There are literally hundreds of things you can do to develop your online business but what is most important. Wouldn’t it be nice if you had a structure in place to help you develop your online business goals. More than just a strategy but a well-defined process to achieve your goals. This article will give you that structure.

There are lots of sites that help you with web site layout or just getting your site online. Before you just to sign up for their service you must consider what they are offering and if it is beneficial to your business. All web sites are not created equal, some are meant for information, some are meant for graphics and style, some are meant for ease of navigation and yet others are just product sales tools. This is just a small summary of some generic uses, you must decide your purpose, are you promoting a product or service. Secondly, if you are selling items what tools are you going to use to sell your products. For example, PayPal, credit card transactions, email transfers and bank transfers to a name a few. We will cover 4 areas that will help you with your website process.

1. Web Layout

How you design your web layout is very important. Some important points of the website are title and company logo area, usually at the top. It is important that this brands your site and is attractive but does not complete a full stop but a transition to other parts of your website. One instance where this may not be true is a separate log and company name page. Another important part is a listing of web pages, this may be only 5 across the top or on bigger information sites may contain 20-30 titles. The most important are: welcome page, product/service page, company information page, testimonials, and a contact us page. There are many other pages you can design if you have several products or services but you want to ensure they are productive pages and do not just may customers get lost. This brings us to our next topic which is customer flow. How can you affect customer flow on a website.

2. Web Page Customer Flow

Everything you do on a webpage creates customer flow, it is like painting a picture or designing a layout in a retail store. The size and quantity of the words and color and style of graphics you use will determine this. If a person looks at your site and sees a lot of text they may have the desire to read and find it informative but you must have something to draw them in whether it be a bold text subject or related graphic. They may not want to read your text and you must be able to say in a short amount of time what this page is about and what makes it attractive to people.

3. Traffic Development

Thereby comes the next topic, traffic development, you have to attract a large number of people, all people will not buy, may be only 1-5% will, depending on your niche. There are numerous companies that assist with traffic development, Google a search to find a company. One of the most important topics to touch on in this area is local vs global traffic, niche oriented traffic to your topic, e.g. via lists. and finally quantity of leads and hits. Make sure there is a way you can track this to make sure you are getting what you pay for. Most of all don’t overspend, more spending on marketing does not always generate more traffic, consult a marketing expert and make a budget.

4. Referral Value

Finally an important topic is referral value. How valuable is your site, since you have developed traffic and web layout and flow. How desirable is it to go to your site, to use your site, to have people buy from your site. How valuable is your information or product. Most important do you have people or customer to give you testimonials to back this up and do you include that on your website.

We hope this article helps give you an overall process in developing your web business and help understand how websites differ from other business models.

Over a rather longer than usual coffee break, a life-long buddy, in a moment of insight, restated the old axiom: tough times require tough measures!

As an SME owner, his expressed insight was that the SME community will be under incredible pressure to survive over the coming 12 months (some say 24 months).

Doom and gloom!!!!

As we trans-versed all the realities, myths, biases and stereotypes of the current economic climate, including the survival prospects for the SME community over the coming year, all the problems of the world were solved!

So, what did we conclude?

Well, we concluded that for the SME community, the first challenge is to not only survive the economic downturn, but also to buttress the SME owner’s sagging self-confidence!

An SME owner knows full-well that they get hammered from all points of the compass!

In difficult times, the big corporates cut rates, target the vulnerable SMEs, (e.g., particularly those in a position to steal market share by doing things more efficiently) and play the political ‘game’ with aplomb – like the SME finds difficult to replicate!

In addition, the Tax Office/IRS thinks the SME community are screwing them blind! Enough to want to make one less than optimistic!

So, the old adage was restated: When the going gets tough, the tough get going!

What does ‘get going’ mean and how does the SME compete with the corporates?

Simple, do it better, more efficiently, more personally and with passion! Don’t forget, ego kills SMEs.

Which competitor has the most complementary product/service to yours?

Well, put the ego in the hip pocket; assess which competitor you can work with best; partner with them – operate a strategic alliance – and share administrative and operational overheads!

Don’t forget, 2 + 2 sometimes equals 5!

Rubbish!

Check the recent acquisitions of late by corporates of vibrant and efficient SMEs.

Remember, no corporate can ever match your agility and your cost base! They are not your enemies; they may even be your retirement fund!

So, what is the best strategy?

Sun Tzu wrote about strategic choices and outcomes around 400BC when he stated: “Best to have your enemies inside your tent peeing out, rather than outside your tent peeing in!” A mental picture not easy to forget!

In other words, the starting point is to ask “…what would be the best outcome for us..?’ Not “…from where do we start the journey…?” And, what graphic or metaphor best describes the outcome?

What’s a strategic plan?

A strategic plan is a charted course for leaders and employees to get an organization to where its stakeholders would like it to be usually in 3 to 5 years. During the strategic planning process an organization establishes its strategic directions and objectives, and specifies the means to achieving these objectives including resource allocation (money, people, and effort), interim goals, and how to measure progress toward achieving these goals.

Operations and people-related benefits.

Strategic planning has a multitude of benefits to organizations. These benefits are essentially operations-related and people-related and come from simply having a plan and working together to establish and achieve common goals. In this series of five posts, we’ll consider some of the major operations-related benefits first (parts 1 to 4), and end with the major people-related benefits (part 5). I have attempted to organize the series in some meaningful way, beginning with the broad benefits, then moving into specific operational benefits, and ending with people benefits. However, this is not meant to suggest that one benefit is more important than the other. They are equally advantageous and integral to organizational growth and success. Moreover, the benefits are not discrete, they are correlated – benefits in one area, usually mean a cascade of benefits in many areas.

Effective Control Over Change

The essential operations-related benefit of strategic planning is being able to more effectively control and manage organizational change. In general, having a solid plan for the future helps to ensure that an organization is prepared as best as possible to make positive internal changes or achieve important goals. Elements of the strategic planning process are devoted to scanning the current external (e.g., the economy) and internal trends (e.g., turnover or poor communication) in order to be able to make reasonable predictions about the future. This analysis and others allow organizations to construct a path to remediating identified problems and to actively manage changes rather than having changes and events befall them.

Planned internal cultural change.

Strategic planning helps organizations identify their priorities and their major concerns in order to develop a sound method for addressing them. The early stages of a good strategic plan must include establishing or reviewing the organization’s mission and values and describing the organizational culture. This provides a meaningful foundation for planning for the future. It reminds everyone of what is really important – what the organization is there to do and how it is supposed to do it. Once the priorities are established, the Strategic Planning Committee can evaluate whether the organization meets these priorities or whether changes need to be made to meet them.

Are you actually delivering the best product in the fastest time? Are there children who are falling through the cracks because your intake process is inadequate? Is the morale of your employees affecting productivity? Do they need to collaborate as your Core Values state, or does that just sound like a good contemporary value you should have? Do they actually collaborate? Why?

Identifying the core issues helps leaders develop a plan to start fulfilling priorities or continue to fulfill them. Thus, an organization can conduct controlled internal change to bring the actual culture of the organization in line with the ideal culture. Importantly, a careful analysis helps organizations understand that changes or problems in one area are likely not confined to that area – changes made to one area of the organization will spill over into areas, positively or negatively. When generating a strategic plan, then, an organization determines whether it needs to change internally, plans how to do so, and predicts how changes in one area will affect other areas of organizational life. It is more efficient and effective to control the changes within your organization rather than allow them to occur naturally. Things do not get better on their own or with quick-fix schemes.

Predicted and unpredicted external change.

Another part of creating a strategic plan is to scan the external environment (social, political, economic, environmental, and technological), define the current context, and describe its relevance to your organization. Look at the trends in these areas, do your research, and try to understand the possible changes that could happen in these areas a couple of years down the road. Your goals and strategies must be based in part on the broader context within which the organization exists. This keeps you grounded in reality and protects you to some extent from being blindsided by developments that may be in the wind.

But nothing is for sure. A careful external environment analysis provides much context, but there can be no guarantees about what is going to happen around you. However, having a plan means your organization has a touch-point when unpredicted and uncontrollable changes do occur in the environment.

Having a strategic plan means that everyone understands what is really important under normal circumstances or when slow-burning emergencies or sudden disasters occur. Not only does it help people focus, it provides comfort and keeps people centered. A strategic plan provides a starting point that helps leaders understand whether they need to deviate from the current direction temporarily or long-term, and slightly or extremely in light of the unpredicted developments. A strategic plan lays out the desired road ahead, but is also a mainstay if adaptation needs to occur. This cannot be stressed enough. Planning is critical for controlled organizational growth and development and effectively dealing with emergencies. Dealing with an emergency without a strategic plan always means starting from ground zero.

Examples.

Strategic plans help not-for-profit organizations. In a downward economic trend a charity organization constructing a strategic plan may determine that not only could their funding be cut because the money just isn’t there, but because it serves a workforce-aged population there could be reduced service demands if these people need to leave the area for opportunities elsewhere. This may suggest a need to downsize. Downsizing is a complex and delicate organizational change in itself, but the need for a charity to become smaller may reduce their funding even more and lead to concerns about service quality and the ability to continue to deliver all services. Strategic planning can help this charity prioritize and gain the needed perspective to focus on the critical issues.

Strategic planning can also help a for-profit organization that wishes to expand its product line. Strategic planning will help this organization determine where it wants to go and whether the new directions fit into their current brand (or image), and if not, whether they need to re-brand themselves. Strategic planning will help this organization understand the critical factors that must change to accommodate the new product line and the ramifications this will have on current operations and practices. A strategic plan will help this organization articulate and actualize their vision.

Planned and controlled evolution.

Whatever the results of the analysis in whatever type of organization, strategic planning is proactive rather than reactive. It is strategic, not tactical. It is a long-term solution rather than a short-term band-aid. It is planned and controlled evolutions, not impulsive or hasty modifications. Strategic planning means effective change management. Period.