You choose a web design firm out there, tell them about your requirement and get your website launched weeks later. Yes, your budget gets you a website, but not the results.

All businesses create a website for reasons. From generating more enquiries to online sales. Yet, this strategy, most of the time, if not all the time, failed to deliver the conversion you are hoping for. Why

20/80 rules

Our general rule of thumb is to spend only 20% of your budget on development while you should allocate 80% on marketing activities. After many years of providing online solution to our clients, we are confident to say that your marketing effort is the ONLY way your visitors will find out about your online presence, and NOT a pretty-flashy-graphically-packed website.

Less is more…

Our approach is very simple. First, we begin with a thorough study on the nature of your business to identify your critical conversion factors and how it is measured. Next, we prepare ONLY the necessary groundwork that focuses on increasing your conversion ratios. This reduces unnecessary resources spent on “nice-to-have” features, which increases speed to market.

Future planning made easier

You can make improvisations only if you know where are you standing now such as your visitors and its conversion. The more you understand about your current situation, the easier and more accurate your next strategy will be.

Building on a wealth of experience

We have helped many different businesses migrate online throughout the years. Although the nature of each business is radically different, we are able to apply what we’ve learned from various industries and apply the strategies to help you in driving up your conversion ratios.

What makes an online business?

‘Feeding a fish with a carrot.’ Doesn’t really makes sense does it? Feeding a rabbit with a carrot would seem to be a sentence more grounded in reality. Anyway, let’s leave that aside for the moment (it’ll make sense later) and get to what we’re trying to say here. Now, ask any online business today whether they would like to get their hands on the international market and they’ll probably say, “What an unnecessary question that is!”

Ask them if they would want to reach 180 countries, they will very likely say, “Who doesn’t?”

Few online businesses limit themselves to the local market yet in venturing into the international market, all are faced with challenging issues. Below are some points that will help you see some of those issues.

What’s the world’s most widely spoken language?

If you say it’s English without any second thoughts and therefore believe that’s the language that will solve all your problems, well, you’re half-right. You may however, want to give the Long tail model a chance to explain to you that you will need other languages to capture untapped markets. See, estimates of English speakers around the world vary from 275 million to 450 million, while Spanish number from 150 to over 300 million, Hindi speakers are projected to be around 150 to 350 million, and Russian from 150 to 180 million.

So yeah, English is maybe the language that most people around the globe speak, but there are substantial numbers of other languages that online businesses must consider in their endeavors to reach the international market.

What is Google?

To an American, Google is a household name for search engines. While in Korea, Google’s Korean-language search service makes up only less than 2% of search page views and search-related ad revenues. Makes you wonder if it’s the same Google!

Americans consider flash and graphic objects in a website as being superfluous and ostentatious. Its pictures and rich interfaces serve only as distractions rather than aids to them, and most times they would be better suited just to use the old fashioned and simple-looking alphabets to form words for communication. Strength in simplicity would seem to be their preferred modus operandi.

However, it has been noted that in the Asian culture there is a predilection in using ‘characters’ or graphic representation of words to communicate. As such, a powerful search engine like Google would not seem as promising to some simply because of its primitive and unsophisticated look. Talk about being worlds apart!

Not everyone is savvy

Language is not the only barrier that you have to cross. You may think that you’re reaching your target audience with the media that you’ve chosen. But don’t overlook the fact that there can be things that can be overlooked.

Like under-developed nations who are not as IT-savvy as others are or young people who may be using your system but have no clue whatsoever as to how to upload a system. Or maybe for some, English isn’t a mother tongue and certain systems may have to be simpler in its use of the language for them to understand. They may not also be familiar with jargons and terminologies associated with the system.

We believe the key is in various elements. One is coming up with a good keyword; a simple yet effective step that can help a lot. Another is the development of a simpler system that is able to be enhanced gradually with time.

With all that, you may just be able to feed a fish with a carrot!

Lots of people will tell you they have an Internet business but the fact is, there’s no such thing - the Internet is not a business, it’s a tool. Granted there may be businesses that use the Internet and the growing army of web apps as their primary or only way to generate, nurture, and convert leads, but a business is still a business.

The reason I want to point this out so emphatically is that too many small business owners look at the Internet as some sort of disconnected form of business - disconnected that is from the rest of their business.

No matter what your business sells you must have a customer, you must have a compelling message, you must have something that people want, before you really have a business. You can’t simply add a blog to your marketing mix and think that you’ve harnessed the Internet. If you throw yourself into the Internet without the proper context of a business, you’ll likely waste your time, money and effort - and then you’ll conclude it doesn’t work for your kind of business.

I know there are lots of folks out there that will tell you differently - that you can throw anything on the web and call it a business, but I’m telling you, it’s not so, never has been, never will be. (By the way, selling you that dream is their business.)

The Internet is an essential piece of the marketing mix - Ignore it and you’ll be obsolete. But, use it to do things you can’t offline, amplify your message, build a community, automate marketing functions, serve clients and collaborate with partners, and do it all in order to attract more of your ideal client, communicate your core message, and build trust through education.

Now that’s what I call an Internet business.

Post by John Jantsch

After the successful launch of www.fmgc.com.my, Fetal Medicine and Gynaecology Centre (FMGC) is to have a “Towards a Healthy Mother & Baby” Forum. This is held in conjunction of Dr. Patrick Chia & Dr. S. Raman’s new book launch “Is My Pregnancy Normal?” – A Guide to Healthy Mothers & Babies’. It will be a great opportunity to meet and learn from the experts themselves and have essential information which could be handy.
 
1.com.my has been broadcasting newsletters to the members of FMGC to spread FMGC’s message the awareness and importance of a healthy pregnancy.  This is a measure to keep members updated with the activities and events of FMGC, and keep them informed of happenings that might be of their interest.
 
For more information on this forum, kindly download the flyer of “Towards a Healthy Mother & Baby” Forum.

News like YouTube sold for 1.6 billion USD to Google, eBay acquired Skype for 2.6 billion often get all of us so excited and usually make us start to wonder about how we too can start something similar. Incidentally, AirAsia with their online booking system, grew their flight business continuously in the last 5 years.

AirAsia outsourced their booking engine to a third party solution provider, but we’ve never heard Larry of Google or Steve Chen of YouTube engaged similar strategy to develop the online business for them. Instead, their solution is “home-brewed”.

This is because AirAsia’s core business is to provide affordable flight (Everyone Can Fly!) and the booking engine is just a medium for the public to book their tickets. No matter how well they design the entire booking system, it is more important to have a well managed airline system. Outsourcing the ticket booking system can allow Tony to concentrate more on the airline business itself.

So, let’s look at a scenario here where Ah Beng wants to build a second eBay.

He proposed to us that he wants to build a platform like eBay and then asked us for a full-fledge proposal of the entire system. These people either do not understand what it cost to build a successful online business and instead of them providing us the specifications, they are asking us to do it for them. It’s like asking the architect to find me a good location for my next restaurant.

You might ask then, what kind of services we provide, since we don’t help people build their second eBay?

After Ah Beng realized how a second ebay wouldn’t work as he’d planned, he then started his own restaurant business in Klang Valley. Business grew by leaps and bounds. Reservations of table through the receptionist became a bottleneck with the increment of business volume. He then came to us again after realizing how an online reservation system can help him clear the bottleneck and at the same time how he can use the online medium to expand his market reach.

After outsourcing his entire online presence to us, Ah Beng can then continue to concentrate on his restaurant business, where his expertise lies in. From this experience, Ah Beng realized that a successful online strategy is very much like a good restaurant, where the owner must himself understand how the restaurant business works.