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Topics & Tips
Online Business
Starting an Online Business from Scratch
One advantage of doing business online is that you can
start from scratch without investing much money. Here is
a 27 Step Action Plan to help you get started...
1. List 5 hobbies, interests or areas of expertise. If
you want to start a new business, you'd better choose a
subject that you like and a subject where you can show
expertise. You will have more fun and you will be more
competitive.
2. Brainstorm a list of keywords and phrases related to
those hobbies and interests. For example, if you are
going to sell small airplane collectibles, some possible
keywords could be: airplanes, aeronautics, war
airplanes, etc.
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3. Research those keywords in Wordtracker.com to locate
problem statements that have high search results and low
competition. Wordtracker.com is a web page that helps
you find out how many times your keywords are searched
online, how popular your keywords on search engines are.
Those keywords may represent problem statements.
Wordtracker shows you how many people are buying traffic
on those keywords and how much are they paying. You need
to find popular statements with low competition.
4. Research those problem statements further to
determine if you can develop a product to solve the
problem stated. |
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You may use search engines to see how many people are
offering products that can help to solve those problems.
If you find a popular problem and there are not many
people offering solutions online, you've got it!
5. Find or create a product based on previous research
for you to sell. Once you found a hungry market, you
just need to find the food that your customers want and
they will eat from your hands. You may find companies
online that can manufacture the products for you or you
may find a different way to create the product yourself.
If the product is an e-book, you may write it yourself
or you may hire someone else to do it.
6. Write a long copy sales letter for that product. The
experience of the most important internet marketing
gurus reveals that long copies sell much more than short
copies. It is also recommendable that you try to sell
only one product on your web site. Focus on one product
unless the solution you are providing is the offer of a
wide catalogue.
7. Register a domain and set up a hosting account. There
are many places online where you can register a domain
and set up a hosting account in minutes.
8. Register for a merchant account (to set up quickly
use PayPal.com). If you don't want to register a
merchant account that will allow you to take credit card
payments online, go to PayPal.com and sign in. It can be
a little bit more expensive, but it is a simple way to
take credit card payments online very quickly.
9. Set up a simple web site using an automatic site
builder or pay to have someone set it up for you. Do not
try to design your own web site unless you are educated
on html. Do not waste your time. Hire someone else to do
it or buy automatic web site builder software. There are
many of these you can buy online.
10. Set up an opt-in form on your web site to collect
e-mail addresses. You need to start collecting e-mail
addresses for your newsletter. The major part of your
business will come from the emails that you will send to
your customer list.
11. Build an extensive keyword list based on the initial
list of keywords you developed. Use Overture.com. For
each keyword on the initial list, Overture can help you
find different combinations with other words that you
may find interesting. Check the popularity of each term
and write down on a spread sheet your final keyword
list.
12. Submit those keywords to Overture.com to start
driving traffic right away. You need to start driving
some traffic immediately in order to test your web site.
The best way to do that is to buy this traffic at
overture.com
13. Optimize and submit your web site to organic search
engines (Google, Altavista, etc...). Once you have
proved that your web site works and sells, you will be
ready to make the business bigger. It is then time to
start working on building free traffic to your site.
14. Continue to test and tweak your web site until
target conversion rate is met. Your conversion ratio
should be that 1-2% of your visitors should buy from
your web site, and 11% should subscribe to your
newsletter. Continue testing until you get those stats.
15. Set up an affiliate program on your web site.
Affiliate programs can double your business with no
additional effort. Others will make the job for you. But
you cannot set up an affiliate program before you are
sure that your web site can produce results. If your
site does not work, you will loose your affiliates and
they will never come back to you again.
16. Approach complimentary web sites to sign up as
affiliates to promote your product. Get in contact with
people that can promote your product and ask them to be
your affiliates. Just try to find your first 100
affiliates, and your affiliate list will boom alone.
17. Start publishing a monthly newsletter. You have
started collecting e-mail addresses much earlier, but it
is not the time to start working the newsletter until
you can prove that everything else works.
18. Submit articles to related newsletters and e-zines
on a regular basis. In the articles you should always
have a link to your site, so that you can get more
traffic and you can get more people joining your
newsletter.
19. Continue the development of a content rich web site
to further increase search engine rankings. Search
engines love content. You must have many web sites which
are rich in your keywords and which have links to your
main page. A good way to do this is to add as many
articles as you can related to your business and link
them to your home page.
20. Once keywords have been tested in Overture, roll out
in Google Adwords. It works similar to Overture, you bid
for traffic. But do not go to Google Adwords first. You
must first prove your success with Overture and then go
to Google Adwords.
21. Roll out your tested keyword list in other major
PPCs. When you are sure about your stats, and you know
how much money you collect per visitor, you must buy as
much traffic as you can get as long as your income per
visitor is higher than your bids.
22. Create a viral e-book to generate more leads. Create
a free e-book that you can promote and which sells your
product or service. Give it for free, and this will
bring more traffic to your web site.
23. Have an expert review and critique your web site.
Even if your site works, you can always improve. Listen
to others and learn from their experiences.
24. Survey your existing customers to find out what
other products or services they are looking for. Once
you have a big list of customers, use it to find out
what other problems they have. Try to find or create a
solution for them and you will boost your sales
instantaneously.
25. Create and find back-end products and market them
through your e-mail list. Continue finding more products
that meet your customer demands and promote them via
e-mail.
26. Continue to test and tweak your web site and offers.
Nothing is perfect the first time and can always be
improved. It is very important that you take action,
even if you make mistakes. Learn from your errors and
improve your skills.
27. Repeat process to create "Multiple Streams of
Income". Once your business is working on automatic,
then you can start the process again with a new
business. Build as many businesses as you can, and
reduce your risks. If one business fails, but you have
another 5 working businesses, who cares?
If you have read up to this point, you are probably
asking yourself how much it will cost to get started.
The answer is very simple; it depends on how much time
and money you have available to invest! If you have a
lot of time, you can do everything yourself. On the
other hand, if you don't have time, you will have to pay
other people for building your website and/or for
optimizing your site on search engines.
If you can do nothing else...just launch a web site and
start promoting online...
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