Young Business Network

Archive for the ‘Internet Business’ Category

An online business will extend a business’ reach to more prospects they can market to. Entrpreneurs realize that there is a huge opportunity on the internet to market to their prospects – it’s also cheaper. However, this no small project. Creating a professional online presence requires planning and organization. Here are 10 steps you need to follow to launch a business online.

1. Domain Name Register a name for your website. Choose a name that is short and easy to remember. When you tell other people what your domain name is, they should easily remember it, know how to spell it and know the type of business you’re in.

2. Web hosting You don’t need to go for expensive web hosting at the start of your business unless you have lots of traffic. Avoid free web hosting with ads on them. It will kill your company’s image.

3. Face of the business Decide on a spokesman for your website. Will it be the CEO, Director or Marketing Director? This person’s photo should be on the website with contact details. It will give your company and the website personality.

4. About Us, Contact Us & Services The common pages of a website are About Us, Contact Us and Services. Spend a lot of time planning the content for these pages. Make sure you give as many options as possible for people to contact you. e.g. Telephone, Fax, Email, Mail Address, Skype

5. Taking orders Decide how you would like to take orders online. It could be via telephone, Paypal, credit card payment or money transfer. Have your order button displayed in an eye-catching area. Your visitors need to know exactly how to buy your products or services.

6. Good web design With the structure planned out, hire a professional designer to create your website. You need to give a corporate image that is eye-catching and exciting. Your website gives your visitors their first impression of you, which determines the number of customers you’ll have.

7. Create a free report Give out valuable information in the form of a pdf file. This report will contain useful information your prospects can use, with links to your website and products. The objective of the report is to show your expertise in the market and make your prospects remember you.

8. Squeeze page This is a web page which describes the benefits of the free report. It informs visitors that they can download the report free of charge and sign up to your company’s newsletter, if they enter their name and email address. This is how you collect targeted email leads and add them to your autoresponder account. You can regularly email good information to your list of subscribers and occasionally remind them to purchase your products and any new promotions you have.

9. Write articles To launch your business website, one of the most effective ways is to write related articles in your niche and distribute them to directories linking back to your website. This will help your website rank higher in the search engines and drive targeted visitors to your website.

10. Press Release To announce your website to the public, write a press release that has a news-worthy story related to your business. With this press release, submit it to as many media channels as you can. This will send visitors to your website and may even get you interviews with journalists. Online press release submissions will also help your website rank higher in the search engines. The above is a brief summary of the steps you need to go through, to create and launch your business online. Each step requires planning and careful implementation. You may consider outsourcing this to companies who specialize in creating and launching online businesses if you don’t have a team of your own.

Is There Money On The Internet?

The simple answer is yes. The more comprehensive answer is that you can make money online by having a well-defined business case that covers all bases. It is too easy to see the big user generated sites such as MySpace and Facebook with their millions of visitors and members as being money-making models. That’s a bit like parading Lotto winners and saying see there’s a winner. The odds are against anyone becoming the next FaceBook or Amazon but many entrepreneurs do find successful niches which generate income and create a sustainable business.
One of the most popular methods for making online over the past 5 or 6 years has been to set up an EBay business online. This does not mean competing with EBay, it means setting up your own niche ‘shop’ within EBay. Millions of people around the world are doing this. The niche needs to be attractive enough to create a demand for product as you would be buying product from others sources and reselling on EBay. A number of people have for example built EBay business around buying surplus stock in categories from Chinese manufacturers and reselling on EBay under some banner for example “Nothing over $2!”
You need a website that can interface with this and you need to find a profitable niche.

Finding Profitable Niches

Many people struggle with niche ideas and research. Finding a great niche market is
like hitting the jackpot, but it is NOT as simple as looking thru a keyword tool. There is a whole thought process that goes with it if you are serious about really working a niche and learning the ‘conversations’ that are going on.
You can experiment with your ideas by using the Google Analytics tool to discover who is appearing on Google with a particular product and service. By looking at the volume of searches you will be guided by the popularity. Of course the bigger the volume the harder it will be to establish a foothold. But the clues can be there.
For example, if you are a golfing enthusiast, you will observe the crowded market for golf accessories and deals for club membership. But there may be a niche for example in offering some narrow category such as “second hand ‘Shark’ golf clubs”.
Regardless of whether you start with the product or start with keywords, make sure they really relate to each other. These words and phrases that you are finding are part of a conversation a reader/Google searcher is having with him/herself as he/she goes from the info gathering stage to the buying stage.

Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is an Internet-based marketing practice in which a business rewards one or more affiliates for each visitor or customer brought about by the affiliate’s marketing efforts. Affiliate marketing—using one website to drive traffic to another—is a form of online marketing, which is frequently overlooked by advertisers.
In business it pays to look for “best-of-breed” – who is doing it well? What can I learn from them? Look at the top affiliates– the ones who are actually making money. What’s the difference between them? You’ll notice that they all work ultra hard, are ultra networked, and are ultra knowledgeable. The catch-22 is that if you’re a one man show, how can you possibly put in enough time to work, meet people, and learn at the same time?
There’s a tendency amongst newbie’s to go hard at it. That’s fine. The entrepreneurial– fire, ready, aim, can be damaging. They can be so “ready’ that they move in any direction with no goal– just lots of open projects– zero of them completed.
Think about affiliate marketing as a form of sales: essentially you become the sales person for a company or product. When you produce the results someone is looking for, for example acquiring email addresses or making a sale, you will be paid accordingly. It’s so well ingrained in today’s online ecommerce world that nearly every major brand and company has an affiliate marketing program that you can join.

Digital Products

There are many so-called digital product categories. Software is the obvious one. But, apart from affiliate categories, the area of internet marketing which is most readily accessible to new entrants or to excising businesses seeking to migrate online is Info Products.
These are information products such as E-books, online courseware (such as “How to” Tutorials). This is suited for subject mater experts such as education services providers. Or a translator, for example could offer online translation services or products (tapes) that are web-based.
The info product area remains at its early stage of adoption with a the first wave of adopters from physical already taking place. For example books to online books via the KINDLE platform. Education services are underdoing some massive migration with even the great universities now offering online delivery of all degree courses.
Even if you are not an “expert” in some category but you have some internet marketing nous or delivery capabilities, info products are a highly accessible digital pricy category. You can always hire subject matter experts online over Guru.com or Elance.com
Remember if you already established in a physical product category, you need to provide fulfilment of your product: warehousing, shipping and warranty are serious hurdles.