Many people these days are starting their own online business and taking control of their own work hours and lifestyle. Indeed, being your own boss has never been easier and we look at how you can get started.
It is increasingly easy these days to start your own small macro business online and to make a decent enough living from your efforts. The days of relying on a job for life and having to work nine to five have long gone. Indeed, if you have the desire and ability to motivate yourself, starting an online business is worth considering.
But how can you develop a business online and what does it involve? How do you get started and how can you market yourself online? Let me explain below.
1. The Beginning and Buying a Domain Name
One of the first things you will want to do is to choose a domain name. A domain name is your website home address and it is where your website will sit. Your domain name can be your own name, a business name or whatever you want it to be.
The biggest issue tends to be that all of the best names have gone but there are a few tricks to choosing an available name. Using your own name is often a simple way to find an available domain, but also consider using an extension such as dot.co so, for example, yourname.co.
Once you have bought a domain name, you can purchase cheap affordable hosting. The hosting is where your website will sit and it is a little like your domain name is your home address and the hosting is the land your house sites on.
The easiest way to quickly develop a site is to use the WordPress content management system and this is free and easily found by Googling the term WordPress.
2. Choosing Your Business Niche
Before choosing your domain name, you might want to first be clear though on exactly what niche you plan to build your business on online about. You might already have a clear idea of the business you want to build online. It might be a hobby that you want to begin to monetise or a new business you want to build from scratch.
Blogging is one way that many individuals begin to build an income online. Blogging involves writing regular content and building a following within a specific niche. The trick is to write high-quality informative and genuinely useful content that helps you to build trust and a relationship with your readers.
3. Building a Sales Funnel
As you develop traffic to your site and a readership, you may want to begin to make an income to at the very least, cover your domain name and hosting costs.
If you want to make a small income from the very start and with very little effort, Google Adsense is one the easiest ad networks to use. This can be set up within a few minutes and the ads will normally show up within an hour and are automatically placed on your site by Google. You will generate an income every time someone clicks on the ad on your site.
In the long term for a much greater income, it is best to build an email list. This list is your direct and valued way to keep in touch with your readers and followers. As you build this list and develop trust as an expert in your niche, with your readers, you can begin to use this list to push products or services you sell.
With search engines such as Google and Bing and social media networks, their way of ranking you can change overnight and you can lose the position in a search engine for the terms you ranked for. The great benefit of an email list is that this follows you in that you own and manage the list and it is devoid of search engine algorithm changes.
4. Making Sales
You may wish to start an Etsy shop because you make and sell arts and crafts. Alternatively, you might be planning to make a living through affiliate income. Affiliate income is income that you make by being given a small percentage commission for selling other people’s products on your site. Indeed, some website owners make a six-figure income as affiliate marketers. Affiliate marketing can be a very good income.
Another option is to sell digital products, such as if you sell digital training materials. The great benefit of selling digital products can be broken down into two points. Firstly, once you make a digital product, you sell it once but you can also sell the very same product 10, 100 or even 1000 times. In other words, it is scalable, meaning there is no limit to many products you can sell. You do not rely, for example, on warehouse space, as you might do if you were selling products offline.
Secondly, selling digits products online is passive. By this, it means that you do not have to be sat at your computer when a sale is made. You might be sat on a beach in the Maldives, or driving around on safari in Kenya when your items are being sold. Selling digital products online can be fully automated and this provides you the freedom to only be online when you want to be. Certainly, though, you will want to ensure you provide decent customer service by frequently checking inquiries and feedback that you receive by email.
5. Who Can Start an Online Business?
You might be surprised by the range of people making a living online. There is simply very little limit to the potential in terms of business types and niches, income and age groups who make a living online. You might also want to start your own online business and join the millions already working for themselves and benefitting from the technological age.
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