Hi im just starting out on the road of self employment, have no imcome generated as yet but would like to set up a business website to start my venture.. can anyone give me any idea where the best place to start would be?
thanks I like Yahoo Small Business... start small, think big. Once you know the software and have "hits," you can upgrade and consider more features. Get yourself a business license and Tax ID as soon as possible. As startup costs, the licenses as well as your web costs, internet costs, advertising costs, etc are all deductible business expenses. Why pay them out of pocket? There's a good book at the library called "Marketing without Money" by Nicholas E Bade that will help you get free or very low cost ideas on getting the word out about your business. The first step is to have a business before you start spreading the news about it so start with your county for a business license and then get expert help from organizations like Score and SBA. See the website links below for free entrepreneural advice: go to forum and put your wesite adress as a reference I am in the same boat..... I learn every and check out the tips from others at http://job.lifequery.com
I am still learning and please share yours if you have some. E-commerce businesses are excellent to generate profit from...if the site is marketed well. There are billions of websites on the internet today and most are unknown or generate little traffic. To start off creating an online business you need:
1) A good idea- there are hundreds of websites that have the same idea and have the same target market. Generally, it is not a bad idea to target people in their 20s and early 30s as seeing most users on the internet are young adults (or teens).
2) Create a domain for your service with a web designing company- There are some cheap prices out there for cheap web designing. But basically you need a professional looking website that provides good tools to selling your product or describing your business (for example, for web design you have an e-mail forum). You should get cheap but well-regarded hosting that gives you a large amount of memory, a database, and allows all programming languages. Check your web designer to see which domain service has the best deal that suits your business.
3) Maintaining you business- Before you start you need to make sure that your website is secure, has a good way to maintain it, and has all that is necessary to make it easy for customers to look at and purchase your product/inquire about your product. Note: Make sure your business has a logo and a slogan if possible before starting. You can trademark the logo and slogan. However, posting it onto your new e-commerce website with an official date should be enough.
4) Promote your business- Once you have you e-commerce business set up and maintainable, you need to spread the word about your business and gain traffic. One important way is through search engines (see 1). You want to choose the best marketing company that can advertise on all search engines for a low price. Another way you can advertise around is by publicity. There are two kinds negative and positive publicity. Negative publicity gains you a more negative reputation in the public eye, while positive does the opposite. Since you are starting off you could do positive publicity since its better to have a good reputation when starting a company, however, good publicity cost more. In fact, you can pay nothing for bad publicity. For example, you can go around famous forums and spam with your logo. However, you will gain little customers out of bad publicity. If you do not want to tell with publicity quite yet, you might want to find a famous website and maybe advertise on it (only one or two with a small budget). You can maybe even advertise on small websites with your target market, however, the bigger the site you advertise on, the more traffic will come to your site.
If you do want to stick to a small time budget, create a media kit and figure out how much you are willing to spend.
Note: This is very important that you read this. All businesses require start up money. There is no way for you to start a business, whether it be e-commerce or a non-virtual business. A lot of people think because e-commerce businesses are cheaper, they can be created for free and they are wrong. Web-based businesses that are created for free or very cheaply are not created or marketed well and 99% percent of them fail (with the other one percent having dedicated customers donate to the business for it to prosper). Online businesses take a large amount of money to create, maintain, and market their products. If you need any help setting up your online business, please e-mail me at monkeyyadon@yahoo.com.
Good luck. The best answer I can give you is to take the time to learn the basics and start an internet business. It's the least expensive way to build a solid, reliable business in the world to this day. It's still "wide-open" to us common people.
You must identify what you are passionate about first of all. What do you love doing the most? Find out what this is and begin an internet business based on this passion. If you love video games build a website about this. If you love cooking, gardening, karate, baseball, woodworking, motorcycles, fishing, collecting old dolls, pets, playing a musical instrument, writing, drawing, helping people, or anything else that you love doing, build a website about it and then learn to monetize it.
If you build a business around something you aren't passionate about all you do is create a job for yourself, so make sure this business is about something you love.
Next, find a good website hosting company. Many of these will only cost $10-$20 per month. They provide site building tools for you that only require drag and drop, and copy and paste skills to build a professional looking website.
Once you have your website up and running put all kinds of free information in the form of articles you write about what you love doing. Write what you know about your passion. You have knowledge about your hobbies, skills, and interests that other people worldwide would love to know about. We all have knowledge about our passions and others love the same things we love and they will want to know what you know.
Then, find affiliate companies that will allow to promote their products (based on your passion) on your new website. This is free and costs you nothing. By putting their links on your site you will get paid a commission each time one of your site visitors clicks on the affiliate partner's link and buys something from their website related to your passion.
The very best web hosting company I have found is www.sitesell.com It's $299 to begin, but it offers every tool you could ever need to begin making money online. And they offer step-by-step instruction on how to build your business. There are other web hosting companies out there also. Do some research.
Be careful of all the scams out there. Do your homework. Study different websites. Learn. Within a year or two you could have several websites up and running, based on the things you love to do, and you could be working from your home at that time. It's very do-able for anyone who puts in the time to learn.
If you need help please feel free to email me at dougd55@yahoo.com and I would be glad to give you some coaching. Feel free to check out my profile... The cheapest way to promote you Go to this site.
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http://www.karthik.ebiz4ever.com/ Hey, I too just started a home biz. It is hard at first, but i think you will find it well worth it...Mine took me several weeks, but it really kicked off nicely....
anyway, traffic swarm is a great free traffic tool. You can post an add or multiple ads to yoru site and the link.
http://www.trafficswarm.com/go.cgi?62728...
Also did you try AdWords
Also I had success with Ezines.
I hope this helps some.. try a small thought provoking advert on google, yahoo etc. also try a Small advert in your local paper. remember that the adverts must capture a persons curiosity. eg... want to know what i would love to do for Ann summers? go to kasiroy.com
and find out!
any such message will make people look because of what i call the "got the cat" syndrome... i hope this works for you. Good Luck Depending on what you are selling
Try
Google Adwords it is a pay per click search engine
Or
Yahoo Search Marketing it is a pay per click search engine
Hope This Helps |
