How To Set Up Your Own Internet Business : Part 1
Yes, so often times we are so entice with having our own internet business online just so we could reap the ‘so-called’ benefits of making easy money online. The fact that such claims of making ‘easy’ and ‘quick’ money online has profoundly been hyped up thoroughly and for us to believe in such ‘wondrous’ opportunity has led many to venture upon such conquest even without understanding the undertakes that is required to perform prior to actually benefiting from it. Therefore, I find it is critically necessary to do my part of ‘educating’ majority of the new internet marketers onto a proper direction to setting up your own internet business.
Generally, I will be dividing this step by step tutorial into 3 major parts as followed. These steps I believe is crucial to preparing and maintaining your online business in the long run. I hope you will be able to learn a great deal out from this and of course, enjoy reading it as you go along. =)
Part 1 : Planning
This section will be a crucial step in determining that you start your business right. Many new internet marketers I believe would eventually not be bothered too much with this. However, I can assure you that this is fundamentally the most critical step each new online business should take to drive your business online towards a much more promising pursuit.
Part 2 : Building
Getting the right platform and application to lay your business on the world wide web. Learning to build is essentially like having an ‘establishment’ or ‘shop’ set up right on the internet so that you are always well prepared when potential customers come walking into it.
Part 3 : Marketing
You can have the best looking website and the best product or services online but without proper marketing strategy, you will never be able to introduce such opportunity out. Therefore, it is essential that you realize some of the best marketing strategy you can perform online to get your business up and running online.
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Part 1 : Planning
Going into business
Before you began working on your business, you need to work out what you want to get out of it. Think carefully; the answers out come up with might surprise you. Creating a business from scratch can be exciting and rewarding, but it also involves time,effort and money. So, it is essential to understand why you’re doing it: a clear sense of purpose will help propel you through what is likely to be a demanding process.
For most people, the underlying reason for starting their own online business is a desire for freedom. This might be the freedom to do something you enjoy, freedom from the oppression if the corporate structure, or the freedom that money brings. There’s also the natural appeal of being your own boss. Real business owners are real people just like you and me and there’s no qualification process and there are no entry requirements. Just a decision followed by action.
For most people, the underlying reason for starting their own business is a desire for freedom
Have you got what it takes?
Determination : Above all else, you need to have the stamina and drive to finish what you start.
Humility : The ability to recognize that you don’t know everything is essential. If you know that you don’t know, you’ll do research and remain flexible enough to change direction in response to evidence. You’ll also have a mind open to learning new things. Arrogance is a business-killer.
Decisiveness : Simple as it is. Nothing gets done unless you make decisions. Developing a business is a repeated process of information-gathering followed by decision-making. You must be prepared to take personal responsibility for your decisions. Once you do this, you take control of your own destiny, rather than feeling independent on the state of the economy, other people or perhaps the weather. =P
An analytical mind : You need to be able to evaluate every aspect of your business and the market in which it operates. At every stage of developing and running your business, you need to be analyzing whether things are working as they should and how to improve them.
Why an internet business?
It’s one thing to decide to set up a business, but now consider the advantages of doing it online. Some have compared the advent of the internet with the invention of the printing press. In the same way that printing made books cheap enough to be distributed to masses, the internet allows businessperson in their broadband-connected bedroom to connect with billions of buyers.
Low startup cost : With both direct mail and internet, there’s no need for the financial commitment of renting a shop, which reduces the risk. The cost of premises are replaced by server hosting costs, shop fitting and infrastructure by a simple electronic shopping cart and adverts in the local press make way for Google Adwords or such. The internet doesn’t just lower the cost of starting up your business, it also offers an opportunity to sell to the world. Whether you take this up depends on the nature of your product and the level of ambition.
Long opening hours : An internet business can be open 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. If you are selling a downloadable product, the sales can in fact take care of itself. The dream of many aspiring internet marketers to wake up in the morning, turn on their computer and gaze adoringly at the mountain of automatically fulfilled orders as their PayPal balance grows. The promise of the internet is a business that, once set up, can be left to run itself as an efficient,low maintenance money making machine.
Scale : Internet business can be scaled to suit you. They can be run alongside a normal job, either permanently or until you want to increase the income generated and go full-time. They can also take up much less time than traditional businesses.
The downside of it : The fact you can get a business up and running almost instantly means your potential competitors can do the same. Indeed, the likelihood is that whatever sector you choose, there will be companies servicing it already. You’re taking advantage of the fact that you can go from idea working business in a few weeks, so you must expect others to see the same opportunity too.
What are you good at?
Before you start to generate specific ideas, it helps to look at what sort of enterprise would suit you. There’s an almost infinite range of possible ventures and the first step is to narrow these down.
It’s not a good idea to start a business online that sells something you have no interest in or knowledge of. After all you’ll naturally do better when spending your time working in area you’re familiar with and interested in.
You need to take an honest look at your list of skills and interests. Which of the skills do you have at present, which are you prepared to learn, and which do you have no interest in?
What kind of internet business are you?
Finding out which category of business you fall into will help you shape your plans. Broadly speaking, the internet can facilitate business in three ways : supporting an existing bricks and mortar business, selling physical good and services and finally selling online services and information.
Selling goods : By setting up an online retailer, all the infrastructures ca be purchased at a low price. With services such as EBay and Amazon, you can use this infrastructure of these companies to sell your products.
Selling downloads and online services : Having no physical products means you don’t need to buy any stock, store it or dispose of it if it doesn’t sell. It becomes possible to keep an enormous range of product at no cost. You might use the internet to sell your own internet related skills. For example if you are a copywriter, web designer or Google Adwords specialist, you’ll use a website to sell your services. A whole new economy has been built around in this, in which it’s possible to make money by even selling tiny quantities of thousand different items, adding up to profitable revenue.
Selling information : Informational products do have a lot going for them. Usually created in the form of PDFs ; ebooks, MP3s; seminars, or videos, they tend to be products that can be sold for years with minimal charge. They can be very quick to get into place, and they can be naturally slotted into Google’s search engine so that you know the people visiting your sites are actually looking for the information you want to sell. However, they do have a downside to that. To charge for a product, you need to convince potential customers you can offer information that’s not freely available elsewhere and that you’re an expert in the relevant field.
Coming up with your business idea
It’s times to come up with that million-dollar idea and it’s all about you.
In most cases, you’ll probably find that those things you’re particularly good at also happen to interest you,but it’s important to put both of these factors together to arrive at a list of potential opportunities. Your chances of establishing a successful business are much greater if you develop on your skills and interests.
Brainstorming : We’re familiar with the technique of brainstorming, although it’s rarely practiced properly. The idea is to put analysis suggestions completely on hold at this point and simply generate ideas. Your interest and skills would be a good starting point. This is best done on your own. The purpose here is to generate as much ideas as possible and not allow snap judgements or instant decisions.
Evaluating your ideas : The mistakes many internet marketers make is to fasten on to the first or most obvious idea and build a business around them. This is hugely risky and is probably the main reason behind the high failure rate among small business. Equally if you have generated a lot of idea, there’s no point in subjecting them all to a full market analysis, or you might end up wasting so much time that you never actually get started. So, the first step you need to apply is to crop your business idea.
- Can you make money at it? You must be honestly and objectively feel that there is a market for your ideas. Unless you are truly confident that there is a market, reject the idea immediately. Do you personally know people who’d buy your product or services? Do you know lots of people who might use it?
Reject all ideas that you’re not confident will make money – even if you love them.
Is there a market for your business idea?
You’ve come up with some ideas : now you need to see if the market is there. If doesn’t have to be huge because you can equally profit by hitting the right niche.
Your niche : The specific market your’re targeting is your “niche” .
So who is it aimed at? : Think about your market and specifically look at :
- The likely age range
- Whether they are more likely to be male or female or no gender preference
- The interest and most importantly what other websites they’re likely to visit.
Size isn’t (that ) important : It is possible to select a market that is too big. You will eventually find it hard to target your marketing and you’ll be competing with large companies. You should be looking for a niche that, while it’s big enough to sustain a business, is small enough to provide an opportunity for you to dominate. Even with a global market, some niches are too small to be worthwhile and the purpose of this stage is to work out where your business fits.
You don’t have to be original : One of the great myths that prevent many people from starting their own business online is that you need a completely new idea. Not at all. The fact is that most businesses are poorly run whether in terms of their core product, marketing, management, customer service or the conversion process. The key is to be better than your competition. In some markets this is easier than others, and the only way to find this out is to evaluate the quality of your competitors. You can make money by being better than your rivals.
- Have a better product or service
- Do better marketing
- Offer supreme customer service
- Produce at a lower cost
Check out the competition : You should know your main keywords as part of the process of coming up with a business name. Google them and see what comes up in the sponsored listing. Only pay attention to the first page as this is where the real competition is. Look at the ads. You should be mainly interested in those that includes the keywords that you typed within their body, title and domain name. These ads have probably been created by a marketer who knows at least the basics of Google AdWords optimization. Take a look at their website. Do they only sell a product or service like yours? or is it a of a bigger range? Your aim is to find the weaknesses of your rivals so that you can provide an experience that is at least as professional as the bigger competitor while being focused ,personal and efficient.
Analyzing the market and the competition
No matter what type of business you intend to set up, it’s vital to analyze whether there is a market for your product or service and who’s already in that market. The simplest way is to estimate the number of Google searches that people are initiating for the relevant keywords.
Get an insight : Go to www.google.com/insights/search to start Google Insights. Type in your two or three most important keyword phrase, set your regional options to reflect your intended market and click search.The peaks ad troughs are as a percentage of overall searches. They don’t tell you whether the actual number of searches has risen or fallen, but rather whether your topics are relatively gaining or losing popularity.
The keywords are in Adwords itself : Google Adwords Keyword tool is an efficient application to perform such task. Go to Google keyword tool and type in the same keyword phrase you have put into Google Insights. Google Keyword Tools will present you with a list. The bar under “advertiser competition” shows how competitive each keyword phrase are. Add those that seem appropriate to your list by clicking add. Usually, I would target on the ones that has a longer phrase as compared to just have two words. Make sure you add anywhere the bar is empty or nearly empty, since you’re likely to be able to optimize your business using these keywords as they are less in competitors.
Ask them what they want
When it comes to running a business, you can’t base decisions on gut instinct. You need to find out the trigger that will make prospective customers buy. Too many would be internet marketers tear headlong into business without doing the most basic market research. You’ve now established that there’s a market for your idea, but that doesn’t tell you enough about exactly what sort of product or service will do well in the market.
A successful prospective internet marketer needs to know what their customers are and what they must do to satisfy them as completely as possible. There’s a simple way of finding out exactly what shape your product your should take in order to sell and that is as simple as asking your potential customers.
The classic way of doing this is by asking your potential customers the three question poised as followed.
- What were you searching for when you found us?
- What do you want to know?
- How hard are you finding it to get this information currently?
The most profitable information business will be those where survey respondents are finding it very hard to get the information you’re going to provide, so question 3 is very essential. Question 2 will help you shape exactly what goes into product and will also help to identify “hyper-responsive” customers. The more words a respondent used to answer question 2, the more likely they are to be interested in the product.
For a product or service business, you may ask :
- Are you searching for your own benefit or for someone else?
- What are you looking for in this product?
- What would be a reasonable charge for this product?
Whatever you choose to ask, the end results needs to be that you have a clear idea of what form or service needs to take and how much you can charge for it.
You can create a simple online survey with Surveymonkey at www.surveymonkey.com. Free account !
The simplest way to get survey respondents is to set up a minimal website, embed the survey link into it and advertise on Google. Invite people to complete the survey.
Planning your website
Your online business not only needs a website, it needs the right type of website. Before you think about design ( part 2 ) , it’s essential that you understand the basic fundamental structure that suits your business.
Your website has a single purpose and that is to sell. In order to do just that, it needs to achieve the following criteria :
- Capture the attention of your visitors
- Retain that attention
- Enable you to being a long term relationship with them
- Convert visitors into buyers
- Establish credibility
- Reassure potential purchases with good contact and support features
- Provide best practice and legally required information
Most business website should include these pages :
- A home page – the front door
- Landing page - the pages visitors see when they respond to your Ads or email campaigns
- About us – A page describing yourself or your company.
- Contact us – Visitors need a place to ask questions and to see that you’ll support them.
- Privacy policy – Visitors need to know that you will treat their details with respect.
- Products/services – a list of catalog of your products or services.
- Delivery policy – Potential customers will want to know when they can expect their products to be delivered, whether they’re physical or electronics.
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I hope you have enjoyed reading PART 1 of How To Set Up Your Own Internet Business. Look forward to the next part where I will be walking through with you on Building : Creating the Right Website:Part 2 . ^__^
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This is a very clear post with lots of useful information. Also provides ethical information which is nice to see from a making money online website.
John Burnside´s last post is on Better SEO with blog link rolling
hey john,
thank you for commenting.
i hope you have enjoyed reading and that my points will proof to be beneficial to you.
do frequent your visit as there will be more updates coming your way. =)
cheers
This is one of the very few posts I actually sat and read completely through.
It is important to plan and think about every aspect of your business before you ho ahead and act. As the saying goes, “Knowing is half ‘the battle”. I’d say the other half is acting.
If you don’t know what you want to do, you can’t fight a full battle and will eventually fall and be stomped on. Great post!
hey joe,
thank you for your warm comments.
you are exactly right about that . I personally feel that acting is inevitably much more important than knowing.
as the saying goes, action speaks louder than word =)
look forward to the second part ,aye.
have a great day
Hello,
In this post, you’ve explained very clearly what we’ve to do before we start to taking out our debit/credit card and buy a domain and host. You actually explained some of the common mistakes that many beginners have made.
Great post! Looking forward for your second part!
Jeen Hao | Earn Money Online´s last post is on Top 3 Ways to Promote Affiliate Products
hey jeen hao,
thank you for your comments.
I am glad that you have enjoyed reading and of course i hope this will proof to be very beneficial for you on your every progress to make money online today.
=)
I am working on my second post now. very soon you will be able to see it.
have a great day.
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