Basics of How to Start an Online Business
The Essential Steps to Starting Your Online Business
By Igbal Yagoub
Finding your niche and creating your product…
In order for any website to make sense, it must have a point of focus, a topic around which the whole of the site is built.
It may well be that you already have a topic or subject around which you plan to build your site, but if not, it should not be particularly difficult to find a suitable subject.
For example, if you pick up a newspaper or watch the TV news, there are things happening in the real world every day that could be suitable site topics. Look around you – almost everything you see could provide the basis of a website, from your computer to different kinds of speakers, headphones, books, cameras etc.
Visit a website like Yahoo Answers or 43Things to see what kind of questions people are asking, or what they are interested in achieving.
Look for questions or goals that suggest that people have a problem that they need to solve or a pain in their life that needs to be dealt with. People who have significant problems or a ‘pain’ of some description are always willing to spend money in order to deal with their situation.
For example, it is very common to see people listing ‘losing weight’ as being a personal objective on their 43Things list of things to achieve. Similarly, you often see people who want to be happier, more satisfied with their life and less depressed or anxious. These are all people who have a problem in their life for which they are seeking a solution. If you are in a position to provide that solution, you have the basis of a successful online business.
Consequently, in this report, I am going to use the example of depression as the market niche which you are going to attack.
Once you have chosen a market in which you want to operate, the next thing that you need is a product or service to promote. In this respect, you have several different options.
The first option is to promote a product or service as an affiliate through a site like Clickbank.com or Commission Junction. Both of these network sites have thousands of products available which you can promote as an affiliate, earning an appropriate commission for every successful sale that you manage to generate.
Hence, if you decide to promote as an affiliate using either of these sites, you have the significant advantage that you do not need to create your own product, and you can start your business straight away.
However, if you are promoting as an affiliate, the product or service that you are offering to your site visitors is obviously not unique. There are dozens (or perhaps even hundreds) of other affiliates in the same market who are promoting exactly the same product as you are.
The situation is of course completely different if you have your own product. In this scenario, the product is obviously unique to you and there is therefore no direct competition selling exactly the same thing. It is therefore easier to carve out a small area of the market that is uniquely yours.
Once again, even in this situation, there are several options available to you.
The first possibility is that you do all of the research that needs to be done for yourself, and then write your own digital information product (i.e. an e-book) based on the results of your research. The obvious downside of this approach is that it represents a good degree of work, and it is going to take some time to complete. As an alternative, you can use sites like PLR Wholesaler or Resell Rights Weekly to see whether there are any suitable Private Label Rights Products in your marketplace. If there are, you can take these PLR materials and modify them in any way you want, thereby creating your own unique product.
The only significant downside to this particular approach is that because these two sites offer PLR materials for free, it is likely that many hundreds of other online marketers have already downloaded and used the materials that you intend to base your product on. This means that you would have to do a significant amount of work to sufficiently modify the original materials to ensure that your book is indeed unique.
The third option is to get someone else to do all the work for you. Using a site like Elance.com, it will be possible to find someone who can do all of the necessary research and then create the product on your behalf. Whilst doing things in this way is certainly not going to be the cheapest option, it is definitely the easiest and probably the quickest as well.
One way or another, if you are not going to market someone else’s product as an affiliate, you need to create your own.
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Tags: 43things, Books, Cameras, Depression, First Option, Focus, Headphones, How To Start An Online Business, Losing Weight, Market Niche, Money Order, People, Real World, Speakers, Successful Online Business, Suitable Subject, Tv News, Yahoo Answers
