There are so many benefits that you could get when you start your business online. Some of them are, you could reach a wider market worldwide, you don’t have to worry about office supplies since you work from home, and you could minimize the expenses to build a new office.

For some people who don’t know about how to build a website, they choose to trust other people to build it for them. In short, they hire a web designer to create a great website for them. The web designer, especially the professional one, often understands about your needs. They only need to know in what purpose you want to create the website.

If you want to build it for your small business, they could create a website that feels professional and fits with your target market. If you want t a personal yet professional look, they will make it looks friendly. Getting a website from the web designer often leads you to purchase the complete package. Web designer often will offer you a complete package for your business website, including the web template, web hosting, and a domain name. This will make you easier to get all you want in one spot.

Before you choose to buy the complete package from your web designer, you need to watch out for several things first. Ask them where is the URL of the web hosting and the domain name provider that you want to purchase in the package. Spend some of your time to read the offers in those websites, and find out whether it matches with your needs or not. Several things that you should look out for are the uptime, bandwidth, and disk space.

Uptime will show you about how long your website could be accessed by other people. You need to shot for at least 90% to 99.99% uptime for this. The higher the number, the longer time for your website to be accessed by visitor without getting the server crash problem. Bandwidth will show you the amount of website or files that being accessed in or out from your website.

For startup business, you need to get at least 5GB bandwidth to make sure more people could accessed your website before you run out of bandwidth. Disk space itself will be used as your website storage. Either you want to put your website pages, files, videos or anything, you will put it in here. Getting 1GB of disk space is a minimum requirement for your small business.

If you don’t know how to choose the best web hosting packages that contain web hosting plan, template, and a domain name in the same place, you could ask the package from your web designer. He will gladly show you which web hosting that is better for your small business website.

i) Product – There are several aspect that the business owner should take into consideration for the product or service provided in relation to the marketing strategy. The business owner have to consider the benefit for the consumer or customer if they purchase the product or service and detail research in this area is a must. The business owner have to think of creating a outstanding packaging that it could be separated from the competitors’ packaging. The business owner also have to consider the warranty use of the product and how to make the customer feel that they are staying in the comfortable zone after they buy your product.

ii) Price – The next important P is the pricing strategy, if you set the price for a product high you will be facing a great resistance in pursuing people to purchase your product, if you set the price for a product low you will generate a perception of low quality for the product. The business owner have to do some home works to find out what is the best price to charge in order to convince the customer that they have a perception that they are not buying an expensive product with the same product quality which the competitors are able to provide.

iii) Promotion – The business owner have to think on how to promote the product or service provided in order to generate great sales projection. The activities that the business owner would go through includes identify the type of advertising medium that is to be used, the marketing effort that is to be carried out, discuss about public relation, describe the promotional and the plan for using advertising specialties or premium items such as pencil, flower and so on.

iv) Place – The word place means by itself indicate that where your product should be sell at and where your customer can purchase your products. Most of the home based business or small business are selling their product through website, auction or direct mail order. For example, if you own a SEO company and where you sell your SEO product should be through online marketplace like forum, online classifieds, webcart and so on. Place is not determined as where the product originated but is best determined as where you should sell your product.

i) The customer – You must understand the market needs, be focus on a niche market as well as how often the prospect will buy your product or services. You must also know exactly what those customers are doing even you have to know in which sector they are belong to. Understand the customer well is important to your home based business, because they play an important role in rating your products or services and how well you have done on the customer service and follow up. As a business owner, it is also important to know what question would your prospect ask before they raise it to you.

ii) The products – Before you launch the product into the market, you as the business owner (sometimes the product designer as well) have to know in detail what your product is. You have to do your homework on research, training and as well as feedback from customer to get the full knowledge about the product. The better you know about the product, you will be able to identify the potential problem or question that your customer would face, thus you are able to provide a prompt solution to the customer in case they raise. With this, the image for your business in terms of customer service also increase.

iii) The tool – The tool that i mentioned it here is not the tool that you use to create the product or the tool you use to repair the product. The tool that i am talking about here is strategy that you use to sale your product, this includes product sample, customer testimonial and etc. I would say every type of home based business would have a different set of sales tools.

iv) The competitors – Know your competitors well is very important in fighting for the sales in a niche market, you have to know what your competitors doing, how long they have been in the market, the price they charge, their key person in business operation, the customer service level and whatever thing that they are doing in they sales strategy. By knowing your competitors well, you are basically able to plan the sales for now, tomorrow and the far futures.