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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 (7) 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.
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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