Beginners Guide To Starting An Online Business

Today the Internet is much more than a simple document storage/retrieval system. It is an excellent platform for anyone looking to start an online business with little or no money and a required lifestyle.

Some have attempted a variety of possibilities and strategies, but it was through failures that some have learned and established a simple technique for success as internet business owners.

I can assure you that, although you will need to acquire some basic technical skills, your success will depend not on your programming or typing skills but more on what you have between your ears.

Below is my list of what you’ll need and have to do, to succeed as an online business owner.

1. Have a dream and persistence. If you haven’t got a dream and the persistence to follow it through then you will fail.

2. Have a mentor. Find someone who has gained experience in this field. Become their student. Listen to their advice and learn from their failures and successes. You’ll save yourself a lot of time, effort, and money not to mention regret and disappointment.

3. Find a hobby, a ‘pet’ project, something you are interested in and would do without payment or rewards. If it gets you excited, keeps you awake at night thinking about it, it will provide you with opportunities to make money from it too.

For example, once you have a project/activity that you live for, be it surfing, stamp collection, video games, mobile phones, you could start a local shop. Once the shop is established you can start a website. Once the website is up and running you can introduce products to promote and your project/activity. Do you get the picture? You probably have seen the film “Pay it forward”. Well, you can use the same principle in establishing an online business. Give something valuable first and then you’ll get your opportunities to reap your rewards.

4. Promote and automate your project website. Once you completed step 3 above and your site is up and running you want to be able to promote your shop site to ‘outsiders’. You don’t have to get technical and bogged down in programming or writing strings of HTML code. There are brilliant software out there to do a lot of ‘skilled’ tasks with the push of a button (both free and commercial products). Learn to use them well!

Promoting your website should be your priority from now on. Get as many people to come to the site as you can and automate this activity. Start a newsletter to keep in touch with your members and provide them with free advice, tips, and news on the subject of your project/activity. And again, automate this too.

Get software to automatically distribute your newsletters and automatically sort any emails you get in reply to your posts. Set up autoresponders signup new members and respond to email queries; automate, automate, automate…

5. Once you have enough members and you have an established, loyal group of followers, you can introduce your promotional products and other services that you now want to sell and make money from as a business. You’ll have to be gentle and take it one step at a time.

You may also find it useful to have another, separate, commercial site for this purpose and simply direct your members there from your ‘signature files’ or ‘letterheads’ you send out as part of your shop’s newsletter. By now you should have enough experience in setting up and running a website from step 3 above.

6. Review the operation of your site, experiment, and test the effect of site layout, content, headlines, etc. Review and look for opportunities to further automate anything that you can to make your site ‘self-sustaining’.

If you do this you should be able to get yourself more free time to actually enjoy your hobby/project and to go out and look for more new material (advice, tips, and news) that you can send out to your members.

After you have a website running, it is quite simple to forget that your business will not exist without new content and the care of your members. Find a gentle balance between your business objectives and your passion.