How to Start an Online Business
Don't get into a business unless you understand the business. What does this actually mean? If you want to sell digital products, do not start the business unless you have the proper skills to create digital products and understand the market for digital products. Well, you can hire someone to create digital products for you but this will only increase your operational cost. You also need to understand what kind of products are selling in the market and what are the best marketplaces for selling digital products. Running a business involves a lot of things, you as a business owner should be taking care of a lot of things from manufacturing products or sourcing products, to building a marketing plan and selling the products. If you know how to sell you can sell almost anything, therefore, you need to be a great salesman. Sadly, a lot of newbies are in such a hurry that they don't build marketing skills.
Do You Really Need an Experience to Run a Business?
You don’t really need an experience to run and operate a business. If you don’t need experience, what really do you need in order to become successful in your venture?
You see, about 75 percent of our body is water, the earth has about 71 percent water. For 4.5 billion years, the water was free. Then one day a smart guy comes. He packages the free water in a plastic bottle, and then starts selling. Some dumb ass then starts buying that packaged water.
The moral of the story is if you know how to sell you can sell anything.
If you do some search online, you can see people are selling all sorts of things from farts bottled in a jar to bottled bath water, smelly socks, dirty underwear, etc. and interesting thing is people are actually buying these things.
Business is basically about good you are with selling. Selling requires marketing. Therefore, the success of business depends on marketing.
What Do You Need to Become Successful in Online Business
In order to become successful in your business venture, you need a couple of things, for example, a product that solves people's problems or is very useful to the consumers, a team that will help you to run and manage your business, and a marketing plan to market and promote your business and products. There are also other things involved such as money for investment, product development, market research, etc. However, if you already have money for business, you need a product, a team, and marketing strategies to become successful. Being successful in business means selling products in volume and pulling a lot of revenue. This will happen only when people are really buying your product. People buy your product only when the product is useful for them, the product solves their problems. People will buy your product only when the product reaches them. Therefore, product and marketing both are very important for business success.
If you start a small business (an online business) you can do it all by yourself, you don't have to hire anyone. If you hire, your running cost will increase and you might not be able to run the business smoothly. However, if your business is relatively big, that needs staff to manage and operate, you will need a team. If you are still short of money, you don't even have to hire full-time staff, you can work with virtual assistants. If you want to hire a full-time staff, you need a lot of money, if you don't offer a good salary you cannot hire the best person. Can you hire a good manager for $100-$200 per month? Well, that is not possible. Even when you hire a virtual assistant you might have to pay at least $100-$200 per month.
Skills You Need To Start an Online Business
No matter what kind of business you want to start, you need money for investment and skills to run the business. If you are thinking about particular type of business, for instance, online business, what kind of skills do you actually need?
You need hard skills as well as soft skills to start an online business
Hard Skills
Digital Marketing: Since you will be running your business online, you need to market your business online. Therefore, you need skills to digital marketing, which include social media marketing, search engine marketing, native advertising, email marketing, etc.
SEO: For an online business to survive, the business website, or online store for your business should rank high on search engines. That will happen only when you have done a proper SEO. Generally speaking, SEO includes three things, links, content, and the page structure.
Soft skills
You need following soft skills to start an online business
Time management
Leadership
Money Management
Customer Service
Networking, etc.
If you are an online business, you certainly should implement SEO and digital marketing. If you are a bug business, and if you want to build brand, build online exposure, you also need to implement, however, if you are a small business with no online presence and a business that does not even need to build a brand, how are you going to use SEO. Let's say you sell tea inside a mall, how can you do SEO?
How Much Does an Online Store Cost
If you have plans to create an online store, you might be wondering how much money, you will have to spend to create your own online business. Here is a cost breakdown.
First of all you need a domain, you can get a dot com for $8 on Namecheap. You need VPS or higher hosting. The cost of basic VPS hosting is about $95 on namecheap. The domain and hosting charges are yearly charges.
You can use free or premium content management. If you use woocommerce, there is zero cost. You might also have to use premium theme and plugins with woocommerce, and you might encounter $200 additional cost.
If you want shopify, you will have to pay $384 for basic membership plan. For shopify, you might have to use premium add ons, which might cost you additional, $200.
You will also have to do SEO and digital marketing, with might cost you additional $500.
So, generally speaking, if you want to create your own online store you will have to spend about $800 for woocommerce store, and about $1100 for shopify store.
Questions to Ask Yourself if You Want to Become a Business Owner
Do you want to start a business and become a business owner but don’t know how to become successful, or how to begin in the first place? If you find yourself in this shoe, here are 5 questions that need to be addressed before you begin your journey
Work for free: You might have to work for free for a long time as it takes time to start generating profits.
Knowledge and skills: Do you have skills and knowledge to run and manage your business, do you have knowledge and skill to generate sales.
Money: You can’t start a business if you don’t have money. If you don’t have money, you need skills to build business funds, either through partnership, loan, or angel investors.
Team building: It does not matter what kind of business you want to start, you need a team. You cannot handle your business activities alone even when your business is sole ownership business.
Easiest Businesses You Can Do Online
One of the easiest businesses you can start online is clothing business. There are methods like print and demand and dropshipping that allows you to start your online business without spending even a penny. You might have to spend money on marketing, but marketing is essential for all kinds of business. With these businesses you do not even have to spend mo ey on building your inventory. If you want to start a clothing business in a grand scale, you can procure products from B2B marketplace link Alibaba and resell through other ecommerce marketplace of your choice or own online store
One of the easiest ways to start online business is by selling through social sites. There are many social platforms where you can sell physical and digital items. One of the main reasons why selling through social site is profitable because social sites boasts billions of active users. You can reach hundreds of thousands people in no time by using advertising features on these platforms. I have been selling through Facebook and Instagram since some time and in my experience there is a good conversion. I sell physical and digital products. I also sell digital services through social platforms. Have you tried selling through social sites.
Some of the easiest online businesses for beginners are:
Dropshipping: You can do dropshipping business with little investment and with a little skill. Of you create your own site, you might need some serious monet, but if you do it on ecommerce platforms, it is cost effective
Selling merch: selling merch is also easy business. You can try free platforms like Amazon or Redbubble.