As a beginner or newbie, you can start your own online business successfully with little investment, determination and persistence using this insider’s guide. As a matter of fact, aspiring entrepreneurs are having aha moment daily by taking the bull by the horns to start a business on the internet.
There are no hard and fast rules to success for anyone
starting an online business. What you require to succeed is a dose of
consistency, passion, hard work, viable business idea and a target audience to
serve. I’m going to walk you through the steps to successfully make your
entrepreneurial journey eventful.
Step #1: Position
Yourself as an Entrepreneur
I guess your goal to start an online business is to make
money. This is a good idea and there is nothing wrong with that desire at all!
But do you know that for you to earn money online or offline, you’ve to be a
problem solver or solution provider for any target market who has a problem to
solve and is willing to pay for it?
If you want to make money on the internet into the
foreseeable future, your greatest challenge is how to identify problems or pain
points in the marketplace and provide solutions to solve them. So, your first
task is to hone market research and keyword research skills which will help you
discover the needs and wants of any target audience.
If you know what your potential customers’ needs or wants
are, you should be able to find a way to be of help to them and you’ll get rewarded
in the end through any suitable monetization methods available to you.
So, as an entrepreneur, your primary job is to research pain
points in the market before thinking of how to make money online.
Step #2:
Position Yourself as an Expert
From day one of starting an online business, begin to work
and build on your expertise status. People buy from who they know, like and
trust and it all boils down to the expertise of the vendor, merchant or seller
of a product or service. There is no sentiment in buying and selling in business
but rather it is the exchange of value between parties.
When it comes to business, nobody wants to throw money away
just like that. It’s about making profits and more of it when the goods are
delivered. If you’re an expert on a subject, topic or field, it makes it easier
for you to promote any product or service and close sales seamlessly.
It doesn’t matter what entrepreneurial hat you’re wearing;
you can make money as an expert if you’re strategic in product delivery. As a
blogger, webmaster, product creator, content creator, etc, becoming an expert in
your field is what will make the difference and stand you out from the
competition.
You’ve to read up books, be abreast of industry news and
trends always, sign up with relevant online courses or get a coach to become
who you want to be. It helps!
Don’t forget that Rome was not built in a day. You’ve to
start from somewhere to get to your desired destination. As a beginner you’ve
what it takes to start your own online business and still be successful. All
you need is to learn the ropes while you build your online business from the
ground up.
You can research existing experts in your field and sign up
for their business newsletters. Continue to look over their shoulders and get viable
online business ideas you can start working on in earnest.
Learn from different ways they promote their blogs,
websites, products and services to their target audience and practice it. As
far as I know, you can never know enough of anything. There is always room for learning,
improvements and perfection.
Step #3:
Determine Your Ideal Target Audience
If you’re an expert or entrepreneur in your field and you
don’t have reasonable number of people to serve in the marketplace, you’ll not
make money to break even. It’s as simple as that! This is why patience is
required for you to start and grow an online business profitably.
You should not be carried away with disruptive and
consistent advertisements of get rich quick schemes flying all over the
internet. It doesn’t work while some are just one-hit wonder. And the best way
to discover a target audience with pain points is to create a blog and set up an email marketing system which will enable you to build an email list of
subscribers from scratch.
From this point, you’ll continue to nurture your leads, ask
questions, take surveys and send out questionnaires to know what your target
market wants. If you have 10,000 subscribers who want you to create a digital
product on a topic which you’re an expert, you’re good to go.
You can also take it a step further by creating buyer
persona so that you’ll know the content to create and publish to gain traction
to your website, get authority, create brand awareness, generate leads and
close sales as the case may be.
Step #4:
Create a Blog Website
There is no shortcut to this if you want to start your own
online business for the long term and make money. You’ve to invest money to
start a blog and grow it to an enviable height. Your blog website will stand as
your business office on the World Wide Web.
You’ll have a regular platform where you can consistently
publish content and interact with your target market, get feedback and opinions
about business information which may be critical to your success.
For you to start a blog and make money, you need to register
a domain name and buy web hosting. This will cost you less than $200 for three
years of shared hosting from a reputable website hosting company. You can
download and read up my ebook on how to create a blog and make money using my
recommended cheap web hosting provider to get started.
Step #5:
Be Generous with Quality Content
As you know, content is king on the internet. And being
generous with content pays great dividends in the end. The law of reciprocity
works like charm on the World Wide Web. I’ve helped a lot of people to start
their own online business by publishing high quality content and I got rewarded
in one way or another.
If you want to leap and not limp in your internet business,
create and publish unique content consistently to attract your ideal clients,
readers, followers and fans. You cannot be a stingy entrepreneur and expect to
make passive income online.
Step #6:
Decide on an Online Business Model to Adopt
There are over 101 online business models that exist.
Broadly, you can:
- Create a digital product and sell it online,
- Provide freelance services of any kind based on your expertise, or
- Everything in between.
For example, if you own a blog website with lots of unique
content, you can promote affiliate products and services and earn affiliate
commissions. Also, you may write an ebook, monetize it with affiliate links to
complementary products and start giving it away for free.
Obviously, starting an online business successfully requires
hard work, smart work, consistency and persistence upfront but the pay-off can
astounding. Whether this is your side hustle or work from home business, you’ll
succeed at it if you know what you’re doing.
Step #7:
Promote, Promote and Promote Your Business
No matter the type of business you run on the internet,
you’ve to regularly promote it to get results. If you don’t advertise your
business, people will not know it exists. This is why you’ve to learn some
digital skills to reduce the cost of running an internet business.
As an online business owner, you’ve to hone search engine
optimization (SEO), digital marketing, keyword research and list building
skills at the barest minimum. You must understand that online marketing is an
ongoing task that must be executed.
Having a unique product or service to sell is not enough in
this digital age. With easy access to social media platforms, you’ve what it
takes to promote your website, blog or brand.
Some of the digital marketing channels you should look into
include:
- Social media marketing
- Video marketing
- Blogging and content marketing
- Guest posting
- Search engine marketing
- Etc
In conclusion, you should be able to consistently position,
package and promote your product or service to your target niche market if you
hope to start your own online business and make money from home.
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