taking their money, you have to be in business to give customers what they want.  You have to give them what they want even when what they want makes no sense.  Bottled water, by and large, is not safer or cleaner than tap water.  But people buy it anyway.  They buy it even when they will be sitting at a desk  a few feet away from clean, fresh tap water all day long. This is why there are businesses that bottle and sell water.  You can get away with giving customers something they don’t want only if you make them want it first.  Even hardcore music fans probably thought $300 was a bit much for an overbuilt walkman . . . until they met the iPod.  Always remember, and always encourage your employees and business associates to remember, to be on the side of the customer.  By and large those folks will pay a profitable price for a good product, so make sure they have a really good product to buy.

Intentionally Insightful

Good business owners, particularly those who survive to do more than one business, develop a capacity for insight and self-reflection.  When things go right, they find out why.  When things go wrong, they find out why as well. If you are the owner of a business, exercise your insight every day and ask those who work with, and for, you to explain what you don’t understand.  Ask your customers to help you when necessary.  Getting the real answers to questions like “Why didn’t that mass mailing work?”, “Why did we lose that customer?” and “Exactly why didn’t we make our numbers last month?” can translate into much faster, much more profitable growth.  Don’t make the market teach you the same lessons over and over again.

Hard Working

A good idea is never enough to have a successful business.  Hard work is required. Generally speaking entrepreneurs and those working for them work well over 40 hours a week, and many are working closer to sixty.  They enjoy what they are doing so much it occupies both their working days and their leisure hours.  If you don’t feel that strongly about your startup or small business, if your team doesn’t join you in your obsession, something is fundamentally wrong. Good investors, good venture capitalists, look for passion because they know it means “profit”. Make sure your business is something you want to work hard for.

A Sense of Community

A business has to be a community of people working together toward a common goal.  Time spent gossiping, plotting revenge, backbiting and hiding scurrilous love affairs is generally time wasted. Entrepreneurs need to create and foster a supportive, friendly and honest community within their businesses so time can be spent on things that actually make money.  Businesses have to be a part of the larger world.  Contributing to the local school, donating to the local charities, playing a role in national and international affairs where reasonable and appropriate, creates good neighbors and good long term relationships.

Flexible Plans

Businesses must consciously plot a path forward, and they must respond to the world they live in.  Planning must be a daily, weekly, monthly process, not something confined to an annual report or business plan.  Plans must have measurable objectives and due dates so success and failure can be determined within a real-world context. “We’d sure like to make more money” is not planning.  Neither is “Let’s build a website.”  Everything you do must serve the customer and meet the test of being a “profitable” investment of time and money.  Good planning is where good business owners make sure those objectives are met.

Is That All?

Anyone who has owned and operated more than one profitable business, and anyone who has ever invested in a business, has strong opinions about what a business needs to survive.  A good product, a good team, good marketing, good financing . . . those are key elements to the long term success of any business venture.  But these seven virtues, these consciously adopted habits, may be even more important.  They are key to the culture I try to create in every company I start and they are things I look for in every firm I invest in. When problems arise in a business, I usually find that one of the virtues has been ignored.

If you are starting or growing a business, I hope you will join me at an upcoming School for Startups event.  I look forward to helping you build your business into something that profits you, your family, and the many communities we share.

Related posts:

1. Naked Business: Building a Wall of Sound
2. Practical Q&A With Doug Richard — Cambridge Starting & Growing a Successful Business Class
3. Press Release-Doug Richard to Teach UK Entrepreneurs How to Start and Grow a Business at Newcastle University on February 3

Furthermore, this is not merely about starting right. It’s also about growing your business. After all, the only problem any small business has is ultimately about growth. The proximate problem may be your team or your cash flow but it all ties back to the question of growth. So I suppose this conversation is about how one organizes a business to successfully grow.

At the same time, my views on early stage business are changing. And I think that, if we are going to have a productive discussion, its worth you knowing some of the biases I bring to the conversation.

My first bias is that I however spendthrift I may be in my personal life, in business I am frugal if not cheap. I am not a big fan of possessions generally. I don’t particularly like offices, or desks, or company cars or, well, pretty much anything. I think one should question just about everything one spends in a startup. Think of it as weight. The more money you spend the heavier your business is and the more it weighs you down. The less you spend the easier it is to keep afloat, the less revenue it takes to stick around and the more likely you are to survive your first year. Like a balloon in a breeze the lightest waft of revenue will gently push your business up.

My second bias is about speed. I think that great businesses start slow and gain momentum. For the same reasons that Warren Buffett has had a 50 year love affair with compounding; I think that there is a difference between speed and momentum and if you start fast you make mistakes. You will grow rich more quickly if you grow rich slowly.

My last bias is about focus. Focus is what you achieve after your business is fully built and that is not what is happening in your early days. In your early days you are experimenting. You are a social anthropologist observing the natives in their habitat trying to understand them. Your products will change, your market segments will change, your pricing will change, the wrong customers will show up, people will buy what you sell for reasons you don’t understand and that’s all fine. If you are focused before you know your business then you are merely dogmatic not entrprenurial. Until the model is sorted you are an opportunist at heart.

Related posts:

1. Practical Q&A With Doug Richard — Cambridge Starting & Growing a Successful Business Class
2. Start Here! STARTING & GROWING A SUCCESSFUL BUSINESS
3. Living Without Air: Ship Early, Ship Little, Ship Fast