If you want to be your own boss and change your life, learning how to build your own online business – from scratch – is an invaluable skill.
Do You Want To Be Your Own Boss? If So, An Online Business Could Be The Answer
Starting an online business is a great way to become your own boss. You can set your own hours, fit work around your family commitments, and work from anywhere in the world (depending upon which type of business you’re running, of course). However, it’s important to do your research and plan carefully before you actually get started.
We’re going to walk you through the main steps involved in building your own online business from scratch.
Step 1: Find A Niche For Your Online Business
The first step is to find a niche that you’re passionate about and that you hopefully have some expertise in. This will help you attract the right customers and make it easier to market your business. But please don’t let lack of expertise stop you! Everything you need to learn is available online – kind of a round-robin situation, if you like.
Once you’ve determined your niche, you need to do some research to see if there’s a market for your particular products or services. You can use Google Trends to see how people are searching for related terms, and you can also use social media to see if there are any active communities around your niche.
Step 2: Choose A Business Model
There are many different business models that you can use for your online business. Some popular options are:
- Selling products: a traditional business model where you sell physical or digital products to your customers.
- Affiliate marketing: a business model where you promote other people’s products or services and earn a commission on each sale.
- Freelancing: this model is where you offer your services to clients on a contract basis.
- Membership sites: this is where you can charge your customers a monthly or annual fee to access exclusive content or services. This can be a very lucrative business model and can be run alongside any other model you choose.
Step 3: Create A Website
Your website is your online storefront, so it’s important to create a professional and well-designed site. You can use a website builder like WordPress or Wix to create your website, or you can hire a web developer to create it for you. (Our article on setting up a self-hosted blog may help.)
Once you have your website, you’ll need to fill it with content that will attract and engage your potential customers. This content could include blog posts, product pages, and e-Books. You’ll also need to tell Google that your business exists. You do this via Google Console (there are loads of tutorials for this on YouTube).
Step 4: Market Your Online Business
Now you have your website up and running, you need to start marketing your business. There are many different ways to market it online, including:
- Search engine optimization (SEO) – this is the process of optimising your site so that it ranks higher in search engine results pages (SERPs).
- Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising. This is a form of advertising where you pay Google or another search engine every time someone clicks on your ad.
- Social media marketing: the process of using social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn etc to promote your business. It can be a bit of a minefield knowing where to start with this but again, there’s lots of information available for free online. We’ll be covering this in more detail in future articles.
- Email marketing – as it implies, this is the process of sending email newsletters to your subscribers. Obviously, you have to get those subscribers first. Offering a freebie of some sort can help, but there are multiple ways to build your email list.
Step 5: Provide Excellent Customer Service
Good customer service is essential for any business, and online ones are no exception. If you want to keep your customers happy and coming back for more, it goes without saying that you need to provide excellent customer service.
This means being responsive to customer inquiries, resolving customer issues quickly and efficiently, and going the extra mile to make sure your customers are satisfied.
A Few Tips
Start small and scale up – don’t try to do too much, too soon. Starting with a small product or service and gradually expanding your business will make it easier to manage in the early days. It’s also easier if you’re setting up your business as a side-line to your existing job.
Be patient – it takes time to build any successful business, and online is no different. Be realistic about how much you’re going to make and don’t expect to get rich overnight.
Most important tip of all – just keep going. Trust us, as two people who have made their living online for a few years, we’ve both had to make sacrifices and work hard. Now, we can do more or less what we want, when we want, but that doesn’t mean we can’t put in the work. Like anything in life, you get out what you put in – but it’s certainly worth it.
And Finally …
Building your own online business from scratch can be a lot of work but it’s also very rewarding. If you’re willing to put in the effort, you can create a successful online business that gives you the freedom to live life on your own terms.
We hope you enjoyed this post. Please let us know if you have any questions or feedback via the comments (or you can contact us privately).
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