Starting a home-based online business. Can you do it?
Yes of course you can! You can do anything you put your mind to. The real question is what do you do. You may be in the same situation as I am, laid off and not able to find a job or stuck in a job you can’t take another day and want to start making the move to being in control of your own life.
The first step is your business concept. What will your business do? Will it sell one or several products, who’s products – yours or someone else’s or are you providing a service? Your expertise relative to the product or service you are selling, time available, customer target, business connections (potential customers), and money to invest in start-up.
You don’t need to have any experience to start an internet business, nor do you need to have money to invest, but you do need to have some basic computer skills, for example, the ability to get online and use email and the internet. You also need to have a few hours a week to spare and be persistent if things don’t always work first time! If this sounds like you, then read on…
Step 1: Educate yourself
Use Google and search the keywords that you think people will use to find your product or service. Scan through the first three pages of the search engine results to see what others are doing, get ideas and ways to make your product or service unique, relevant and useful. If you cannot then maybe it’s not the right idea – keep that in mind always, it’ll keep you on your toes.
Subscribe to free sites like Entrepreneur.com to get tips on how to launch a business and niche site related to your business and how your are going to sell it, like Seagate Web Solutions which is a one-stop-shop resource for businesses that want to launch a site quickly and Pro Blogger which has great information about blogging and using blogs for writing.
Step 2: Create the skeleton of your idea
Draft a high level overview of the your business plan.
These are a few links to valuable resources for business ideas:
Site Build It! Site Build It! (”SBI!”) is the only, all-in-one, site-brainstorming-and-building-and-hosting-and-marketing, step-by-step system of software tools that delivers thriving, profitable business.
Step 3: Add the flesh to the bone
Map out what your site will look like and how it will function. We highly recommend using a free (open-source) platform like WordPress, B2Evolution or Droopal. Don’t get intimidated – it really doesn’t matter if you know how to use these. The point is that these are all free and there are hundreds, if not thousands, of free and premium all ready made websites you can upload – just like you would a video to YouTube or a picture file to Facebook. Use the shortcuts since they are there and they are very good – pick GoDaddy for hosting (awesome support) and domain search and buy, pick the platform and go man go… write the content. Seriously, it took my husband two days to launch a full site using GoDaddy, WordPress and Seagate Web Solutions and he can barely do attachments in emails! The total cost was $1,500 which included a site with email marketing capability to send out his business newsletters automatically.
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