Getting started with your online business

Researching your productYou may already have an idea what your business is going to sell but don’t worry if you don’t. If you already have an idea you must research your product to see if there is a demand for it. There is no point spending good money launching a website to sell a product that either no one or very few people want. Google your product to see how many search results come up as this can give you a good indication of how much your product is in demand. Other good places to check would be Ebay and Amazon to get a feel of what people are willing to pay for it.Another area of research is finding out what people expect from your product and things that you may need to improve. You can get some great incites at related forums. All industry sectors have forums where people post comments and chat about their particular industry. Here are some good places to start in your forum searches: -

Yahoo! Groups

Google Groups

MSN Groups

Delphi Forums

Getting inspiration for your business What if you want to start a business but you don’t yet have anything to sell? Well let’s take some time to think about this, think about your own hobbies and what you are interested in. It’s easier to sell a product that you have a passion for and you would be more of an expert in. There are many businesses that have started out as hobbies. You should also think about things you use in your day-to-day life that may annoy you and could be improved upon.

The best way forward is to find a niche in the market. People might say to you that your product isn’t a good idea or it will never sell, DON’T listen to them. If you have done your research and have found that one person in your town would buy your product you may come to the conclusion that’s its not a good idea and you should give up. However the beauty of the Internet is that it exposes you to a worldwide customer base. If one person in every town felt a need for your product, well we are talking about a heck of a lot of people, you do the maths. Lets take the “long tail effect “lets take companies like Amazon they sell everything and their products are in high competition with other websites and offline stores (how many book shops do you think there is out there). Whereas a company selling tartan screws may not have the volume of sellers but would probably have a bigger market share. I strongly recommend you read this famous article written on this subject by David Rowan

Setting up your website and getting online.The first step is to get a website and domain name. You would think at this point you will need to contact a website designer and get a quote to build your website. Although this is an option it really isn’t a good idea at this point as your business may not be successful and you would have paid out all this money with no return on your investment. The best course of action would be to use website builder software and use a website template. This allows you to set up your shop and payment gateway with ease from around £10/$20 a month. This is a much easier price to absorb if things go wrong. For great website building software which includes hosting and the ability to set up stores and blogs check out Umbrella’s website builder software they can offer you support on all aspects of your website design project, not just the hosting of it.

Earning additional Income from your websiteYou can also earn additional money from your website by selling affiliate goods. A good example of this is Google adsense where Google will put ads on your website and you will earn money every time someone clicks an ad.  All these adverts will be targeted to your website so they will be relevant to your customers.  Amazon affilateis also a good program as they offer good commission. If you want to affiliate other people’s products I would recommend digital products as the mark-up on these products are far higher, you can earn up to 70% commission on these products. A good place to begin searching for digital products to affiliate sell would be Clickbank as they have thousands of products available for you to affiliate with.

Receiving targeted trafficNow if your website is already receiving some traffic you may be asking yourself how I can increase my number of hits. This is a mistake; the first thing you should be asking yourself is what am I going to do with these visitors? If you are currently receiving some traffic and you can’t convert them into sales then more traffic will not help you.  You will only receive more unconverted traffic. You must concentrate on converting some of the traffic you already have.To do this you need to write convincing web copy to entice your customers to buy. Statistically it is said that normally only 1% of your traffic will convert to a sale and that that 1% needs to be exposed to your website at least 7 times.A good idea is to get targeted traffic from search engines. This would require you to do some search engine optimisation to be ranked in Google. Or why not try a pay per click campaign. This can get high volume targeted visitors to your website in short periods of time at low cost.

Opt in subscribers listNext you should build your subscribers list, as people need to be exposed to your site at least 7 times. You need to build a relationship with your customers and building a subscribers list is the best way to do this.On your products pages or really on every page on your website you should have a simple form for people to subscribe to your mailing list. Try offering them something for free to entice them to sign up to you.Now you can email them regularly and offer them your products. Please don’t just send out spammy emails, send them content that they will be interested in. Offer them something for free once in a while; this is also a good opportunity to sell them your affiliate products.  Build up a good relationship with your subscribers and they will trust you and buy from you again and again. A really good service for managing all this is Aweber . I personally use them and find them very professional.

Don’t give up. The important things to remember is don’t give up if your first attempt fails. Just try again and apply the pointers I have given you here with a different product. The one tip I would give you here is be persistent and stay focused.

Thank you and good luck.