There are five basic steps to setting up
a home based online business. They are:
- Find a market with people willing to pay for information.
- Create or find a product that solves their problem.
- Create a web site.
- Drive traffic to your web site.
- Sell your product.
First the market research. This is needed
to find your niche. You can access a number of tools to help
you with this. An excellent free tool is Google's Ad words
external keyword tool. Google has some excellent instructions
for the use of this tool. There are also some video instructions
on You Tube that are quite good.
Word Tracker also has an excellent tool that
includes a 7 day free trial. They provide instructions on
it's use along with ideas, and procedures for market research.
After you get an idea for a niche, look through
the keywords to see if there are a reasonable amount of searches,
then look to see what the competition is. While you can't
want heavy competition, you do want to see some. If there
is no one selling a product on the keyword you are looking
at, it is an indication that you are not targeting people
who are willing to buy.
As to a product, there are a number of approaches
to this. First, you can create your own product. I really
don't recommend this as a place to start unless you have some
really solid ideas for your product. Second, you can use a
PLR product. That is, you can purchase a product from someone
where you purchase the private label rights with it. There
are many good ones out there, along with many bad ones. Be
careful to read the terms and conditions. You will need to
know exactly what your rights will be. The third way is to
sell products as an affiliate. You can often get a commission
of 60-75% for affiliate products. Check out Clickbank and
The Pepperjam Network for some excellent deals.
You can create a web site using the standard
tools such as Dreamweaver, and purchase a hosting account;
but if you are a novice, you may find that you can do better
setting up a free Wordpress blog. They come with a lot of
options these days, and there are many people using the blog
interface for their whole web site. Wordpress has step by
step instructions and email tech support to help you.
After you have your web site setup, you will
need to drive traffic to it. There are many ways to do that,
but there are just a few that actually work. The best are,
pay per click (PPC) advertising, banner advertising, organic
(free) search engine listing, and article marketing.
For pay per click you would setup a Google
Adwords account, or an account with Yahoo, or Microsoft. There
are other small PPC companies, but until you have some experience,
you should stay away from them.
As to the free search engines, there is an
entire discipline devoted to getting high in the rankings.
This is known as Search Engine Optimization (SEO). I would
advise that you do a search for SEO and read some of the most
popular blogs to get an idea of this field.
Article marketing is all about writing articles,
such as this one, and submitting them to article directories.
The best of the directories is at ezinearticles.com.
You can then put links in the article that direct to your
web site. It's time consuming, but it works very well.
Then you need to sell your product. You will
need at minimum a 5 page web site with a home page, contact
page, privacy policy page, and a couple of pages with relevant
articles. The home page will need to be setup in a way that
keeps your customers reading, and moves them naturally to
the purchase.
You can find more detailed instructions on
setting up a website at cybermarketingpro.com/website_development.
Warm regards,
Rusty Campbell
rustyc@mtisoftware.com
Blog: wwwRustyCampbell.com
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