If you are planning to build a successful online business, below are a few tips for you.
1. Have a Plan
If you were going to set up a brick-and-mortar business and had to borrow money from the bank, they would certainly require to provide them a business plan. They want to know that you are organized enough and focused enough that the money they lend you will not be wasted.
The same applies to an online business. Once you open the door to making money online, you will soon be bombarded by all sorts of offers and opportunities.
Who knows, you may have already experienced this. Without a good plan of action, you may be tempted to listen to all those offers. If you don’t focus your energies towards one goal, you are wasting your time.
“In order to succeed, your arrow of focus must be pointed in one direction”
When creating your business plan you will want to focus on the following:
a) Why
What is the reason for starting your online business? And don’t just write that you want to make money. Take a moment to reflect on the real reason you want to succeed online.
Are you doing this to provide a steady income for your family, do you want to work from home and have time freedom, or do you want to share and teach your success to others?
Don’t worry about making it perfect, write it down today and you can modify it as you go along.
b) Goals
Set realistic goals within a time frame.
For example, if you just got started, a good goal would be to make your first $500 within a 1-month period.
If you are already making $500 a month, set your goal to double that within a month.
As you start seeing success from your efforts, you can start stepping up your goals to be more challenging.
c) Actions
What actions are necessary to achieve your goals (be specific)?
If you are just starting up, actions like setting up your domain and website would be a good one. Then set up your landing page and autoresponder.
If your system is already set up, you could take action to increase traffic to your site or you could tweak your landing page to increase conversion.
2. Pick a Mentor and a Training Program
A good mentor will make the difference between success and no success. A good mentor knows the way and can show you the ropes.
When I got started with online business, I wasted a lot of time and money and get no results.
Thanks to my mentor that showed me Wealthy Affiliate. I have experienced awesome training and support. The training program is a step by step mentoring program.
Picking a mentor is finding someone that are experience in the field and will help you along the way and guide you as you take the steps to success.
3. Self-Branding
The most common mistake when starting an online business is to lead with your business/product/pay plan. It is truly an important part of the business, but not the most important.
The #1 key principle is to BRAND YOURSELF. Who knows, you may be with a particular company today, but what happens if you decide to change?
If you spent your time branding yourself, the transition will be easy. If you branded your company, you will have to start all over from scratch.
The best way to brand yourself is not to hide behind a computer screen. Create a website with your name as the domain, have real life pictures of yourself, create videos in which you offer value to your viewers, use the social media platform and be visible.
You don’t have to be the best in the world to be liked, just offer valuable content to the best of your abilities.
4. Systems and Follow-up
The main reason for creating an online business is to leverage the internet to free your time.
By having systems do most of the work for you, you achieve two things:
1) you build relationships without having to actually be there and
2) you can spend your time and efforts on other things that will increase your results.
Disclaimer: I’m not talking about the “push this button and make money without lifting a finger”.
Just like building a real business, you need to put in effort and time to create your online business system and then promote it.
So what kind of systems am I talking about? The main components of your system will be your website/sales page and your autoresponder.
Website: This system is meant to allow the visitor to get to know you and your opportunity. It should answer most of the frequently asked questions about your business and give a bit of your personality so that visitor and potential business partners get to know you as a person.
Autoresponder: This is a series of emails that will continue to touch base on autopilot with the people who have shown interest in your opportunity. It should be packed with valuable information and obviously lead back to your opportunity.
The 3 key players in autoresponders are iContact, Aweber, and Getresponse.
5. Marketing and Traffic
Traffic is the lifeblood of any business.
When it comes to the topic of online traffic, you could search online for days and still find new products that will teach you the “new best way” to drive tons of traffic to your website.
The truth of it is, if you bulk up the information, traffic can be grouped into 3 categories: Link Building, SEO, and Advertising.
a) Link Building:
Link building not only increases your traffic but has the bonus of increasing your SEO.
Link building, put simply, is the activity of producing and publishing content online in order to increase the number of links pointing back at your site.
There are many many ways of doing this like Articles Marketing, Video Marketing, Hubpages/Squidoo marketing (if you don’t know what this means, don’t worry) and finally, Forum participation.
b) SEO:
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization and means to optimize your web content for the search engines (like Google). Done properly, this will generate a large amount of free traffic from the different search engines.
Just to give an example:
I created a small website for my real estate business about 3 years back. I optimized the content for a particular keyword and published a few articles about the topic to build links. Ever since the website appears on the first page of Google, that website has been receiving 20-30 hits per day and generating 2-3 leads a day. And I only spent a few hours creating and optimizing that site.
Link building for SEO: Links are like votes for your site. The more links you have, the more you have authority and search engines look for authority sites.
So as you put the effort in your link building for traffic, you are also building vote towards your site which will lead to better ranking in the search engines.
c) Advertising:
The are 2 ways to advertise:
Free and Paid. Free advertising is like posting ads on Craigslist.
A good example of paid advertising is the Google sponsored results or PPC (pay per click). This topic is very broad and surpasses the scope of this article. I would definitely recommend focusing on link building at the beginning. PPC is quite complex and for someone that doesn’t know how to do it, it can be quite costly.
To start an online business, you will need to have a website. You can build your own website even though you do not know computer programming. I have learn how to build my website the easy way. You too can do the same.
Christine, you have so much information here. I have learned several new things from reading your posts, that I was totally unaware of. Thank you for helping me understand. A good plan is the corner stone of any business and I certainly agree with you on the importance of a good mentor. The help we give to each other is also invaluable.
Hi Fran,
Thanks for stopping by and your comment. I am glad that you learn some new things. To start any business, we need a good plan so we know how to reach our goal. A good mentor will guide us in the right direction and support along the way.