Creating a website or an application is not a guarantee of online success, just like buying a fishing schooner does not mean that you can take it out to sea and catch at least something.

Before you start, you need to ask yourself a question that you yourself will answer at the end of the article. Do you want to be a “fisherman” or “schooner owner”? The difference is great, the first is a professional in his field who manages his own team, which works like a well-coordinated mechanism. And the second is a person who invested money and earns income from the work of the first, while doing something closer to him, for example, running a fish restaurant on the beach, talking to tanned clients and sipping a cocktail. The fisherman is not up to cocktails, but he has many adventures and overcomes, he fights the elements, looks for accumulations of fish and sometimes repairs the schooner or modernizes it. In general, the choice is not obvious, everywhere its charms.

Step # 1: “Choosing a Schooner”

Of course, before you reach a new level of your business and get a representation in the online space, you need to decide what you expect from this “representation”, and based on this it will be clear exactly how it should look. There are many options, but for simplicity we will limit ourselves to three:

1. I want my clients to be able to find out about me, my product or service, contact me or sign up, find out the schedule or availability, or something from this area.
2. I want my clients to be able to familiarize themselves with my assortment (goods or services) and buy it (place an order) without my participation, and then I just executed it for them.
3. I want to keep the attention of my clients, communicate with them, or so that they communicate with each other; create an audience of interests that will use my goods or services for a long time, become their adherents and will not separate their consumption from their own interests.

In the first case, you need a “business card site” and this is a relatively simple task, since this is a small site, as a rule, there are no complex systems, such as a chat bot or online payment, and there is not even a personal account for users. It's just a collection of pages on which you place text and pictures. True, if you do not have the skill of writing code or design, then the site is unlikely to turn out beautiful, but somehow it will work out. By the way, you need to be careful with this, because before your potential clients read about you on your site, they first see it and they will have a first impression, which may be the last, after all, they are “greeted by clothes”.

In the second case, you need an “online store”. It has storefronts, a payment terminal, online consultants, a shopping cart, and other important things that make visiting it more convenient than shopping offline. Here you cannot do without serious programming skills. Especially, if you want your “store” to look good and work on any potential customer's device. If the “store” does not work well, they will never return to it.

In the third case, you need an “internet portal”. It is a large, complex site that combines a “business card site” and an “online store”. It also turns out several additional tools, such as a news feed, automatic mailings, forums, a large number of different content, integration with other sites, and other 'tricks' that help your customers to discover something new and interesting there for a long time, as in an amusement park, but only on a specific topic, like fishing.

Step # 2: “Obtaining a fishing license”

After you have made your choice and created a website in some way, you need to register it on the Internet. That is, he should have an address where he can be found, and he also needs to be filled with text, pictures and video. In general, these are two different tasks, but they are close in their purpose. The first is that you can be found, and the second is that when you are found, they will find what to see and read.

To get an address, you need to have a domain and hosting. To obtain them, you need to contact special providers of these services, without them in any way. Just as it is impossible to obtain a fishing license by passing the “Ministry”. You can easily find them by searching for “buy domain with hosting”.

To fill the site with high-quality content (beautiful pictures, selling texts, bright videos) you need to have the appropriate skills. Compared to fishing, these are nets, hooks and bait. You can learn how to weave nets, sharpen hooks and prepare the bait yourself, but just be prepared to learn this from someone who already knows how. It will take time and effort, but without these essential tools you will not be able to “fish” and all other actions will be in vain.

Step # 3: 'Echo - location'

There is a huge number of users on the Internet, but there are also a huge number of sites, and somehow you need to draw attention to yourself. Experienced internet marketers know what and how to attract visitors to your site, just like an experienced fisherman knows where and when to spread the net so that there are many fish in them. There are always two ways, or hire an experienced internet marketer (though you still need to check his experience, and how successful this experience was) or get this experience on your own. This is also worth learning, but do not cherish special hopes for training, it is necessary, but not enough for everything to work out right away. So please be patient and have a good ad budget, because before you learn you will waste most of it. By the way, many people don't realize, but internet marketing requires good analytical skills, not creativity and creativity, so if you think that working with numbers is not yours, then you will have to work hard.

Step 4: “Delivering fish to the shore”

You must always remember that it is not enough to catch up with visitors to the site, because the goal of a business is not to increase site traffic, but to increase the number of orders in business, or to increase the efficiency of their processing. It is very important that the site converts site visitors into your customers, this is called 'conversion'. Unfortunately, there is no one-size-fits-all solution to how a website should look to give a good conversion. It all depends on the specifics of your business, audience and just events in the outside world.

This means only one thing, you need to constantly research the behavior of your site visitors and improve the site so that the conversion increases. It will not be possible to make a website once, place it on the Internet and do nothing else with it. In reality, there are at least three areas in which work should be constantly carried out:

1. Optimizing the engine to make the site work quickly and the customer experience is positive.
2. Optimizing the SEO so that your customers see your site in search engines when they enter a query that you can satisfy.
3. Optimization of the client route so that as many site visitors as possible become your clients.

Each of these topics is very broad and requires training and experience, but Gods Don't Burn Pots, so everything can be dealt with. In any case, you need a “web visor” to work on improving conversions. This is the first thing you have to deal with! Fortunately, the internet can help you with this).

Step 5: “The fisherman always has helpers”

Even if you limit yourself to the basic steps described above, it becomes clear that it is very difficult to cope alone. And this does not even apply to the creation of the site itself. Much more work lies ahead. Pick people up for your team, train yourself and train them. Here is an important point for you: you need to start by teaching yourself! This will help you have the necessary level of expertise to assess the level of knowledge and experience of your employees. You should know all this and be able to do it yourself, but entrust the work to someone else, controlling the process and managing it, otherwise you will not have time to do everything, just like on a fishing schooner. If you miss something and the whole team's work will go to pieces, so if you decide to master this art on your own, you should be able to do everything.

It is important to dispel the myth here. Only those who know exactly how it should be done and who can control the work of a freelancer or, in extreme cases, even redo it themselves, can hire freelancers to perform certain tasks. If you don’t understand the issue, then freelancers will do the work, but these will be “pieces of different mosaics” that you cannot put together.

Fisherman or Owner?

And here is the time to ask the question, do you want to master this new and exciting business, or still prefer to buy a schooner and hire a team led by an experienced captain. The choice, of course, is yours, but here it is still worth stopping and reminding you that you cannot just leave your current business and engage in learning and gaining experience in a completely new business for you. If you have a fish restaurant, it is much more productive to do your job well, which you already know how to do now, otherwise you will have to live off savings for the period of study.

You know, our IWBO team loves fish dishes, but it never occurs to any of us to fish other than for fun and cook in our office. We go to have lunch and dinner in a restaurant where people do their job well, while we do our best. And perhaps it is better that it stays this way, if each of us does his job well, then we will all get much more results and this will happen faster.

What would these five steps look like if you contacted us?

1. Would you tell us about your business and what kind of results you want to get. And we would have listened to you carefully and asked the right questions. Then we would suggest a strategy for going online, while choosing the most suitable products, because we have a lot of experience in this. Further, we would make a website, an application and any other Internet resource for you, beautiful, unique and perfectly working. By the way, we have a fully equipped and well-coordinated team, so we work quickly.
2. We would start working on step 2 right away, as soon as you told us about your project, we would do all the work ourselves, including writing, selling texts for you, agreeing and posting on the site.
3. By the time the 'representative office' is ready, we would have already prepared a market entry strategy, because you told us from the very beginning what you want to achieve, and we would immediately start working in this direction, preparing everything for launch. Speed is important, because any of your investments should be recouped as quickly as possible.
4. As soon as users start to enter your website (or your application) as a result of promotion, we immediately begin to analyze all available data and, on its basis, increase conversion, that is, directly work to get your business new orders that increase your income.
5. Our team is legally responsible to you for keeping our promises, because we are not a random freelancer, but a team that knows exactly what to do, how and when. We provide full support and are constantly working to improve your performance, because “it is beneficial for a fisherman who supplies his fish to a restaurant that the restaurant continues to work and buy fish.”

And also, to make it easier for you to recoup your investments, you can pay for our services gradually, without immediately investing a significant amount in a project that will start bringing you money only after some time. And when that time comes, your Internet resource will generate income sufficient to pay the monthly bill for our services.

The choice is yours! And our team wishes you success in your business and delicious food at lunch! ;)