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An Insiders Guide to Starting an Online Business
by Edward Rizzo
There are many advantages of doing business online that you can start from
scratch without investing much money. I have outlined a 27 Step Action Plan to
help you get started.
1. List five hobbies, interests or areas of expertise. If you want to start a
new business, you'd better choose a subject that you like and a subject where
you can show expertise. You will have more fun and you will be more competitive.
2. Brainstorm a list of keywords and phrases related to those hobbies and
interests. For example, if you are going to sell small airplane collectibles,
some possible keywords could be: airplanes, aeronautics, war airplanes, etc.
Yahoo Search has an excellent keyword tool that you can use for free.
3. Research those keywords in Wordtracker.com to locate problem statements that
have high search results and low competition. Wordtracker.com is a web page that
helps you find out how many times your keywords are searched online, how popular
your keywords on search engines are. Those keywords may represent problem statements.
Wordtracker shows you how many people are buying traffic on those keywords and how
much are they paying. You need to find popular statements with low competition.
4. Research those problem statements further to determine if you can develop a
product to solve the problem stated. You may use search engines to see how many
people are offering products that can help to solve those problems. If you find
a popular problem and there are not many people offering solutions online, you've got it!
5. Find or create a product based on previous research for you to sell. Once you
found a hungry market, you just need to find the food that your customers want
and they will eat from your hands. You may find companies online that can manufacture
the products for you or you may find a different way to create the product yourself.
If the product is an ebook, you may write it yourself or you may hire someone else to do it.
6. Write a long copy sales letter for that product. The experience of the most
important internet marketing gurus reveals that long copies sell much more than
short copies. It is also recommendable that you try to sell only one product on
your web site. Focus on one product unless the solution you are providing is the
offer of a wide catalogue.
7. Register a domain and set up a hosting account. There are many places online
where you can register a domain and set up a website hosting account in minutes.
Check to make sure the hosting company offers all the tools you need to market
your new business and allows you room to grow. There are many hosting companies
that also include website building tools. You may pay a little more but the
benefits will outweigh the costs many times over.
8. Register for a merchant account (to set up quickly use PayPal.com). If you
don't want to register a merchant account that will allow you to take credit
card payments online, go to PayPal.com and sign in. PayPal is very easy to use
and takes all the hassle out of processing credit cards. 2checkout.com is
another very popular Credit card processor.
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