What's your #1 challenge when building an online biz?

Welcome to Fluther!

I haven’t had much experience building actual online businesses, but I know that turning visitors and page views into money can be a huge obstacle. Simply throwing advertisements into the design won’t necessarily benefit you without a lot of coordination, and creating an online service in which users pay a monthly or one-time fee can be very difficult. The biggest key is to offer a unique service with good design and usability, good reasons for users to subscribe, and a good reputation.

Welcome to Fluther, indeed.

I haven’t done an online business, but from the shoestring business I did create and run for about a year and a half (as a sideline to my ‘day job’), the big problem was promoting it. Getting it known, building a reputation for service, delivery and price. I would imagine that that’s the biggest challenge facing any new business.

My daughter, on the other hand, has opened her own food cart in Madison, WI, and had a great first year. She’s actually starting to make profits, which I didn’t think that she’d be able to do in her first year. (She also scored top marks in a city-employee survey of all Madison carts, beating out a lot of well-established competition.) And now with the cold weather approaching, she’s taken to accepting orders sent to her via text message, and even received one via her Facebook page.

Even for her, though, and the terrific word-of-mouth advertising (she loves it when one person from a neighborhood office tries the food, and the next day five or six people show up from the same place) and the article in the local paper, the big thing is still promoting the product.

What is your business, anyway? Not that we want to invite spam, of course, but you might as well put a plug in a response, right?

HI CyanoticWasp, Yes, getting know and getting people to your website when doing biz online is a huge challenge! I think that the social networking sites like Twitter & FB can really help here.

Your daughter sounds a real dynamo with all the characteristics of a born entrepreneur, not the least being extremely innovative! Does she have a blog? I bet she would have some great stories to tell in posts direct ‘From The Food Cart’!

Thanks for asking about my business :-) I’m an online coach to women entrepreneurs starting out in their online business. That is why I wanted to know what my ‘ideal client’ felt were the biggest challenges! My website is http://drkisane.com

Thank you so much for taking the time to respond.
Kisane

@drkisane she’s following in footsteps that I read to her about, but never had the courage to pursue on my own. I think her first half-year of her-own-business experience has been worth more than the BA she earned the year prior. And I think that she’s starting to realize that, too.

Good luck with your venture.