Many of us dream of setting up a successful online business. Unfortunately, a large majority keep putting it off because the task seems so daunting!
Some make a start but get overwhelmed and demoralized when they get bogged down in the detail of setting up a website or a blog.
Often their first efforts at marketing become a convoluted quagmire of list building, safe lists, PPC, Adwords, banner promotions, back links, SEO, video marketing… the list seems endless!
What is missing?
In most cases, it the complete absence of a plan! (And I’m not talking about a technical, verbose business plan document with pages and pages of text, charts and tables.) A simple handwritten checklist following a lot of brainstorming will suffice!
Many people arbitrarily select a starting point which all too often is to create a website or blog when the first step should be to do some basic research.
This research does not have to be terribly technical or difficult and should start with some serious introspection. Ask yourself some fundamental questions:
Do I have the absolute desire to succeed in an online enterprise? Do I understand the realities of starting and running an online business? Can I commit to the necessary requirements (time, expertise, financing)?
After you have determined that you have what it takes, the next step is to determine what kind of business you wish to promote. Will it be products or services or will it be a combination? Will it be personally-created products or will it be someone else’s products? Will it be a highly specialized business catering to a select niche market or will it be for a broader general market? Will you concentrate on affiliate marketing? Where will network marketing and MLM fit into your plan? (The assumption here is that you understand the pros and cons of these alternatives and if you don’t then some further study is required!)
Again, many people mistakenly decide that at this point their next step is to create a web site or blog or both. The problem with this is that no thought has been given to how you will market your products and services. In fact, how you market your business will in many ways determine whether you need a website, a blog or both. Or maybe many website and/or many blogs!
You need to know that a personal domain (which you have to purchase) may be required for each site especially if you have a multitude of products that cater to different markets. Individual domains are inexpensive but you need to incorporate this cost into your startup budget.
After you have brainstormed the possibilities, explored your marketing plan and decided on your goals and objectives, you need to answer a simple question: Do I have the necessary financing to hire someone to develop my website or blog, OR do I have the time and commitment to develop it myself? There are numerous products available that do not require knowledge of HTML, PHP, or CSS and are free or can be purchased cheaply.
If you can hire expertise then you can probably be up and running fairly quickly. If you opt for doing it yourself, it may take longer depending on the amount of learning you need in order to put the pieces together.
In order for your plan to work as a unit, you will need to make use of a specialized technology that adds synergy to your online activities and is an absolute must for your marketing. I’m talking about an Auto-Responder. Two good examples are aweber (dot) com and getresponse (dot) com.
You may or may not be aware that there is a SUPER product on the web that has been around for a long time and continues to out-perform any new resources that come along. I’m talking about a product that leads you through all of the steps I have outlined above, and then some! If you wish to start an online business and work from home, you may be interested in looking at case studies of sites created with this resource and consistently remain in the top 10% of all sites on the internet. Now that’s IMPRESSIVE!
To summarize, I hope I have given you some insights into the kind of process necessary to set up an online business. It is not a complicated procedure but an absolutely necessary one. If you are serious about establishing a successful enterprise online, then it is worth taking the time to do it right!