Regardless of all your advertising and efforts to bring new customers to your online business, your success will depend on your ability to attract the attention of new viewers. The marketplace today is replete with new businesses trying to get noticed. Clearly, this is a tougher task than some may think as about 50% of all new businesses will fail by the end of their first year and the number will be close to 90% after 5 years.

So how do you go about helping your online business stand out? Here are five tips to help your endeavor:

1.    Keep some tried and true basics. An unfortunate number of ‘new age’ professionals have started neglecting the foundation principles of good presentation. When dressing up your website, follow a consistent layout, keep the colors neutral enough that they are easy to read, don’t experiment too much with font styles, and don’t try to cram too much information into a front page. Readers’ brains respond better to a presentation that follows familiar patterns. If the information is easy to physiologically process after a quick scan, it is much more likely to catch a client’s attention than if special effort is needed to adjust to colors, text wrapping, etc.
2.    Find your edge. Keeping the traditional basics lays the foundation to get you noticed. Your unique edge will help you stand out. It is relatively easy to let your imagination roam free when working on a site. Find a graphic that truly captures the spirit of your business, use a (short) catch phrase, or give the viewer a taste of your unique ideas. However, remember this is a first impression only. There is such a thing as too much edge and it can hurt you.
3.    Invest time in research. Give your customers a sense that you have noticed them, together with their interests and preferences, and they will notice you. The hurried way in which many new ventures are started today leave a lot of consumers at least mildly dissatisfied with how not unique they are. A little time put into research early on will spare you a lot of time in follow up investigations and attempts to salvage a loss.
4.    Practice customer service. Customer service is an art, it’s a skill, it’s a must. If you don’t provide a superior experience to your customers, be sure that your competitors will. So create your website in a way that is user-friendly and provides easy links to help navigate the site and communicate with you. Respond to inquiries as soon as possible or post clear timelines for the frequency with which inquiries are addressed. You never know which email inquiry comes from a potential investor who is feeling you out before making a business proposition.
5.    Reserve a couple of tricks. This is the test of true creativity. The challenge is to keep your audience interested after having caught their initial attention. For your online business this may mean setting up a feature that activates a particularly appealing graphic for any user which has lingered 20 seconds on your front page.  If you have banner ads, you may want to adjust the ad sequence and duration to first show those of the most reputable or relevant advertisers you have. This may indirectly increase the time the viewer spends on your site. Your initial presentation has already been noticed, the final touch you add will make it actually stand out.

First impressions and the moments immediately following those are crucial for the success of your online business. It is often in that period that your customers will be making a (not completely conscious) decision whether to give you a further chance. Take a creative but moderate stance to get yourself noticed and you will have a larger audience to dazzle with your unique ideas.