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Have you heard? Everything’s gone digital.

Pretty much whatever you’re selling has to have an online presence, even if it’s a service that ultimately requires meeting people face-to-face.  And while it’s easy to think that all you have to do is start up a website and a Twitter handle to have the money roll right in, there are plenty of things you should think about before you get started.

Just like there are plenty of programs working in the background to make sure your phone or laptop is working properly, the same true about every successful online brand.

Having Your Back Covered Legally

Since you are a business, you are suddenly liable for whatever you provide, whether it be a product or service. And while it’s important to have a positive outlook, and try your best to make sure everything goes off without a hitch, you also have to be realistic.

You might run into problems with copyright, malfunctions, or competitors.

In fact, the more successful you become, the more likely it is that you are going to have to deal with a lawsuit, if only because other people think they can get some money from you. That’s why knowing all about lawsuit loans can be a godsend to your business.

The challenge with digital brands is that it is too easy to feel like you can hide behind the massive behemoths like Amazon or Google and that you won’t get as much attention as either of them, but sometimes it’s these big corporations that look for the slightest bit of competition.

If they send you a ‘cease and desist’ letter and you know that you’re in the right, being able to afford a lawyer through the lawsuit is essential to coming out on top.

Your Site Is Your New Receptionist

Who even needs a phone number these days?

You might not have a living person handling people’s appointments, bookings, orders, and complaints, but you have to make sure that the way people can do these things on your website is very easy to do.

For all the great leaps the internet has made in changing how we do business, it is still not as fast as asking a question to a person on the other end of a phone call, so when someone creates an account on your site to order a product or service, the easier it is to give them the information they need right away is essential.

Ask friends and family members to navigate your site just after it goes live. See if they can click around and know what they’re doing at every step, and even have them send you an email just to make sure it arrives in your inbox. These little self-checks can go a long way to make sure that

Some Good Lighting

If you’re selling a physical product, one of these easiest things to forget is to make sure the photos on your website look stellar. Since you can quickly take a photo with your phone and upload it, you don’t realize that it might not look so great…until you check out someone else’s website and notice a bad photo on theirs.

With websites, you can’t rely on your snappy personality or a nice showroom floor to keep the customer interested. The pictures of the product on your website have to professional.

We’re talking car-commercial-level sleekness in this case. Buying at least one professional light to shine on your product as you take a photo is essential, and you’ll be surprised at how affordable some of them can be.

A Catchy Name

While the above issue about lighting is a very 21st-century issue, good branding is as old as marketing and sales itself. But with the internet, people’s attention spans have shortened even more, and that means to get them interested in your product or service has to happen in seconds.

Think how many times you skip the thirty-second ad on YouTube after five seconds are up. That means you have to get people to remember your name in only five seconds. And that means having a clever name, a clever slogan, or a clever visual joke or meme to draw them and stop them from clicking skip.

Heck, you might even want to use the reverse psychology trick and make the slogan purposely bad just to keep them watching.

Like That Like Button

As attention spans are shortening, so are the time people are taking to say something good about a product or service. If they are upset about something, don’t worry, they can make a full ten-minute rant video or even write a long letter how about disappointed they were.

But if something worked great, chances are the best you are going to get from them is a ‘like’. Marketing has worked so well that now people expect ‘amazingness’ from everything, even their cleaning supplies.

This means that the ‘like’ button has become the chief way to know if you’re doing a good job, and since it’s typically a public thing on your social media pages, it means that everyone else can see what kind of job you are doing.

While it makes sense from a personal perspective to not get too hung up on the thumbs up and thumbs down buttons, for a business, it is akin to a customer survey in real-time.

While you always have to deal with trolls, taking actual complaints seriously is a very important part of making your business a success.

Not addressing issues, or dismissing them with snide comments risks your attitude going viral, and not in a good way.