10 Steps to Starting a Successful Business
According to the statistics provided by the University of Phoenix, in 2014, almost 50% of all employees in the age from 20 to 30 wanted to start their business. Still, as stated in a Wall Street Journal research, in 2015, only 3,6% of these people started their companies. Needless to say, nowadays, technologies become more and more user-friendly. Modern customers can buy whatever they want and do it anytime they need. You can easily book an appointment with your doctor, order food, purchase different stuff and get information about any services. There is no need to lose time by standing in lines because you can do all of these and even more without leaving the house.
As you can see, these days, businesses became extremely fast and shopper-oriented. Thanks to the newest technologies, everything became easier for business owners as well! For example, just think of the difference between modern websites and the ones we had in 2009. Those days, running the usual business site cost big money. To do it, business owners hired professional web designers and developers. Alas, the result was still far from perfect. Such online projects were quite boring but, what’s more crucial, they weren’t visitor-friendly at all.
Back to 2019, now anyone is able to set up their business site. No coding required! All you need to do is to choose a best-selling landing page template to work with. Everything is as simple as ABC. As a result, the latest business statistic inspires! Nowadays, 69% of US entrepreneurs start their business at home. No wonder, people want to start their own projects because today is a perfect time for it. We live in times of amazing digital progress, so you have everything and anything you may ever need. Regardless of starting a business in Singapore, in the US or remotely, what should you start with? Well, this is the question any beginner asks, so, in this post, I’ll share with you 10 must-have steps on starting a successful business in 2019.
Before we get started, I also recommend you to check out this post. Here you will find 5 simple tips for successful startup project management.
1. Focus On The Idea
Needless to say, the development of different technologies influenced any business type. Today, you can see that almost everyone starts promoting their companies. All in all, you are a part of a highly competitive era. In 2019, it is hard to stand out from the crowd. Still, hard doesn’t mean impossible. Just follow my quick step-by-step guide on how to start a winning startup.
First things first, I want you to focus on the idea you are about to promote. Is it unique enough to impress modern customers? Without a doubt, nowadays, there might be tons of companies that provide the same services. However, you should do your best to create something genuinely inimitable. Something that will make people prefer your business to other companies they can see on the market. To begin with, ask yourself the next questions.
- What are the most essential advantages of using your services?
- Are there any features you can be proud of?
- Why should prospects like your company?
Here you should pay attention to the details. All in all, each of them can influence the reputation of your company. It can be a timely delivery or a delicious cup of coffee clients can get for free when visiting your office.
2. Be Flexible
To make a long story short, the progress made shoppers’ life super comfortable. That’s why, in 2019, offering high-quality products and services is not enough to get attention. Would you like your company to become a real go-to place? Thus, be flexible! In fact, modern customers are kinda spoiled. They get used to comfort and expect you to provide it. So, keep in mind, whatever you do, you should do it with a customer in mind!
How to make people love your business? Before all else, know everything about your potential audience. You should know the needs of your customers in order to keep them satisfied. Needless to say, you can do it by simply studying your prospects. You will need to know as many things as possible. Here are only a few questions to think of.
- Who are these people?
- How old are they?
- Where are they from?
- Why do they use the services you provide?
- What makes them choose a particular company?
- Are they satisfied with the services they get?
- What are the most significant advantages your prospects are looking for when choosing a service provider?
- What are the other services they may be interested in?
When it comes to starting a business in 2019, there’s one more thing to be done. You should also study your competitors. Start with the successful ones. What are the most popular companies who provide the same services? Why customers get back to them? What are the advantages? Are there any disadvantages?
In case you found some downsides of your well-known competitors, use this information smartly. Do your best to make sure that people won’t get the same downsides when they are working with you. In the end, you should follow the opinion of your audience and be as flexible as you can. People will always prefer a customer-oriented business to a well-known one.
3. Run A Professional Website
Should I explain to you why you need a professional website? There’s no secret, these days, you can’t stay on the market without being online. No company that can survive without a professionally created site. It is the most lucrative and proven way to showcase your business all over the globe. Thanks to the properly designed online project, you will easily:
- showcase your business to a huge online audience,
- find new customers abroad,
- enter the global market, and much more!
Besides, with it, you don’t even need to pay rent! Today, you can build a cool business site without running out of the budget with the help of the ready-to-use themes I mentioned above. And here we move to the next point!
4. Choose a Website Theme
Do you need any experience to build a site with such products? Nope! Website themes are 100% code-free and absolutely creator-friendly. Users of all skill levels can work with these themes. Also, all the worthy ready-made themes come with visual instructions. Plus, there are many free tutorials you can find on YouTube, detailed guides, etc.
Fortunately, you can find a theme for any business type. It doesn’t matter how rare or unusual your business may look. By the way, you don’t have to launch a vast online project right now. If you are out of time or simply not sure you need a big website, start with a landing page. It will provide prospects with all necessary details.
Here are your must-haves. Make sure your online project has the next sections:
- gallery,
- contacts,
- company information,
- feedback,
- services or products list.
5. Choose Domain Name
Basically, when it comes to online sales, choosing a name for your domain is an extra important step. All in all, it will be the first thing a prospect sees when they visit your site. So how to make the right choice?
Keep in mind that:
- your domain name does influence how users will refer to your business,
- look for short domain names because they are easier to remember,
- make sure your domain name is also easy to type,
- search for a brandable and memorable domain name,
- make sure it is catchy enough to get the attention of prospects,
- and, obviously, your domain name should be related to your business.
In addition, you should also think about using a custom domain name to shorten and brand your links. Using a branded link shortener can help you turn a long, ugly link into a short, memorable phrase- featuring your brand.
6. Search For Must-Haves
Once you are through this, it’s time to work on the design of your business site. As the name of the point says, you’ll need to look for some must-haves and add them to your web design. Keep calm! You won’t need to edit the online project by hand. When it comes to modern website themes, you can change the design quickly and without touching a single line of code.
Actually, the only thing you have to do is to look for the needed functions. Here are the features to look for when you choose a site template:
- mobile-friendly design,
- cross-browser compatibility,
- Retina-ready design,
- responsive design,
- Search Engines Optimization,
- WPML-ready design that supports RTL,
- readable and eye-friendly typography,
- multi currency option,
- lightning-fast loading speed,
- clean and eCommerce-ready design.
You may find numerous website themes offering the above-specified pointers. However, after you are done selecting the right theme for you and as you plan to develop your website according to the theme then you must perform cross browser testing to ensure a consistent and seamless experience to all of your website visitors.
As the name suggests, cross browser testing is a process where you test your website rendering capabilities across different browsers for both mobile and desktop operating systems. There is a pain point to it though and that is around the infrastructure setup and maintenance. After all, you may have to test across a hundred browsers + OS combinations or maybe more and doing so on your own inhouse infrastructure could be a very costly and time-consuming task. Fortunately, we have got online cross browser testing tools such as LambdaTest, which allows you to test your website on 2000+ real browsers & OS over a cloud-based infrastructure which is ready to fire up any time you want. Just select the browser, OS, screen resolution, and launch the environment for your testing URL.
You can also test your locally hosted web pages. That way, you can ensure your website’s theme is cross browser compatible and responsive across different screen resolutions and viewport, even before you make your website live. And in case, you want things to be done in the fast lane then you can perform Selenium automation testing with LambdaTest as well.
Thanks to these features, your business project will meet recent requirements.
7. Make It Customer-Friendly
When the technical part of your business website is ready, it’s time to go further. Let’s make it customer-friendly! In a word, everything depends on comfort. Thus, now your main goal is to help a prospect find exactly what they are looking for. People should be able to find the needed information quickly when they are using your site.
To improve the design of your business website, you will need such features as:
- hamburger menu that will contain lots of information without overloading the website,
- easy-to-use site navigation which allows you to sort its content with categories and subcategories,
- a sticky menu that remains on the top of the page when a visitor scrolls it down,
- properly designed headers and footers with all the needed buttons,
- back-to-top button,
- intuitive search that shows results when a user is typing, etc.
As you can see, there are lots of features that can improve the design of your site. Start with the basic ones and only then move to the trendy elements.
8. Create Your Logo
Here is another must-have step for you. Thanks to a smartly designed logo, people will easily recognize your business among other companies. It will be the identifier of your work. For these simple reasons, the logo you choose should be connected to your business as well. When working on the logo, you are going to use, remember that it should be:
- memorable,
- eye-friendly,
- unique,
- simple,
- and meaningful.
When your logo is ready, place it in the top left corner of the website. It is the most popular place, so your prospects already expect to find your logo there. Finally, I recommend you to link the logo to your main page.
9. Visual Elements
Finally, you can start working with the creative part of your website. Undeniably, vogue is such an unpredictable thing! New trends appear every month, and they come for the world of website building as well. There are so many recently appeared trends, but you don’t need to follow all of them. It will quickly overload the look of your business site so that it won’t be comfy anymore. So how to add beauty to the design of your business site in a stylish way? Use visuals!
The thing is that the human brain is a weird and complicated mechanism. It always recognizes visual elements faster than other types of information. To say more, our brain remembers visual info for a longer period of time. That is why you should definitely use some visuals to highlight important details.
Here are the visual web design elements to look for:
- various counters,
- call-to-action buttons,
- graphics and infographics,
- progress bars,
- carousels,
- slideshow, etc.
10. Social Integration
In 2019, social media makes a big part of our everyday routine. That’s why it’s important to integrate your business website with all the popular SM platforms. Just create the accounts if you haven’t done it yet and connect them to your landing page. There will be more people to hear about your business! Plus, with it, you can get more unique visitors and social traffic.
Final Thoughts
As you can see, there is nothing impossible for a modern person. In 2019, starting your own company is not a luxury. Lots of people all over the globe successfully do it without any special skills. Technologies become more and more user-friendly every single day. Don’t hesitate to make use of it! Now, let’s sum everything up! Here is what you should do to start a winning business in 2019:
- focus on your idea and develop it,
- analyze your business,
- do research to analyze your competitors’ work,
- compare the results to know what you should look for,
- find your target,
- study the needs of your prospects,
- stay flexible to meet all today’s requirements,
- run a professional business site,
- style it with all must-haves,
- make the site customer-friendly,
- look for trendy features,
- use visuals,
- create a logo,
- and use social media.
About The Author- Xandra Curtis is a 25-year-old founder and owner of GetYourPapers company. Her writing startup appeared to be successful. Today, the resource provides lots of US students with different ready-made college assignments and not only. Also, Curtis is the author of several books and regularly writes guest posts for such well-known companies as TemplateMonster.
