How to Build an Online Business

A short guide on starting from scratch. We'll look very briefly at your business product/service, your website, your market and how to make sales.

Steps

1. Choose what you want to do. Stick with a hobby or interest. This means you'll already have good product knowledge and, more importantly, be passionate about what you are doing.
   
2. Assess the competition. See what they do good and look even more closely at what they do bad. Work out your unique selling point (USP) or competitive edge. This can be something obvious like cheaper prices, better customer service, newer products, and so on.
   
3. Brand yourself. Your company brand is extremely important and the first part of marketing. Do you need a sharp executive logo or a family friendly feel to sell your product? Get an appropriate name and get a rough idea of who you are appealing to.
   
4. Build a website. The website should be themed around your brand image. For the layout itself, you might copy a successful competitor. If you need a web designer, then find someone local. You'll need to meet them face-to-face and make sure that you know exactly who you are dealing with.
   
5. Market shamelessly. Tell everyone you know about your site. Add it to every directory and search engine that you can find. There are plenty of good free ones. Get onto related forums and chat rooms. Word of mouth is a very effective marketing tool; however, be sure to abide by forum rules.
   
6. Utilize PR marketing. You can submit an article about your new business to newspapers. If you are savvy enough to be able to get a story printed. then you'll have thousands of resultant visitors.
   
7. Close your sales. Now you need all these people to buy from your site. Don't be arrogant, but tell people about how great your product is. Use testimonials. Create a "need" for your customer to purchase your products, as opposed to a "want". Having sales and limited editions creates a sense of urgency; people don't like to miss out!
   
8. Distribute newsletter sales. Offer a free email newsletter on your site, where people can enter their email and receive great hints and tips on your area of expertise. Within these e-mails, you can suggest some new products and offers, as well. Don't be aggressive in your technique though, as it will scare off potential and repeat customers.
   
9. Work hard, and commit to it. Remember that success comes to those who work for it, which generally most people don't like to do. That means there's less competition.
   

How to Start an Online Business

An online business is a business that is run via the internet. These businesses may include retailing, outsourcing of services, reselling of items of your own or other companies/people's products, being an infopreneur and many others. Finding an online business that you can make money from may require you to create a website that advertises your business and items, registering yourself on certain websites or forums where you can advertise your services and finding clients from the rather huge world of the internet.

Contents

• 1 Steps
  
  
  
  • 1.1 Choose Your Focus
  
  
  • 1.2 Create an Online Presence
  
  
  • 1.3 Finance your Endeavor
  
  
  • 1.4 Miscellaneous
  
  
  
  


• 2 Tips


• 3 Warnings


• 4 Things You'll Need


• 5 Related wikiHows

Steps

Choose Your Focus

1. Identify your area of expertise. Do you have any information that others will benefit from?
   
2. Write down some keywords that you will be using on your website and check out the demand for your keywords using the many keyword tools available.
   
3. Use to determine the Google supply(the number of websites that are built around those keywords) for your keywords.
   
4. Determine profitability of your keywords using the formula 'Demand number/Supply number'.
   
5. Research what people are looking for and buying online by going to different forums, Google Trends, Ebay.com and www.amazon.com and places like www.ezinearticles.com and look at their top sellers or articles. Find a niche that looks interesting and do more research. Think about what and why people buy things online.
   
6. The goal of all of your research is to come up with a business idea that people are interested as compared to just starting a business that you want to create.
   
7. Knowing what you can easily offer people online and what business you can successfully run and make money out of is the first step in running an online business. After determining this, you will need to come up with a plan for the execution of your business idea. You may start with hiring a programmer to create your website for you or you can create your own website if you are capable of doing so or take a class in how to create an online business.
   
8. Create a list of keywords and plan your pages according to what people are looking for. You will need to learn how to create an optimized website that gets found by the search engines.
   
9. You will also need to find hosting for your website as well as to register your domain name. Your domain will depend on finding the best keywords that describe what solution you provide. You will need to research webhosting and website design and see if you can do it yourself or if you need to hire someone. Most hosting is just hosting and you will need to know how to create a website. There are companies out there that can teach you how to build an online business.
   
10. You will need to learn about what it takes to get the website found by the search engines and how to get traffic to it. It is fairly straight forward but can take some time to implement. It will include a plan of getting backlinks and creating content based on the keyword research you have done on your business topic.
    

Create an Online Presence

1. Build a content website for your profitable keywords which overdelivers to the user that you are targeting. Remember an Internet user is looking for information and not sales talk. So use your content to show them your expertise in your area. Write your content in such a way that your user stays and browses through your site instead of hitting the 'back' button. Write just how you talk for the most part. Talk to your user through your content and pre-sell to them the product you want to sell - information/product/your offline business etc. Pre-selling using content builds confidence in your user.
   

1. Monetize your site. Use Google Adsense and/or Yahoo Publisher Network on your site to monetze. Follow some easy to follow tips given by google for posting adsense ads on your site, that will make you money. Find affiliate programs that are compatible with your business topic and promote them to your readers.
   

Finance your Endeavor

1. Research and select an online payment processing service so that you can provide your customers with a wide array of payment options, such as credit card,e-wallets PayPal, or even bank transfers.
   
2. Use other ways of monetizing as well if you are not an entrepreneur.
   
3. Use article marketing to start promoting affiliate products without having a website to fund your website business. This can be an online business in it self.
   

Miscellaneous

1. Find a mentor, the person who has a good success system to follow!
   
2. Find a direct sales model. It's the fastest way to break-even.
   

Tips

• Find a business system that has been proven successful.
  
• A thing that needs to be ironed out for your online business is your billing service. While there are businesses that may bill their clients directly after a contract has been agreed upon and signed and these bills are paid for through checks that are deposited into the service provider's bank account, there are some clients who require a certain online billing system for them to pay for the services they have contracted. You may need to register with a billing system like Paypal for your online business to make billing and payment easier and less of a hassle to you and your clients.
  
• Putting up an online business may be easy or hard, depending upon whether you did your research well and laid down all the groundwork before you began. You can make money out of an online business if you execute the necessary steps and do not miss out on some of the essentials that are needed for an online business to succeed.
  

Warnings

• Watch out for website hosting and building services that do not handhold you through the process of building an e-commerce website.
  
• Keep in mind that it is a business. Learn from your failures but also the success of others. Be a willing and eager student.
  
• Never give out your money to anyone to show you how to make money. Please be very cautious before spending a penny.
  
• Paypal is limited as a payment processor because when people use their debit/credit cards through them they lose the ability to get refunds directly.
  

Things You'll Need

• A Website with a domain name that you can acquire from a website hosting service.
  
• A good training system to follow with step by step details.
  
• It is much more profitable to outsource when you are beginning to start an internet business. This will insure that you have experts doing the work for you instead of you trying to figure it all out.
  

Related wikiHows

• How to Make Money Online Without a Website
  
• How to Name Your Business
  
• Start a Website Business
  
• Get your Website Indexed by Google
  

Article provided by wikiHow, a wiki how-to manual. Please edit this article and find author credits at the original wikiHow article on How to Start an Online Business. All content on wikiHow can be shared under a Creative Commons license.

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