Getting Started With An Online Business

Do you want to build an online business but don’t know where to start? There are so many opportunities for creating an online business that most people don’t think of, I wrote a post on some of the different types of online businesses if you are looking for ideas. If you already know what you want to do but just don’t know where to start, don’t worry, as it is no longer as complicated as it sounds. The first thing you need to know is that building an online business is like building anything, it requires a plan, the right tools and some skills. Once you have these you can start building step by step until you have your structure in place.

The main part of a building plan is usually to identify what needs to be done and in what order, for example, you wouldn’t build the roof of a house before building the walls or foundations. The plan for building your online business has four main steps and they need to be done in the right order and to a good level before you can move onto the next step.

Step 1: Choose your Market Place

If you want to build any sort of business then you need to start by deciding what industry or market you want your business to be in. This is known as a “Niche” in online businesses and is really important as everything you do after this point will be driven by this decision.

• The easiest way to identify a niche that you want to work in is to start with a blank piece of paper and brainstorm topics that genuinely interest you. Consider your hobbies, skills, experiences, areas you’re passionate about or even pain points that you have experienced and feel that others will have the same issue.If you are not sure if your hobby could be turned into a business check out my post on How To Start a Hobby Business
• During this initial brainstorming session try not to put any restrictions on yourself and don’t try and think about what would or wouldn’t make the best business. Just write everything down to get ideas, you might end up with ideas for multiple businesses further down the road.

• Once you have a list of ideas you should start to look into each one, I like to start with another blank piece of paper for each idea, I write the niche in the middle and then build a mind map by noting down all the different elements of the niche, write down anything related to it and draw a line to how it is linked to your niche idea. Google is a great tool for this, just start typing the main word of your niche and Google will auto fill and give you ideas that people have searched for, add these to your mind map and you will start to see a picture forming of the many areas that your niche can cover.

• You should then have a look at the competition in this niche area, this will let you know how big the niche is and who the main players are but also give you more ideas and directions to explore. Using this information will help you to decide on an angle or approach for your niche and you can then use this to narrow down your ideas to the one that really fits with you, it is really important that for your first online business you pick something that you can really get into as you will need an enthusiasm for the topic to sustain you through the initial phases when you are still learning your new skills.

Step 2: Open Your Business – Build a Website

Once you have decided on your niche you are going to start creating the foundations for your business, this involves building your very own website. If you are like me then this sounds really complicated, I had this picture in my head of some programming specialist sitting at a computer for days writing code like I had seen on movies. Luckily it is much easier than that and the vast majority of the work is now automated, you do have be fully involved in the process though and there are some really important steps that you need to do.

• Choose a name for your brand – at this stage you will need to decide on a name for your brand. Ideally this will be something that is relevant to your niche and is easy to remember but you can be creative and have some fun here too

• Get a domain name – this is simply the name of your website and you have to make sure it is available to own, ideally your website name will be the same or very close to your chosen brand name. However, like a normal business, someone might have already registered the name you want so you will need to check this. This is easy to do though as there are companies where you can search for website names and they will give you suggestions as to what is available that is similar to what you are looking for if your first choice is already taken. You will also be able to choose the domain extension, this might not seem like a big deal but ideally you want your website name to have an ending like .com or .net as these carry a lot more credibility than some of the less well know variants.

• Choose a website platform to host your website – There are hundreds of website platforms that you can use but it is important to find one that fits with your needs and skill set. If you are a beginner like me then a user friendly system like WordPress is recommended as they have website designs that are perfect for people that are not web designers and simply want a website “off the shelf” so to speak. If you are starting your online business in a specific sector then consider looking at a hosting platform that is designed specifically for that market

• Choose a website design – Every website platform will have a variety of themes available, these are preset formats that you can use for your site and you can browse 100’s of themes and find one that has the features you want. Don’t worry too much about this as you can start with the basic theme and change it later once you get more experienced if you want. To start with you want a simple format that has a clean look to it and is easy to populate, most platforms will have a standard default theme for this use.

• Ensure your website is optimized for search engines – once your website is created you will then need to make sure that it is optimized for the internet. This essentially makes it easy for people to find and fast to load when they want to look at it, good platforms like WordPress will look after a lot of this for you and will even provide warnings and updates to let you know if anything needs to be improved.

Step 3: Get Customers to Visit You

Getting customers to visit you is essential in any business and website traffic as it is called is the single most important thing for your online business, without visitors to your business, there is no one to sell to, the more visitors or traffic you have the more sales you will generate. If you had a physical business like a shop the location of your shop would be the most important aspect but there are millions of online businesses and they are all in the same place….the internet. So we have to find other ways to get visitors to our online business.

There are many different ways to do this and many different tools you can use, the easiest is to pay for visitors and simply take out paid adverts on google to advertise your business and bring customers to your site. However this will usually only generate short term results and as soon as you stop advertising you will probably stop getting visitors. It can also be quite expensive so you would really need to have a good conversion rate and good sale value. Most small online businesses prefer to use free methods for attracting visitors, this will take more effort and time but will be much more sustainable for your business. There are many free ways to attract visitors to your online business but the most common are:

Social Media – One of the most well known methods is to use social media platforms such as Instagram, Pinterest, Facebook or Twitter to generate interest and bring visitors to your business. These are good methods to engage with people that have similar interests and can put you in front of a lot of potential customers

Blogging – This is very common among affiliate marketing and involves writing posts on your site about topics that will resonate with people that will be interested in your business. There are strategies to help you make sure your posts contain certain phrases that get searched a lot online and this will help your site to appear on Google and direct people to your business.

Email Marketing – This is another common method for generating traffic to your online business, you use other methods to get people interested and then offer them something of value in exchange for their email address. I am sure we have all given our email address at some point in return for something, even if it was just internet access.

Industry Forums – Engaging with like minded people on industry forums is a great way to start building a community and making sure people see you as an authority in your chosen niche. this will keep people coming to you for advice and to talk to others with similar interests.

There are special analytics tools available that help you to monitor how well your business is performing online and you can use this to tweak what you do and improve your business massively. These tools are virtually all free

Step 4: Turn Customers Into Profit

Once you have built your business and starting getting customers to visit you will want to start making some money from it. There are many ways that you can do this but there are 3 main methods of monetizing your website:

• Affiliate Marketing – this can be used to promote many different things from software programs, training programs, holidays or even normal day to day products. Your job is to promote the relevant product with your business and if customers then go onto buy something you will receive a commission fee. This could be anything from small amounts of commission for selling food or electrical products on Amazon to huge commissions for selling training programs worth $1000’s.

• Advertising – if you are getting a lot of visitors to your business there are companies like Google that will pay you to let them advertise on your site. I am sure you have been on a website before and noticed adverts for things you were looking at previously, this is companies paying Google to use their AdSense program to advertise on your website. Anytime an advert appears on your website you will be paid by Google. Google are not the only company to do this, Bing and Yahoo both have programs and there are also other companies that specialize in doing this.

• Sell your own products – With AI and digital platforms it has never been easier to create your own products such as eBooks but you can also use your business to sell physical products too.

There are lots of other ways to monetize your site but whatever direction you choose it is important to set realistic goals and plan accordingly, the most common mistake that people make is trying to do everything at the same time and ending up focusing on nothing properly. Just like building any business, you need to have a clear business plan for your online business if it is going to be successful.

Where Do I Start – Wealthy Affiliate Can Help

Hopefully I haven’t made the process sound too difficult because it actually isn’t, but it does require commitment and a lot of effort from you, that is why I would recommend that you team up with a reputable partner that will help you through the process so that you can focus on doing the right things for your business.

Wealthy Affiliate is one of the most reputable partners in the industry and will help to guide you through the step by step process above in a systematic way. They have recently transformed their platform by introducing Artificial Intelligence and their new Hub process, this takes the steps above and breaks them down to even smaller steps. Each one is accompanied by a training session and additional support, if you get stuck you can reach out to the trainers or anyone of the 1000’s of community members for advice and support

• Step 1 – Wealthy Affiliate will help you to find your niche using proven techniques and Artificial Intelligence to give you ideas
• Step 2 – Wealthy Affiliate will walk you through the process of creating a website and host it for you
• Step 3 – Wealthy Affiliate offer training, guidance and specialized tools to help you create content that will bring visitors to your business
• Step 4 – Wealthy Affiliate will demonstrate how to turn your traffic into revenue, you will learn how to monetize your site and even find affiliate programs in the platform

One of the biggest drivers for most people joining Wealthy Affiliate is the free membership, if you are interested in starting an online business then I would recommend signing up for a free membership with Wealthy Affiliate and spend a few days looking around. You will learn a huge amount and this will help you to decide if this is for you or not. If you want to know a bit more about Wealthy Affiliate you can read my review here or if you just want to get started I wrote a post on how to get started with Wealthy Affiliate.

If you want to take the next step and see what is involved click the link below

If you have any questions or feedback please leave a comment below as I would love to hear from you

Pete