An interesting perspective building a business that lasts. Roughly 1/3 of new businesses don't make the 5-year mark. Find out how you might avoid that and make your business last 100 years.

Moxwai has been around since 2009 and it is nice to see some of the stuff that kinda felt right to do, showing up in someone's TED talk!

You can watch the video above or click here to access the video from TED:

https://www.ted.com/talks/martin_reeves_how_to_build_a_business_that_lasts_100_years

Summary: Building a Business That Lasts

If you don't have time to watch the video above then here is the guts of it. Success in business can be related to the human immune system. The critical success factors found in the immune system and  most businesses that have lasted 100 years or more are:

About Woocommerce

WordPress was originally released in 2003 and few people could have predicted the impact that it would have. Roughly 75 million websites are built in WordPress, that is about 26% of the web! If you want to do e-commerce in WordPress there is only one option as far as I'm concerned, and that's Woocommerce. I have the numbers to back me up here. According to the Woocommerce website, there have been 22 million downloads of Woocommerce. That might not necessarily mean there are 22 million sites running Woocommerce, but it is still a healthy number and shows strong support for the software. One number we can feel more sure about is the percentage of the e-commerce market that Woocommerce holds and that is a whopping 41% of the market share. That is to say of all the e-commerce systems, such as Magento, Squarespace, Shopify etc, Woocommerce owns 41% of that space, with Magento and Shopify coming in second an 5% each. To me it's almost a no-brainer, if you are serious about e-commcerce then look no further. Woocommerce started in 2008 and has gone from strength to strength. 

Above: Man tries to resuscitate donkey, which is easier than SEO.

What is SEO?

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is the fancy way of saying, 'Where does my website rank in the Google search engine results pages, and how can I improve its position'.

We are all sick of getting spammed about SEO and behalf of SEO I would like to apologise for all the spam, but... there are real reasons to pay attention to Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). The best reason is that it is directly related to how much business you can acquire online. The next best reason is that it's cheaper that just about any other form of marketing. Spend $5000 on radio advertising and when that ad campaign is gone, so is your $5k. Spend $5K on SEO and it's the investment that keeps on giving. Once you near the top of the Google results, it's relatively easy to stay there, leads, sales, and new clients will keep on coming. 

Why getting a Website makes sense

A website can help engage with your customers at many points in the buying cycle, from awareness to research or even a purchase online using ecommerce. Covering off these touch points is the core of Digital Marketing and a website will often tick more of these boxes than any other form of digital marketing. 

Credibility

Although the primary reason may sound a little vague, it is to gain credibility for your business.Almost everyone regardless of whether they are purchasing a product or service, will at some point check your website. A lot of people want to do some background checking on your products or company, therefore, they expect to see a website popping up on the first page in Google when they type in your product or brand.

If you don't have a website you run the risk of your prospective customer checking out your competition and spending their money elsewhere. It doesn't matter if you build your own site or you pay someone else to do it, you should at the very least have a website with your basic contact information and ideally some info on the products and services you offer. If you want to go for extra credit then your website can relate a strong sense of the values behind your brand, the level of professionalism that you offer and the demographic your product is pitched at.

Google is on a mission to make the www (world wide web) a more secure place. The way they intend to do this is by getting every website to have a digital certificate and use https:// at the start of their domain name, instead of the more popular http://. The S at the front indicates whether a site is secure or not, but the web browser also displays its  own message, see above from Google's Chrome browser. Google has turned this on already for any page that loads with a form, eg your contact form or employment form. They will turn it on for all pages in the immediate future. The benefits that a digital certificate provides are as follows: