Online Business: The Starting Point

How TO Start

Making money through internet marketing isn't an impossible task, although many make it out to be the easiest task in the world to make a real success online with any business or venture you do need to know how to go about it. There are many get rich quick schemes out there and although they say they are the be-all and end-all of getting rich working from home, very few schemes actually deliver the whole package necessary to get yourself making a profit. With this in mind, you still can make money online if you have the right skills and know-how. The most important factors when starting an online business is to research your market place or niche.

You want to be in a place where you have a market to sell to people and you don't want to be in a highly competitive marketplace or niche as this makes it harder for you. The clued-up marketers are already making it harder for certain niches because they have all the tools and know-how of how to drive traffic to their offers. Driving traffic to any web-based business is the key to your success online, without lots of traffic you stand very little or no chance of being very profitable.

Start Your Own Website

To stand a chance you need to have a decent website, a website that has good keywords for your niche in the domain name is a good place to start. There are free keyword tools such as Google keyword tool which will show you how competitive a keyword is. In general, if you want to rank high on the pages of Google you will have to choose keywords that have under a 50,000 searches a month on Google, this may sound surprising but the lower the competition of a keyword the higher the chance you have of rating your site higher in Google.

So you need to learn about keywords and how to make them work for you. So let's just say you have done some research into your keywords and you have a group of 10 keywords or phrases.

So you would need to get a web domain using one of those keywords or phrases. next you need to build a website or have someone build it for you. Outsourcing a website designer can be quite cheap there are places like fiverr.com where people may design you a site for as little as $5.

What Is Important?

Your website is important as its the sales media between you and your clients. It should be full of lots of good content relevant to your niche. It's a good idea to have an opt-in box for people to sign up to, then they can receive your weekly newsletter or updates from your business. This also gives you the starting point of building a list which you can later email market to. So for that, you need an autoresponder ( which is an email client software to mass send emails to your client list) autoresponders are available from many companies online, with different price ranges depending on your needs. Aweber autoresponder is among the most favored with internet marketers, but you can choose which suits your needs best.

So lets say you have an autoresponder and a basic website, now you need to fill your website with good quality pages, have links between them and opt-in forms on the different pages with a "call to action" to help persuade your visitors to join your mailing list, give away some good freebies is a good incentive for people to sign up. But you must make sure that its a juicy offer people are reluctant to give away their email addresses for little in return.

Blog Is Must

Have a blog on your website telling your visitors valuable information or the latest special offer. Offer a free resources page with downloadable content, have an add a bookmark this page script to get visitors coming back, these little tactics can make a big difference. Also, change your content frequently especially on free resources pages this keeps the content fresh for the people revisiting your site. Also, have a Facebook like button on your website, your company can open a free Facebook account and you can even link the two together. Other social sites are also a good place to link your website to.

So lets say you have got all that done, you need still to get traffic to make money, well then building a mailing list is a very important start, it can give you many more possible leads without really working any harder, the email list is the way to make a considerable monthly income, but you must remember to deliver value to your customers give them free offers and don't just hard sell to them, you need to build relationships with your list by giving them what they want and selling to them at a later date.

Do Some Research

Research what your clients want from you, maybe email them a questionnaire asking them ways you can help them get what they want. Maybe email them with a competitive offer and give away some great products as prizes.

So you have got this far... so what next... Well you need to permanently be looking at promoting your site, there are lots of ways, paid traffic methods, Pay per click advertising these are all well and good if you have an expert on board to help otherwise the paid methods can just cost your business lots of valuable resources.

Forums of your chosen niche are a good place, offer solutions to problems in the forum topics, and get your business seen that way. Forums usually let you have a web link in your signature, which is a mini bio about you, answer some forum questions well and people should use the link to visit your site.

Focus On Your Niche 

Write niche related articles and publish them online using many of the free article sites, many articles need to be written if you want this source of the traffic to work. Articles should be rich with key information of value to your prospected clients you need to give to receive in online business. Produce ebooks and post them at free eBook sites, have links included in these ebooks linking back to your website, produce videos and post them on sites like YouTube.

Use eBay to sell physical products, it's always a good place full of hungry ready buyers, use it to further your business online, enclose business cards with the sold merchandise or include online vouchers, but make sure you enclose your website address for them to look at.

These methods can really work but you have to maintain a consistent level of posting good content otherwise your hard work gets little or no results. The truth is its a constant struggle in the early days of getting seen online but if you work hard and maintain the traffic promotion methods mentioned you will see some results.

Also finally have a tracker on your website so you can manage the data of where your traffic is coming from, then you can see which methods are working best or worst giving you the inside information of what is working and what doesn't, Woopra.com is a good free analytics system to use. It's very important to track what is working for your business as it can cut down on less benefiting tasks.