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Previous: What Are Small Businesses Afraid Of? by Fredric Paul Robin Kohli -- lead developer of E-Junkie and an “accidental” entrepreneur -- offers up four helpful tips to jumpstart the creation of a new Web-based business. Suprisingly, Kohli's advice isn't technical. Instead, he focuses on the core issues facing any new online business: 1. Get it off the ground: Don't get all tied up in creating an online store with all the deals and packages and multitude of options available. Keep it simple to a level where you can handle it yourself and can get your key products added to your site easily and focus on the creative and marketing aspect of your business. 2. Get traffic: Don't limit yourself by just creating a storefront. Instead, create a site or a blog that lets you create content around your niche. Content creates community and then commerce follows. Also, having your own site/blog gives you the flexibility to express your creativity and lets you use sharing tools which help you get the word out. Apart from having a store, listing your products in a marketplace like eBay or Etsy or iTunes also helps, but it's a bad idea to drive traffic from your site to these marketplaces. Remember, you are paying their fee so they can generate sales for you, not the other way round. 3. Convert traffic to sales: Make it easy for the buyers to see how they can add an item to the cart. And once buyers have reached the cart, it should not take more than 2 clicks for them to reach the checkout page where they enter their PayPal or Google or credit card info. And that should be it. 4. Turn buyers into evangelists: If your fine product is backed by equally fine customer service, then there's not a whole lot more left for you to do to turn those buyers into evangelists. But having an affiliate program provides additional incentives to spread the word about your product. E-Junkie is a shopping cart and digital delivery service which lets anybody sell anything, anywhere (Website, blogs and social networks) in a matter of minutes. E-Junkie's FatFreeCart works "inside" a merchant's Website as a part of it and provides a seamless shopping experience to the buyer. Follow Fredric Paul on Twitter @ http://twitter.com/TheFreditor Posted on September 2, 2009 at 12:45 PM | Comments (12)Comments The simplest is to advertise. Your site address goes on everything you do - your letterhead, your business cards, your comments to other blogs (I see you did that here. Good job!). And you might ahve to pay for it. More than ads in the paper, use pay-per-click on Google, Yahoo, Bing, Facebook, etc. Posted by: mike on September 4, 2009 at 2:36 PM Is there any way you can get traffic to your site without paying for it ? Posted by: Beth Solgote on September 7, 2009 at 2:52 AM Hello, Thanks Posted by: Vlad Cristian on September 18, 2009 at 4:42 PM Starting an online business is not just about developing a website, uploading it and waiting for customers to appear. It takes commitment, effort and a lot of time to market your online business. You have to remember that nobody knows about you yet. So you have to make yourself visible. Familiarize yourself with SEO, pay-per-click and the likes. Never stop marketing…even when you reach the top. Posted by: riffraff on October 5, 2009 at 5:23 AM How do i start doing an online store? i have looked at software e commerce companies, or thought about a yahoo store. I don’t know where to begin. How do i know if i will make money or if i have the manpower to set it up and fullfill orders, take photos, etc. I feel overwhelmed and nervous. Posted by: joyce on October 12, 2009 at 4:16 PM You begin by writing a business plan. There’s never any guarantee that you’ll make money, but writing a business plan will help you see and understand what’s involved to start and run your business and help you determine how much money you’ll need to get it going. When you put answers to the first three of those questions based on research and realistic estimates, then you can figure out if you’ll need to hire anyone and at what point and what you’d have to pay them… and figure that information into the answer to the 4th question - what it will cost to start and run the business. Good luck. Remember, worrying is a waste of time and energy. Planning helps you make the go/no go decisions and get things done.
Posted by: Janet Attard I think the most difficult thing in online business is developing a proper SEO campaign, especially these days when SEO “rules” keep changing. In order to succeed online you need a lot of targeted traffic. And of course, the most valuable traffic is the one you get from search engines. Posted by: Ian on December 21, 2009 at 9:03 AM Starting business takes a lot of courage and determination to be able to reach your goal. There are several helpful tips in setting up a small business of your own and this article is one of them. Full of substance and very good source. Post more. Posted by: newbie on March 16, 2010 at 8:43 PM From some of the comments I see that some of you are getting sidetracked by minutia when (if you’re planning to start an online business or are just getting started) it’s really important to be clear on your overall strategy. I’m a big believer in the concept of crating a “You” centered online business. In a nutshell you position yourself as a credible authority in your niche and provide good content. You build trust in your followers this way, and this allows you to market to them. A “You” centered business lets you incorporate many different online business models (i.e. affiliate marketing, marketing your own products, network marketing etc.). Rather than being locked into one model it opens you up to expand your business in may different ways. My focus is on how network marketers can use the power of the Internet to grow their businesses far faster than they ever could using odl school promotion techniques that are almost universally dsiliked by everyone. However you can apply these same concepts outside of the MLM world. If you’d like to learn more about creating your own “You” centered business for whatever niche you would like to do business in, visit my blog and check out the free course and other content I offer . Posted by: Vincent Czaplyski the MLM blog guy on July 31, 2010 at 12:39 PM This article is informative. It is important to put hard work and perseverance in an online business. You will not get massive traffic to the website if you do not promote it. The advices you have here are straight forward. Posted by: Brocha Weiss on August 9, 2010 at 11:55 PM 1) Open Cart is a great, FREE open source shopping cart system that you can combine with a blog to promote your products. 2) Setup Google Analytics, AdWords, Merchant Center and Webmaster Tools accounts (do your reading here). Google provides everything you need to do free and paid promotion for your site. 3) CONTENT CONTENT CONTENT: You MUST provide tons of free, valid content re: your market and products. Blog about your items/market and make YouTube videos. Why do you think they paid $1B for YouTube? Because Google knows that people love videos. Search for anything on Google and you’ll see video results near the top. And most of your competitors don’t bother to make videos, so you’ll have a huge advantage. Posted by: Bob on September 25, 2010 at 12:06 PM |
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4 Keys To Starting An Online Business
#2, getting traffic is the tough one for me. I got the content, but I don’t get the traffic. Any tips on that?
Posted by: Conrad Walton on September 2, 2009 at 3:20 PM