How To Start An Online Business

If you are anything like I used to be, then you too would have sat there for a while thinking about how to start a business online but just didn’t know where to start. I didn’t know how to create a website, how to get traffic to a website, how to be seen on Google… It was all new territory for me, but I learned how to do it all and so can you.

Maybe the idea of starting your own Internet business is completely new to you, in which case, welcome to the world of were pretty much anything is possible! You could be the next Google, Facebook, Twitter,etc…

All companies that started off as tiny little websites and are now global giants.

On this page I’d like to go through why you should be starting an a business online, how you can make money online, the first initial steps to take to get the ball rolling and at the end you’ll have some simple and easy tasks to perform… Completely these and you’ll be well on your way to having your own business!

Let’s get started!

Why Start An Online Business? What’s So Special About The Internet?

Why Start An Online Business

Well in my eyes there are 3 things that really stand out to why having an online business is better than the more traditional “brick and mortar” style businesses.

1. You can start/run an online business from anywhere in the world, all you need is an internet connection.

The best thing about an online business is that you can run it from anywhere in the world. You can be 3,000 miles away from home on holiday with your laptop and an internet connection and you can run your business… That’s if you wanted to of course.  Whereas if you owned a shop, or something similar that required a premises, then you’d have to be there to run your business to make money.

You could be sitting on a golden beach sipping cocktails whilst running your internet empire!

2. Once you’ve got the foundations set  it doesn’t really take much to keep the business going, sometimes it might only be a couple hours per week!

This is so true! Once you have a well established website you can literally “get away” with only spending a couple hours running it and spending the rest of your time with your family and enjoying life. If you wanted to grow your business and make more money you’d spend more time on it, but only if you wanted to. There are people out there making mindboggling amounts of money for barely any work… but it wasn’t always like that.

There are no get rich quick schemes… Especially online. If you want to be making 5-figures monthly or 6/7-figures yearly then it’s going to take some work. The time you invest in setting up your business at the beginning will pay off in the long run. It make take you weeks or months to get a website up and running to a point where you can start stepping back and start watching the money roll in. Here is one of my favourite quotes:

“The difference between a successful and others is not a lack of strength, not a lack of knowledge, but rather a lack in will.” – Vince Lombardi

So if you’re not willing to put the effort in, don’t expect the success you’ve been dreaming of.

3. You can start an online business for less than $100/month… 

This is the real clincher for why online businesses are better! You can get set up your own online business for less than $100/month. So cut out the trips to starbucks or cut out a weekend of partying and you’ve got all you need for your business!

Hmmm, which would you chose? Yeah… Me too… Who needs coffee and alcohol anyway! (well… We can add is back into our lives once our business is self-sufficient 😀 yay!)

So if we looked at a “traditional” brick and mortar style business you’d see that you’d need deep pockets to get started, or try getting a bank loan. A lot of businesses have huge start up costs because I have to get a premises, purchases stock, do some advertising and hope you start making sales to cover the loan repayments!

This is also why 90-95% of business fail within their first year. They get into a bad cash flow situation where they cannot afford to pay their loans and creditors that they go out of business.

With the Internet, you don’t need bank loans… You can get started using my the guide I created. I’ve even created cheatsheets for you! 😀

OK, So Internet Is The Way Forward, But How Am I Going To Make Money?

Money

There are 3 main ways of making money online. There are many ways of money money online: selling ad space on your websites, local marketing, creating websites for others, flipping websites, etc. But I want to talk about 3 in particular: Affiliate Marketing, Selling Your Own Products and Google AdSense.

1. Affiliate Marketing

One of the most popular ways to start making money online is to do something called Affiliate Marketing. The broad strokes of affiliate marketing are: You get visitors to your website, they click on an affiliate link to a vendors website and if they then buy something you get paid a commission.  Here is a little graphic to explain it too…

How Does Affiliate Marketing Work?

The good thing with affiliate marketing is that you can get paid 75% commissions on a lot of products out there. You’ll mainly find these high commissions on digital products like eBooks as they don’t cost any money to reproduce. Even the big guys like Amazon and eBay even have affiliate programs and you can get paid up to 10% commissions with these companies.

There are some affiliate marketplaces where you can find massive lists of companies looking for affiliates. You sign up to these marketplaces and when a sale is make, the marketplace usually process the payment then give you your portion of the sale and the merchant their portion. Places like Clickbank and Shareasale are great places to find products to promote. Shareasale is a favourite of mine so sign up there for sure.

Another good thing about affiliate marketing is that there are no customer service issues to worry about, the vendor deals with all that! You don’t have to deal with unhappy customers, sorting out refunds and answering product related questions. You can do these if you wanted, especially answering questions and that can help get you a commission and build trust with your visitors, but that’s up to you.

All you are is the middleman between the buyer and the seller.

2. Create Your Own Product

Have you ever bought something and thought to yourself “I could do a better job than this!” Well now you can! You can create your own products to sell online whether that’s writing your own eBooks, selling your own handmade figurines or well just about anything. Just think of something random and you’ll probably be able to find someone selling it online.

This option is great because you have access to the world whereas if you had a store like you would in a traditional brick and mortar business you’d only have access to the people who come in. With a potential customer base of 7 BILLION people, I’m sure you’d be able to find a decent amount of people who would want to buy whatever you want to sell.

If you decide to go down the road of creating digital products, a very popular choice since they have a reproduction cost of ziltch and people love instant downloads, you can take advantage of the option I mentioned about… Affiliate Marketing. You can build an army of affiliates who help attract more visitors to your website. More visitors = More potential customers.

A lot of online business owners start off with affiliate marketing and then move onto creating their own products, and this is what I’d recommend too. Learn the ropes by promoting other peoples products and then when you’re ready, think about creating your own products.

3. Google Adsense

Google Adsense is a service that places adverts on websites. Have you ever seen websites that have an adverts on them and in the bottom corner it says “Ads by Google” or “AdChoices” in small writing. Here is an example:

Screenshot_on_3.20.2013_at_12.42.47_PM

An Example Of An Adsense Advert

Well, these are Adsense advertisements. Google places relevant adverts wherever the site owner wants the ads to appear.

Have you ever noticed that the adverts you see popping up on websites, especially on YouTube videos, seem to be about what you’ve recently been looking at or what you’ve recently been searching for online? Like in the picture above, I was looking at websites that offer services to create logos for people and suddenly all of the Google Ads are about logo designs and logo creators.

Now, these ads either be based on what the visitor has recently been browsing, like above, or they can be relevant to the page the ads are on.

The good thing about these are that they are things that the visitor is currently looking at or have recently been looking at, so it’s a good chance that they’ll click on it.

You’ll get paid for every visitor that comes to your website and clicks on one of the ads. What happens is, there are people out there who pay Google to place their adverts on other peoples websites and they pay for every time one of them gets clicked.. Also known as PPC or Pay-Per-Click. Google then pays you a commission of the money they receive for that ad that was clicked on. You can get paid anything from $0.01 to $15 per click depending on the ads.

This means no matter what niche you decide to work in, you can make money from it. If you don’t want to promote someone’s product or create your own, you can use Google Adsense and make money from your sites that way.

Great! But What Is A Niche?

Fishing for a niche

What you need to do now is find yourself a niche and a niche is a specific part of the market to focus on. This can be anything from health and fitness, music, video games, fashion… Basically anything! They can be broad niches like that or they can be narrow and insanely specific, for example; school clothing for boys ages 7-12, left handed golf equipment, rimless sunglasses for men, etc. You get the idea.

Now, I just made them up on the spot and have no idea if there is any money to be made in those niches, but there are benefits for being so specific with your niche.

A broad niche would be very hard to be successful without a big advertising budget, at least to start off with anyway. You’d be trying to compete against the major players in whatever niche you’ll be working in. I’d start off with a broad niche and then drill down to something specific that can easily be targeted with little to no money at all, and a lot of the time with little effort too! So instead of targeting something broad like “health and fitness” and try battling with the big name companies to get visitors to your website, you should drill down to something specific like “kettlebell workouts for women” which is much easier to target.

Now because you can make money within just about any niche online, it’s best to work in one that you have a passion for, a hobby or something you’re interested in. This is because you’ll be spending a lot of time writing and talking about it, you’re more likely to stick with it for longer and most importantly, enjoy it!

This should be something for you to enjoy doing. So don’t pick a niche you have no interest in, because you’ll quickly lose interest and all the work you put into it will end up being wasted. You can make money within any niche online so pick something you’d enjoy talking about.

Next, you have some tasks to complete, including picking your niche, which will get you started on a new career path… Something you’ll actually enjoy doing!

Your Tasks For Success!

Tasks to Complete

Time to get started on your own online business. After you complete the tasks below you’ll be in a position where you’ll have the beginnings of your own business, and most importantly, you’ll have access to all the tools and resources necessary to make sure you are doing it the right way that virtually ensures you’re success.

I’ll bust out the bullet points here so it’s easier for you to read as I’m sure your eyes are hurting after reading everything else. So… Are you ready to get started on your new careers path?

  • Read my “4 Steps To Find A Good Niche” post and complete the tasks at the bottom. The link opens in a new window so you don’t lose this page.
  • Go through my “How To Start A Business With $100 per Month and With Just One Hour per Day: Starting Your Own Side Hustle” free mini course.Your first 3 months are laid out step-by-step so you can take out the guess work. At the end of those 3 months you’ll be in a fantastic position to catapult your business. Don’t forget to grab the cheatsheets!
  • Leave me a message below! I want to hear your thoughts about all of this. Do you still think you can’t start your own online business? Well you can and I’m going to help you!

Don’t Go At This Alone!

With your niche ideas in hand you’ll be ready for what’s in store in the near future. So jump in head first and you will see that you too can start your own business for pennies which you can work on at your own pace. I started off doing a few hours a week and the odd full days at the weekend… And so can you. The more time you invest, the quicker everything will come together.

You don’t need to try and make a mountain out of a mole hill. There are plenty of people willing to help you out, including myself, you just need to find them.

If you have any questions or comments pop them in the section below and share this with your friends using the Facebook and Twitter buttons below!

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