8 Simple Steps to Starting Your Online Home Business Have you ever thought about starting your own online home business? If you’re like many people, you’ve probably considered doing it, but since you didn’t know where to start or which resources to use, you quickly abandoned the idea and chalked it up to being just a pipedream. This is the completely wrong mentality to have, however, because when you try anything for the first time, there is going to be some risk involved; plus, you will never know how successful you could have been unless you give it a try. Moreover, if you break the process down into a series of small, manageable tasks and goals, you will view the process as being much less daunting and much more feasible. In this article, I will lay out the procedure of starting an online home business for you in 8 simple steps.
1. Get a domain name – Your domain name serves are your unique home and address on the Internet. You want to have a domain name that ends with “.com” as opposed to “hostingsite.com.” The reason for this is simply because it looks a million times more professional. You can get inexpensive domain names on websites like NameCheap.com and GoDaddy.com
2. Find a web host – Basically, a web host is a company that charges you a small fee for “renting” you a place on its server to house your website. When selecting a web host, some of the things you want to evaluate include storage capacity, domainbased email and sever security, and uptime percentage.
3. Design your website – Don’t think that you need to have a super fancy website in order to be successful. Sometimes, it’s the simplest and easiesttonavigate websites that are the most profitable. Two popular tools you can use to design your site are WordPress and Dreamweaver by Adobe. And if you don’t feel comfortable designing your website yourself, you can always hire a web designer to do it for you.
4. Online payments – Any business that wants to be successful online needs to accept online payments, which allow customers to act quickly and on impulse. Two options you can use to accept online payments are PayPal and Google Checkout. Or, if you prefer using an online shopping cart, you can go to either E Junkie.com or 1ShoppingCart.com.
5. Product delivery – This is going to depend completely on what it is that you aim to sell. To learn how to ship actual, physical goods, check out electronic fulfillment companies, like Motivational Fulfillment and the Mailing Fulfillment Service Association.
6. Increase traffic – Even if you have the greatest online home business of all time, that means absolutely nothing unless people know about your website and are frequently visiting it. Some quick tips for how to drive traffic to your site include registering your site with search engines (Google, Yahoo, and Bing), making audio and video podcasts, advertising with Google AdWords and Facebook, and promoting your brand via social media (Twitter, Reddit, Delicious, etc.).
7. Publish a newsletter – Once you create your website, you want to collect as many people’s email addresses as possible. Then, you want to send the people on your optin list a newsletter every week or so with relevant information and promotions to make sure that you stay on their radars.
8. Tracking – With your website up and running, you want to keep tabs on things like who clicked where and when so that you can chart you the growth of your site and see where you need improvement. A free tool that you can use to do this is called Google Analytics.
I have now provided you with a basic stepbystep guide for getting your online home business up and running. For more in depth information, check out a fantastic course called IM Quick Start, which will go over exactly what you need to do to launch your online home business when you are starting from ground zero.