Posts Tagged ‘careers’

Work From Home – Choosing The Best Domain is Critical

Saturday, May 15th, 2010

So you have been considering doing this for months, but today, you made the final decision to take action to work from home. You have a good idea of the home business which you would like to launch, however, you still have not come up with a domain name for your website. My advice is that you put a lot of thought into your domain name. We will discuss this further below.

Over the past fifteen years, the our lives have become more and more intertwined with the Internet. It is just a given that businesses are expected to have a website, even if they have multiple physical locations. When it comes to selecting the proper domain name for a home business, opinions have been varied. The strategies surrounding domain selection depend immensely upon what you wish to accomplish with your business. For instance, domains are often selected for their advantages in search engine rankings, company branding, or for how they describe a general term. Factors which always need to be taken into account are the length of your domain, how easy it is to say and remember, as well as similar existing domains with different extensions. For example, if your business were to offer the best deals on clothing, you would not want to name the website bestbuy.org, because everyone would assume that you were selling electronics. Of course, this domain is not available.

Below, we will examine three of the dominant rationals which have been utilized in domain selection.

1) Domain Selection As A Keyword Ranking Strategy

The purpose of this sort of domain, is to rank high in the search engines. Such domains contain the keywords being searched for. Search engine domains are very rarely brandable, and are primarily utilized to redirect traffic to a main website. A company who sells blue widgets would benefit from acquiring blue-widgets.com and bluewidgets.com, firstly, because it is natural that people will remember such address, but most importantly, such a domain name has a high probability of ranking at, or very near to, the top of a search for ‘blue widgets’.

2) Branding One’s Business With A Domain Name

About ten years ago when a lot of existing businesses were getting creating their first websites, it was understandable that they would they would simply take the name of their existing company, and add a .com or .country right after the name. The thing that you should know about country extensions is that they are good for businesses which are popular in the specific country, but not really for international businesses. However, most of us here are starting a work from home business from the ground up. This gives us the opportunity to be clever when selecting our new domain name. However, you just have to realize upfront that there already are millions upon millions of registered domain names out there. Therefore, many names which would be ideal for your home business will not be available to you. Nevertheless, we can all probably agree that shorter domain names are better. I have heard that for branding purposes, five letters is the magic number. The thing that you have to make sure of, is that your domain is easy to pronounce. For instance, although ghfsh.com is five letters long, it is a terrible domain because it is difficult to pronounce, and to remember.

3) Domains Which Utilize General Terms

Before the (dot) com crash, businesses would flock towards general term domains. However, the (dot) com crash resulted in many of these companies who utilized general term domains going out of business. Companies which focused on branding refused to purchase general term domains due to the fact that they recognized the importance of branding. While such a strategy worked for many of these companies, allowing them to survive the (dot) com crash, general term domains still have some value, and should not be summarily dismissed. Similar to keyword domains, which attract visitors by achieving high rankings in the search engines, so do general term domains. Thus, general term domains still hold a lot of value, and continue to rise in importance. With that being said, what we can learn from the (dot) com crash, is that general term domains are not all that it takes to run a successful online business. Rather, there are a myriad of factors which lead to the success of an online business.

Thus, prior to taking action to work from home with a home business, make sure that you take a good amount of time to compose a list of possible domain names. Keep what you have read here at the front of your mind, and decide which factors are most important to the success of your home business.

To successfully Work From Home you will need a website for your Home Business. Just make sure that you put a lot of thought into your domain selection. Furthermore, you should stop by and see us at SOSComplete.com

Three Tips To Help Your Online Sales

Friday, January 22nd, 2010

Don’t wait for the holidays to keep track of your sales. When having an e-commerce Web site it is crucial to pay attention to the possible e-store problems. Most apply to the entire year but some need to be tweaked around the holidays because monster holiday sales makes them more likely to pop up. We will start with credit-card processing.

Tip No. 1: Knowing the limits of your credit processing. Getting more business than you anticipated with a limit on the volume of credit-card transactions that are too low relates to customers’ cards being refused. First be sure your system is prepared for the increase of business during the holidays. Make the changes you want during the season but they should emphasize the functional aspect of your site, But decorations should not be ignored; a festive look will encourage shoppers to purchase your products. When people open a page, they are downloading all the files that make up that page.

Also, don’t be dependent on automation as this can have problems. Computer programs do have their problems and you want to know as soon as you have a problem. You do not want to lose sales due to a glitch that you miss. You don’t want customers that are trying to check to receive a message “We’re sorry. We cannot process your card at this time.” or stating the customers’ cards are invalid or out of credit. So, double check often.

Tip No. 2: Watch the home front. Your credit-card and fulfillment contractors can get stressed during the holiday season. If you have increased business during this time it can stress your computer systems and network. You haven’t had any problems but don’t assume everything is OK. Computer problems appear at the worst times. That goes for both hardware and software. Having someone available who can fix problems quickly will help your online sales. If you can put them under contract or having programs to double check your systems will decrease the likely hood of lost sales. That ensures that failures are taken care of promptly.

A poor set-up indicates that you are not paying enough attention to your online INCOME. Which means you are not going to make the money you are capable of. The promotion of your web site and the systems that help you run your site is the key to your online work. So of course you need to keep track of everything you do with your site and how your site interacts with your potential customers. Also large files could significantly slow the download and because of this it may frustrate the customer.

Tip No. 3: Not monitoring your site. This goes without saying if your site doesn’t work your customers could conclude that you’re incompetent. A below par operating system will drive people away from your web site. What people are doing at your site and input from your potential clients may show you that your site is poorly designed. Some glitches have an easy fix. You can fix those on the fly during the season but hopefully you have them fixed before. More serious problems would require some site reconfiguration, obviously.

With several site reporting programs out there that can tell you about how your site is working internally. And also showing the traffic patterns of your visitors, this will give you an idea of what most interests your customers. And it will tell you where your traffic is originating. Also a link checker will only tell you that the links work. Recheck your site for dead links. If you don’t keep up with them frustrated customers may just go to a competitor and may lose you several hundred dollars over time. Things on your site will get moved around, and to forgeting a link that no longer works happens. Keep in mind that making sure everything is current and your descriptions of products and “Terms and Conditions” are not out of date is another key to keeping your site working properly.

Wishing you all the best of luck with your online sales and I hope that these few tips will help you with your web site and your online income.

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