Starting Your Online Business — From Scratch!

(Last Updated On: September 5, 2019)

The Internet, a blessing or a curse?

click-here-start-online-businessPerhaps you are a retailer whose customers are shopping online rather than in your store.  In that case, you may consider the Internet a curse. Every skillful business person tries to turn each negative into a positive. You should be starting your online business.

5 advantages of having an online business

1. Vast audience

You have a vast audience who are on the Internet and you can market to them every day.

2. Your own website 24/7

You can have your own website promoting for you 24/7 365 days a year. You do not have to be there to sell.

3. Promote using email

You can have a squeeze page and give valuable information to the people who have given you their contact information.  With a click on a button you can promote to one person, a thousand people or a million people.

4. Lower cost than anything

With the Internet you can provide more value per visitor than ever before in history. (This blog post will refer to value quite often.  It’s what you want to be giving with all of your emails and with the products you sell.)

Earn a percentage of the selling price for every book sold.

Click here to learn more.

5. Love your lifestyle

Having your business online gives you more freedom.

5 characteristics of a good online business

1. Paid advertising

You can get lot of free publicity and can create brand awareness using social media.  You want to get good at social media.  You want to make lots of blog posts and link to them from your Facebook page, from Twitter & from Google Plus.  For the really good posts you will want to make a YouTube video and also link to it from SlideShare, Pinterest and LinkedIn.

start-your-online-business-adAs important as those 7 social media are, they will likely never work as quickly and effectively as paid advertising.  Also, keep in mind that it can take a year or more to become reasonable good at using even those 7 social media above.  You will have to learn the first one, become good at it and then move onto the second one. You keep repeating the process until you are good at all of them.

You must decide whether you should use Bing, Google, LinkedIn or whatever.  It depends upon things like cost per click and what demographic uses the platform. If you are undecided, search for something like how decide which PPC to use Bing, Google, Instagram, LinkedIn. That may help you narrow down your choices.

2.  Phenomenal website

wordpress-gears-401There is a reason why a quarter of the websites in the world use WordPress. Learn how to use WordPress and make a WordPress blog. Seriously consider using the Divi WordPress theme.

3. Build a list

online business list-building-bookHave an excellent squeeze page, use it to create a list and develop a relationship with the people on your list. (Click on the image of the book to learn much more about list building.)

Let AWeber help you make the best use of that list. Watch the video.

4. Give the people lots of value

You want to be known for giving people value. Sell nothing but high value squeeze-page-2products.  To get people to give their contact information on your squeeze page, you must give them valuable information.

That’s why they give you their email address in the first place — they are anxious to get the free valuable information you are offering them.  That free valuable information should tell them that you will be emailing them more free valuable information.

You may even end up sending them a free valuable video or PDF file every day for a week. Each video or PDF file will have information about your product. The more value you give people, the more they will trust you.

5. Sell your product

buying-online-with-credit-cardWith each email, you will make it possible to buy your product. And remember, the more they trust you, the more likely they are to buy. If you are using the Divi WordPress theme, consider using the WooCommerce shopping cart for your online business.

YouTube video

Below is the YouTube video that accompanies this blog post.

 


Peter Enns has been developing websites since 1996. He is a social media blogger and author of the free YouTube video-creation tutorial called 7 Day YouTube.

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VideoGuy Enns

Author: VideoGuy

I've been a professional educator for years. Right now I'm creating short tutorials about many facets of video creation.

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