How to Start an Online Business

Are you tired of the rat race, and want to be in charge of your own destiny, but don’t have the capital to buy a franchise or open up a storefront? Consider starting a business online, instead! Whether you are a crafts-person with a line of jewelry, a writer with the gift of gab, or good with affiliate

marketing, starting an online business can get you heading down the road to financial independence. We’ll give you a few pointers and potential business directions to help you along the way.

Create a domain name

Either before or during the process of setting up your online business, you will need a domain name. Because most of the “good ones” are already taken, you will probably need to be creative in giving your online presence a catch name. For example, “MyWebsite” is long since off the table. However, you can add to the basic site name with dashes, unique identifiers, or even calls-to-action:

My-Beyond-Awesome-Website or My-Cool Jewels-Website may be available. Similarly, BuyMyBanglesToday.com could be another direction: it not only has a unique name, when give it out, you’re putting them in the frame of mind to buy.

·  Note that most web hosting sites have a method for securing domain names. Bear in mind that whether you secure a domain name from your host or from a traditional domain registrar such as Network Solutions, the results are identical—the primary difference is price, so shop and compare before signing on the dotted line.

·  Click here for more information on how to create and register a domain name.

Keep it keyword-rich

One of the things that will make your business successful is if people can find you. Most people will pull up Google or Bing, and perform a search such "plumber, Portland" or "Graphic designer, industrial design." Whatever it is you specialize in, be sure that the copy on your site reflects that as often and as varied as possible.

Be social

Whatever your business, whatever your venue, keeping your name in the the air is key to internet success. Have a business account on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. If your business is graphically oriented, have accounts on Flickr and Tumblr as well. Whenever there is news of any kind—a new contract, a new page, a new entry, a new photo—cross-post it to all your social media sites. Also make sure those sites link back to your main website, and that your website has links to all of them.

Method One: Retail—Selling Your Wares

Define your unique product

What is it about your product that differentiates it from what everybody else creates, and why would somebody like yours instead of the competitions?

Let’s say you make jewelry—but so do a few million other people. What makes yours different? Do you focus on finely wrought gold necklaces with pearls, or perhaps your focus is on found objects strung together in new and interesting ways?

Develop your style

Elegant or funky, classical or hipster, your website should reflect what you’re selling.

For example, if you make traditionally styled diamond jewelry, having a website that looks like shredded cardboard with edgy fonts and images taped to the cardboard would tend to drive away your potential customers—as would selling found object bangles made with rusty razorblades and old bottle caps, and presenting those on a satin backdrop and gold script font.

You don’t have to design the website yourself—there are professional designers who are more than up to the task, plus eCommerce websites will offer dozens of appropriate templates for you. If you know in advance what you want, you’ll make selecting a designer or a template that much easier.

Set up an eCommerce website

To sell your products effectively, and manage the process from pricing to reporting, a website that specializes in eCommerce is crucial. Sites such as Shopify and Collusion offer competitive packages, with free templates, custom packages, credit card processing, and more.

If you don’t already have a domain name for your company, you will be able to do this here.

Use an eCommerce web service such as Easy

Similar to Shopify and Collusion, eCommerce web services makes it easy to sell your products on the web, without a lot of overhead. There are no custom interfaces or templates to work with, you simply create an online store within the framework of the service

Method Two: Selling Your Services

Set up an online portfolio

Whether you are a programmer who specializes in Javascript, a graphic designer who works on commissions, a plumber who is on call 24/7, or a copywriter who will write about anything at all, having an exemplary website where potential clients can evaluate your work is crucial to your online business success.

For creating an internet presence, services such as Weebly can get you going with templates, multimedia, and drag-and-drop website creation.

Populate your site

Focus on your key areas of expertise, and display them professionally. Much like you would do when having potential employers contact references, put your best foot forward for potential clients. Include descriptions, where appropriate or necessary.

Don't use jargon

If you are offering technical expertise, include descriptions that appeal to your client base, not your peers. For example, if you are showing that you can code with PHP and AJAX, don't say "in this case, if the input field is empty (str.length==0), the function clears the content of the txtHint placeholder and exits the function." The person who needs you to work on their site will just scratch their head and say "huh?" Say, instead, "Start entering text into this field, and it will auto-complete."

Offer payment options

Service businesses in the past had to generally rely on cash or check—setting up an entire credit card processing system was a thankless, expensive task at best. Using a service such as PayPal makes it possible to accept virtually any form of credit or debit card for your services, and includes dispute resolution should the need arise (and it will arise).

Method Three: Selling Advertising

Become an affiliatemarketer

There are many companies and webmasters who use affiliate programs to boost their online sales, and most of these affiliate programs are free to join. When you sign up for an affiliate program, an affiliate link with a unique affiliate ID will be assigned to you. The affiliate link is used for marketing the products of your merchant. When a visitor buys an item through your affiliate link, you earn affiliate commission.

For example, if you are an affiliate marketer for Musician's Friend, an online musical instrument retailer, you can advertise their products on your site. If a person visits your site, and clicks on the link that takes them to the Musician's Friend website, and they purchase an instrument within a certain amount of time (24 hours or more, typically), you get a commission on the sale.

Add GoogleAdSense advertisements to your blog or website

Google’s Ad-sense is a revenue-sharing opportunity for small, medium and large web sites that places ads for goods and services that are relevant to the content of your site, targeted to the people who frequent your pages. In turn, you get paid a small amount when the ad is either displayed on your page, or clicked on.

Method Four: eBay

Sell on eBay

Every day, tens of millions of dollars are traded on eBay. It is exactly like selling in any other marketplace except that the usual barriers to entry (such as cost, employment, etc.) are virtually non-existent and, instead of just a few thousand potential buyers, you have access worldwide to over 181 million potential buyers! Search out low prices on items that might normally sell for more, but are just being sold at the wrong time, and resell the item for a higher price.

Start small, and build

Like any speculative market, you will have successes, and you will have failures. Try and avoid the temptation of jumping in with both feet until you get a feel for how eBay works. Buyers are very sophisticated, so do not assume you have a deal sewn up until the auction closes. There are a lot of people looking at the same item you are, and are waiting till the last moment to pounce on the product. 

It can be frustrating at first, but as you become more experienced and savvy yourself, you find yourself doing the same thing.

Scour your own town for deals

You may find amazing things at garage sales, book stores, Goodwill, and Salvation Army. Things that with a little love, or a little spit and polish, will look great and sell for a higher price than you paid. Occasionally, you will come across that rare thing you know is of far higher value than it's being sold for.

Remember—it's not about the dollar value as much as about the percentage, combined with the volume of sales.

Miscellaneous:

Find a mentor, the person who has a good success system to follow!

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.

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