Building an Online Business
Introduction
What do we mean by an online business and what kind of online business infrastructure do you need to run it easily and profitably? This document describes the components and activities of an online business in non-technical terms. It is written for a business person who is used to using the Internet at work or at home for their own personal use. Jazar's foundation for online business infrastructures is our open source JDD - open source means it's freely available at no cost. We will talk here a little about why partnering with Jazar to build your online business is makes sense and why the JDD is the best place to build this infrastructure.
Business on the Internet
The Internet has transformed the way we find information and buy and sell things. It's difficult to imagine how we ever used to manage without it. In the early days of the Internet it was enough to put up a few web pages as a rough and ready electronic brochure. For very little outlay you could let potentially millions of people know about your company and your product or services. It was a very forward-thinking thing to do and, once done, you could sit back and say “there - that's the Internet dealt with”. It certainly didn't transform your business but maybe there was the odd email or telephone enquiry from someone who says they “saw you on the 'net'.” Soon it seemed everyone was putting up their 'home page'. The Internet became a crowded and noisy place. Not only did the number of websites mushroom but so did the expectations of people using the Internet. Perhaps it is just as well today that so many websites are difficult to find amid all the e-hullabaloo because most of them certainly haven't evolved in their content or capability to match what people expected. And the quality of a website, rightly, speaks volumes about the quality of the company. Whatever your situation, whether you have a creaky out-of-date and hard-to-manage website or no website at all, the time has come to seriously build your online business to complement, support and serve your traditional business. If you don't, you're missing a great opportunity and your competitors will thrive at your expense.
Building an Online Business
What is an online business? What must it provide and how do you build it and keep it going? We'll outline the requirements and activities associated with building and running an online business and we'll describe how Jazar enables your business to make the most of the Internet opportunity.
Your website
Your website is the heart of your online business. As such, the healthier it is and the fitter it is for what you want to achieve the better it will serve your business. Your website acts as your online sales and marketing hub. This is where you communicate who you are and your company's values. Here you provide, in an easy-to-use manner, all the information about your products and services that a prospect or customer needs to carry out the action you'd like them to, be it making a purchase or contacting you for more information. This is not the place to go into any deep philosophy of website design (“what's it all for?”) but it is worth just saying 'think of the customer'. Most websites are written from the perspective of 'what we want to tell the customer'. Think of it this way – you're website isn't there for you, it's there for your customer. Does it say what they want to hear? They've come to your website for a reason. Can they see that you recognise their problems and that you can help them?
JAZAR 2 Weston Road, London W4 5NH +44 (0)20 7504 1318 info@jazar.co.uk www.jazar.co.uk
Your website needs to be good looking and consistent
The days of bright green backgrounds and gaudy flashing colours is, thankfully, mostly, well past. Jazar's web designers are expert in their field and have an impressive portfolio of world-class sites. They will design a site that communicates your corporate values and serves your customers' needs. And one of the (many) good things about the JDD is that it is able to accommodate literally any design of website. The design of your website will consist of the designs for different page types – usually the minimum is the design of your home page and the design for content pages. These page types are used as templates by the people who create your actual web pages, thus ensuring that every page is consistent with the others in its appearance and behaviour.
Your website needs to be easy to find
The Internet is crowded place and you need to be very smart about being seen in the global scrum. There are many things you can do to make your website easy to find by search engines and to appear high in the list of returned search results. These include things like... • • • making sure the address of a page (the URL) is simple and reflects the page's content ensuring that the content you create is easily readable by the search engines the automatic creation and updating of a sitemap which guarantees that search engines will visit and index every page on your site
The JDD does these things automatically for you. In addition, you must carefully choose the keywords you think visitors will use to find your site and write your web pages in such a way so that the search engines will return your page high in the list of search results when these keywords are used in a query. Getting other popular sites to put a link to your site on theirs can help your site to appear high in the search results too. Unfortunately the search engines' idea of what a high-ranking page looks like keeps being refined so the optimisation of your website for search engines needs to be an ongoing process.
Your website needs to be comprehensive
Once a visitor has taken the trouble to find you, if you haven't made the effort to put all they might need to know on your website you might create a negative impression. A website doesn't need to be perfect, (look at what you find on the Internet!) but if it is, it will stand out from the crowd and that might make all the difference to a visitor's purchasing intentions. A comprehensive website implies a lot of content. The way you organise this content on your website is critical to the extent to which it meets your visitor's needs. The JDD makes it easy to manage lots of pages, and to make sure that they are all accessible through menus and through hypertext links that always work.
Your website needs to be accurate and up to date
Describing products that no longer exist; showing a 'last updated' date of 2003; having old prices. We've all seen them on websites and we know what that tells us about the company whose website we're looking at. Setting high standards for the information on your website is just as important as if you were going to print 10,000 brochures. It needs to be as good as it can be. If you have multiple people responsible for producing and maintaining content on your website it is useful to have at least an review and authorisation step in the publishing process to ensure that some check is made before new content is made public. The Internet's a very public place to display shoddy content. The Jazar JDD incorporates a review and publish step to ensure that only authorised and reviewed content goes out on your website. You can even specify a date when an authorised page should be published.
JAZAR 2 Weston Road, London W4 5NH +44 (0)20 7504 1318 info@jazar.co.uk www.jazar.co.uk
Your website needs to be easy to navigate
No information should be more than three clicks away - your visitors shouldn't have to root through your pages to find what they want – it's so easy to leave and go somewhere else. We work with you to understand your business and how your customers would expect to find their way around your website; the paths they should take to get to some definable goal like buying something or signing up for a newsletter. The JDD automatically creates menus to reflect the structure of your site and also includes a search module enabling your visitors to go straight to the information they're interested in.
Your website links should work
Broken links or links that go nowhere serve to frustrate and imply shabby management of the website. Not to mention the fact that search engines frown darkly on sites with broken links. Links in a JDD-based website are automatically managed and any manually created links can be analysed using the built-in link analyser. No-one ever needs to see a 'page not found' error on your JDD website.
Your website needs to be maintained by non-technical people
You shouldn't have to go to specialist technical people just to add or remove a page or to edit some existing content. It's important that the people who own the information can safely make the changes they need. The Jazar JDD is designed to let non-technical people manage their own content. The page templates only allow defined content areas to be edited and content may be pasted in or created with an easy-touse word processor (like a mini-Word).
Online Marketing
It's all very well to have a great-looking website with up-to-date and comprehensive content but it's no use if no-one ever goes there. Online marketing is all about drawing people to your website so that you can communicate your value to them and sell your products or service to them. Online marketing takes many forms and requires a different skill-set to marketing in the offline world.
Searching for and finding your website
When most people want to find something on the Internet the first place they go is to a search engine like Google (or Yahoo or MSN). There they type in the keywords that characterise what they're looking for and click on the Search button. If what they're searching for is anything other then the most specialised and niche thing they will be confronted by potentially millions of search results. The truth is that if your website is not in the first couple of pages then your website is as good as invisible to the searcher. Making your website easy to find in search engines is probably the single most important online marketing activity. The JDD makes it easy to build a website that search engines can index properly. However, there are also guidelines and best practices to follow that we can help you to apply to your website. Let's look at an example. Go to Google and search for 'learn chinese'. As you might expect such an obvious phrase to search for in a such a popular subject will return quite a few pages – 45,400,000, at the time of writing, to be precise! To be returned even in the first 10 pages would be a remarkable feat. Well, the first entry returned (at the time of writing) is www.chinese-tools.com. This is a website built in the Jazar JDD that has been optimised by Jazar for Google. We know what we're doing in search engine optimisation.
JAZAR 2 Weston Road, London W4 5NH +44 (0)20 7504 1318 info@jazar.co.uk www.jazar.co.uk
Advertising your site with search engines
If you've ever searched for something on, say, Google then you might have noticed the sponsored links at the top and down the right-hand side of the page of search results. These advertisements, called AdWords, are returned by Google because they best match the keywords searched for. MSN and Yahoo! have their equivalent too. Of course, you don't get to advertise on sites like Google for free but the good thing is you don't actually pay anything unless someone clicks on your add. This is called Pay-Per-Click or PPC. PPC campaign management requires setting up and needs to be monitored and adjusted to make sure the best results are being achieved at the lowest cost. This is a service Jazar can offer you or we can provide you with the tools and training for you to manage it yourself.
Advertising your site on other sites
Another way to advertise your site is to put advertisements on other related sites. When someone clicks on one of those advertisements to reach your site you pay the site which hosts the advertisement a small fee. Your ad could be supplied to the hosting site automatically by one of the search engines (Google's service is called AdSense) or you could have negotiated arrangements with an affiliate programme or with specific sites. Affiliate programmes enable your advertisement to be displayed automatically on many sites. Two of the leading affiliate programmes are Commission Junction and TradeDoubler. The Jazar JDD includes a set of tools to enable you to maintain a set of ads on your site and to set up ad exchanges with other sites. These tools allow you to monitor the number of exposures of the ads and how may times they are clicked on, so-called 'click-throughs'. Remember also, if you host ads on your site you can also earn money when people click on them.
Including your site in specialist directories
The basis for these directories' specialisations could be product-related or geographically-related or both. Jazar can help you determine which directory sites are the most appropriate and can organise inclusion and negotiate rates.
“You link to my site and I'll link to yours”
This is called reciprocal linking. If you host a link on your site to a non-competitive related product or service they will do the same for you. Ideally you want a site with a high search engine ranking to link to your site. This automatically confers on your site a similarly high ranking.
Keeping in touch by email
Although we all suffer from too much junk email we generally don't suffer from too much of the right kind of the email we're really interested in. You can easily stay in touch by email with customers or prospects who have requested it. This makes it easy to send out news of promotions and special offers, information on new or revised products and so on. Included in the JDD is a newsletter module that lets you keep track of subscribers, lets them opt-in and opt-out of your mailings and tracking tools to measure conversion through specific marketing campaigns.
JAZAR 2 Weston Road, London W4 5NH +44 (0)20 7504 1318 info@jazar.co.uk www.jazar.co.uk
Selling products from your website
If you're selling products then ideally you'd want your visitors to be able to buy your products from your website. If it's an existing customer who comes back to your site then you'd want them to be able to check their purchase history, track their outstanding purchases, offer them promotional deals and so on. All the above considerations about building and maintaining a healthy website apply but also now you need to consider the mechanics and processes selling on the Internet, e-commerce. The Jazar JDD incorporates an e-commerce module which consists of an online store where you can display all your products, a shopping basket to enable your customers to select products to buy, and a checkout where you can securely take payment for the products. In order to display previous order information to your returning customers you'll need to integrate your JDD-based website with your order processing system. The JDD is open, extensible and customisable which enables it to be easily linked into the rest of your back-office infrastructure.
Why use the Jazar and the JDD?
Making the most of the Internet isn't going to happen with only an unchanging electronic brochure website. Building and maintaining an online business must go to the heart of your company's sales and marketing operations. It requires the right tools and the right skills – both commercial and technical. If you were to search on the Internet for content management systems you would find that there are plenty to choose from. Some you pay for and some, like the Jazar JDD, are free. Given such a choice how can you choose and why would you choose the JDD? Although the Jazar JDD is is rich in functionality, is proven in the field, is in use in many companies and is a quick and easy way of building good looking and maintainable websites these are probably not the sole reasons you would choose the JDD for your online business infrastructure. Your website, whilst critically important to your online business, is only one component in your overall online business infrastructure and activities. First there are the online marketing activities that need to be carried out on an ongoing basis to make sure you keep attracting visitors to your website and market to existing customers. And then there are the growing and changing needs of your business which must be reflected in your evolving website and online sales and marketing activities. Unless you are a big company with your own online sales and marketing resources you probably don't have the skills in your company. And why should you? Online marketing is not your business and it makes perfect sense to employ those skills and resources only when you need them. That's where Jazar comes in. Online business and online marketing is our business. We can partner with you and be your online business resource that you can call in as and when you need to. In these days of increasing complexity and shortened time-scales, the idea of doing everything yourself just isn't sensible or practical. It makes sense to build a relationship with Jazar – we have those skills and resources you need and can work with you to build and evolve your online business. This isn't about a choice of website designer or content management system – this is about building an online business partnership where the skills and experience you don't have in-house are supplied by your partner. Talk to Jazar about building your online business. Because we don't just build websites – we build online businesses.
JAZAR 2 Weston Road, London W4 5NH +44 (0)20 7504 1318 info@jazar.co.uk www.jazar.co.uk
About Jazar
Jazar combines solid business understanding and experience with the technical skills of the Internet. Jazar was started in 2004 by ex-employees of shop.com who brought with them not only years of online sales and marketing experience but also the JDD content management system. Since then Jazar has grown its business by providing cost-effective, high-quality and innovative online business services.
About the Jazar JDD
The Jazar JDD is an open source content management system for building and maintaining websites and conducting online sales and marketing. It was first used in 1999 with shop.com and has been under continual development since then. It has now evolved into a robust and comprehensive platform for an online Internet business combining a rich set of features for website creation and management, online marketing and e-commerce and is ideally suited to small and medium-sized businesses. The JDD, being open source, is freely available and may be customised by anyone with the necessary technical skills. We hope, however, that you'll consider using the JDD's developers, Jazar, to be your online business partner.
JAZAR 2 Weston Road, London W4 5NH +44 (0)20 7504 1318 info@jazar.co.uk www.jazar.co.uk