Iowa City

Archive for December, 2009

To generate revenue for your business, you can set up a referral system with business service providers that target entrepreneurs and business operators. For example, you could receive a referral fee for every business person you send to a financial planner, an accountant, or a lawyer in a specific area. You could also develop an alliance between office equipment suppliers, print houses, and other businesses that would benefit from receiving business from your Web site’s visitors.

After developing these alliances, you would be surprised how much money you could make from referrals. You can also sell banner advertising to business service-oriented companies. They would benefit from the targeted advertising exposure that could be generated from your Web site.Initially you will have to pay for the development, design, and hosting of your Web site, computer hardware, computer software, and a printer. If you currently have some of these items, your initial start-up costs will be considerably lower. You will also have to design some sort of tracking system to track your
referrals to the businesses that you are promoting on your site. If you are planning to launch a mailing list, you will have to purchase mailing list software.
This will help you maintain, manage, and distribute your mail list. Other costs
that you will incur are related to the promotion of your Web site. Estimated cost is $10,000 to $30,000 to start.

This type of business can be established to assist entrepreneurs who are interested in starting a business or to help existing businesses enhance their current business operation. You can provide entrepreneurs with information on how to register a business, different tax issues that need to be addressed when running a business, and other information that can help them set up and run their business.

This information will be easy for you to provide to your visitors, as it will be accessible from your local government offices. These government offices will also be able to supply you with any forms, brochures, or pamphlets that you will want to make available to your visitors. This will help you cut down on high overhead costs. You can also provide current business operators with resources that will help them run their businesses more efficiently. You could develop a directory of various consultants, accountants, financial advisors, office equipment suppliers, and so on, that would be accessible from your Web site. Current business operators could easily reference your site when trying to outsource activities to a specialized organization or purchase new materials for their business operation. This directory would be a great asset to all business operators.

Since your main source of revenue is going to be generated from the sale of online advertising, it is very important that you ensure that the server hosting your site has high-speed access. You don’t want to have a slow-loading site, because this won’t be attractive to advertisers. If it takes a long time to download a page of your site, both visitors and advertisers will be dissatisfied.

You should ensure that your Web site has an attractive interface with consistent navigation throughout your site. Since your advertisers will be posting their ads on your site linking out to their site, you should develop the interface so that the visitor doesn’t actually leave your site. What you can do is have your advertiser’s site appear in a pop-up window. This enables the visitor to continue to navigate throughout your site without having to click back in his or her browser.

Since your target market is senior citizens, you should remember not to make your Web site design too complex. You should use fonts that are larger than your typical font size. You should also ensure that navigating throughout your site is easy. Any complications may cause a senior citizen to leave your site due to confusion. You should update your Web site constantly. Perhaps you could have a What’s New page that is continuously updated with recent site additions or information that would be of interest to seniors. You could ask visitors if they would like to be notified via e-mail of any updates that you make to your What’s New page. This would be a great way to encourage repeat traffic, and seniors would definitely appreciate hearing from you.