The internet is a growing and booming medium for aspiring entrepreneurs. However with all of the competition, it takes a little more than a basic website to profit. To build a thriving and profitable website, youll need a few key ingredients.

A Memorable Customer Experience

Think about what matters to you when you shop online ” its your experience as a customer that matters most, right? The same holds true for your website visitors and customers. To create a powerful customer experience you must provide everything necessary for your customers and visitors to make a quick and easy buying decision.

FAQ pages, for example, are a great resource for all those common questions. Shipping charges and easy to find product descriptions are also a must.

A sense of community is also a vital ingredient for a fantastic customer experience. This can be created with, a frequent buyer program, superior customer service and even your about us page can help foster a connection.

Regular and Valuable Content

For business owners, in order to provide your customers and visitors with a fabulous experience a CMS, content management system or article management system will make providing valuable content quick and easy.

A CMS enables you to create, edit, password protect and delete content without the assistance of a webmaster and without needing any programming skills or knowledge. You can upload and manage a high volume of content quickly and easily.

Simple Checkout

While a shopping cart may seem like a mere technicality to you, its an integral part of your customers experience. Customers need to know that their information and transaction is secure. They want to know all shipping and sales tax information right up front, and they want a system which lets them manage their cart with relative ease.

A quality shopping cart system will provide your customers with an easy and secure transaction and you with valuable data and reports at a moderate price.

Search Option

One great feature for customers is the ability to search a site for a specific item or keyword. For example, imagine you’re visiting a pet store and you need to buy a coat to keep your pooch warm during the cold winter months. Rather than having to search through pages and pages of items, having the ability to search for dog coats enhances your shopping experience

Providing this functional search feature enhances your customers experience as well it provides you with valuable keyword data to incorporate into your marketing strategy and product line decisions.

Search Engine Traffic

When building a profitable online business SEO plays a very important role in driving website traffic and sales. A key feature for a website builder is an easy SEO system which makes linking, content, and keyword tagging including meta and alt tags a straightforward process.

Dont forget to include a sitemap in your website. Sitemaps will help you stay at the top of your search engine rankings by informing the search engines each time a change or addition is made to your website.

Branding

As internet marketing becomes more and more competitive. If youre a solopreneur that means your personality is in large part your brand. While logos are important, its often more effective to demonstrate who you are and what youre about in the content and design of your website.

Many website building tools are difficult to navigate, have a steep learning curve and make it extremely difficult to get the look and feel you want to convey. A profitable website, one which provides customers a memorable and enjoyable experience, isnt impossible to create. You just need the right tools and to know what you want the end result to be.