The 10 Essential Steps of Starting your online business:

Interested in how to start an online business but you are confused about terms like web 2.0, blogging, websites etc?  If you are starting a home based business online then the 10 steps listed below will give you a good idea what starting an online business requires.

10 Essential Steps of Starting your online business: 

1. Choosing a Market:

Choosing the right market is essential for your online business because if the market is too small you might not be able to make any money. If the market is large, How are you going to compete? You need to assess the size and scope of the market, the size of your competition and determine which marketing techniques you are going to use. It is a huge mistake not spending enough time on market research and the no 1 mistake new people make is to choose a market that is too small. The bottom line is that if no-one is active in a market, then there is just no money in that market. You are NOT going to find something that the online community has magically “missed” or neglected. If there is money somewhere the online community probably has found it already.

2. Choosing your Niche

The right way to approach this is to find a large, competitive market and then position yourself to be competitive in a segment of that market, in short a niche. Once you have identified your niche, you need to determine what type of niche products there are available, how are you going to position your niche website and what your marketing strategy will be.

3. Keyword research

Keyword research is another essential element of this process and the online marketer needs to be familiar with the tools that Google provides such as Google analytics and in this case the adwords keyword tool. Fortunately these are free. There are other commercial applications on the market but the Google tools are good enough to start with.

4. What to sell

After all this we need to find a product to sell because without a product their is no business. Product research is just as important as market and keyword research and all of these elements need to be in sync. For ideas on physical products it could be useful to check what is selling on ebay or amazon.  You then have two choices 1) Develop your own product or 2) sell somebody else’s product ( online this is known as affiliate marketing ). We suggest affiliate marketing as a good place to start for the beginner online entrepreneur and the potential should not be discounted, there is a wealthy affiliate or a few of them in every market. The ebay affiliate program or theamazon affiliate program are good places to start out as an affiliate.

5. Build a website / blog

The next thing you need is a place to showcase your product, your shop. Some people prefer a static website but I personally prefer a blog to a site. What is a blog? A blog is a type of website that leans itself to the easy addition of content by content writers or as they are known in the industry, bloggers. Blogging, i.e. writing about your business, product or service is a good way to promote your site. The two most popular blogging platforms are Blogger ( Free and owned by Google ) and WordPress ( both a free and a commercial version.)

6. Set up a “Squeeze Page”

A squeeze page ( aka. a landing page or capture page ) is a tool with which we capture details of visitors to our site so that we can build an email list of  leads. Leads are visitors to our site, thus potential buyers and we capture their details so that we can continue to market to them via email.  Very few people will buy something on a first visit to your site so it is essential that you build a mailing list which then becomes a valuable asset. There are websites where you can find software to create your own landing pages.

7. Find something valuable to give away

Most people won’t fill in a form on your website if they don’t have an incentive to do so. Enter the “Free Giveaway” or as it’s known in the industry ” the Ethical Bribe”. You need to entice your visitor to fill in a form with their details and the best way to do this is to give something away in exchange. The most popular item to give away is a freee-book ( a book in pdf format ). Other things you can give away is video training, free reports etc.

8. Set up an autoresponder

An autoresponder is an email management system into which you can enter all your email leads and then email them on a regular basis. Normal email programs like hotmail and gmail will not work as they have restrictions and not the capabilities needed for follow up. The most popular ones are Aweber, Getresponse and Mailchimp, good old Google will direct you to them via a search.

9. Marketing

Once you have everything set up, you need visitor or website traffic. There are hundreds of thousands of online sites that get zero visitors. So you need to market your site and your business. So needless to say, you need a proper marketing plan even if you decide to blog every day, that blog needs marketing. Website marketing is an essential skill for the online entrepreneur.

10. Sales & Service

Now, finally you are ready to make sales and let the money roll in! Yes, NO! What is paypal? Oops..

You need a shopping cart, a merchant account and customer service to keep buyers happy after the sale.

So, as you can see it is not just Click, cut and paste and the money rolls in. A proper online business is a mammoth undertaking and needs planning, care and attention.

Fortunately there is always someone with a “better solution” at hand and my friend, Mike Filsaime is launching a new product ( Microadvertsingformula ) in a few days that will do all this heavy lifting for you. Now, I don’t have all the details yet but knowing Mike and Andy Jenkins this is going to be another great product. You can get on the early bird list by clicking here..