How to Start Your Own Business Online – Use These 7 Simple Steps

Have you ever wondered how to start your own business online?

If you answered yes to this question then you are among the many. You may be interested in starting your own business for a variety of reasons. This can include replacing an income from your old or current job, or supplementing your current income in addition to your current job, or to allow yourself more time freedom as well as financial freedom. What ever the reason, starting your own business online is actually not that difficult to do and can bring you huge returns.

The best way to start is to make sure you do not over complicate the process, and yes, there is a proven process and a sequence of steps to follow to ensure your success when you are starting out. But, you must be consistent in your approach, follow the laws concerning work, and you must not let all the noise of the internet distract you from following these 7 simple steps that I am about to show you.

1. Find a niche market that you have an interest in.
2. Make sure people are searching for information on your niche.
3. Design and build an easy-to-use website.
4. Use the major search engines to drive eyeballs to your website.
5. Establish authority in your niche and on your website.
6. Follow up with your prospects through email marketing.
7. Do things in this order.

I know these steps seem very general, however, they do work and are intended to be done in this particular order. This is very important.

Anyone can follow this process. You do not have to have a particular degree or background for the type of research you need to do can be done through simply using the search engines on the internet.

Find a niche market that you have an interest in

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You may be wondering what a niche actually is. Lets begin by defining a niche. A niche is nothing more than an “audience”, a distinct segment of a market. When choosing a niche, you should choose something that you are truly interested in. Whether it be a hobby or even something you want to know more about. Keep in mind, you do not need to be an expert. What happens is you become an expert by setting up a foundation and then becoming an authority in that area.
Almost anything can be a niche, and what’s even more interesting is that you can earn money from any niche because there are billions of people on the internet searching for information and solutions to their problems, and these become products or services that you can sell to them.

Many people at this stage of the game are tempted to look for a product to sell first and then look for a market to sell to after. You want to resist doing this. To increase your chance of success, start with your niche first before even thinking about a product or service to sell. So, if you are even worried about not having a product, no worries. It is simply not important right now. Just focus on finding the niche and worry about the product later.

Make sure people are searching for information on your niche

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Understanding why people use the internet is very important when it comes to knowing how to start your own business online. So, why do people use the internet?

To find information.

So, the secret to creating a successful business online is to simply provide the information people are looking for. If you give them information they are looking for, they are more likely to want to look at products that you recommend for them. It’s that simple. People don’t like to be sold on things. They want help to find information they are looking for. If the information that you provide for them gives them value, then they are more likely to look at your recommendations. This way you are not selling them products, you are simply recommending products that are relevant to what they are already looking for .

That being said, how do you make sure people are searching for information on your niche?

The answer is to ask your favorite expert “Google”.

Well, you don’t ask directly, you use what is known as “Google Instant”.

What is Google instant?

Well, your friend Google discovered that it takes a person more than 10 seconds to type in a search request and then hit the enter button. Since Google is always trying to improve things, they developed what is know as Google instant search which lets the system search for results as you type them in the search bar. They claim these methods will shorten time spent searching by more than 3 seconds per search attempt, and this instant search in ON by default.

This attempt to decrease the search time, gives marketers to see what people are actually searching for and gives us suggested keyword phrases. The results that you see below are results that people are actually doing. Therefore, you are seeing what people are searching for. If people weren’t searching for those terms, they would not display.

So, let’s say you are interested in starting a business online providing information about learning how to play guitar and you want to know if people actually are interested in this subject. Well, just start typing in google….

See the image below:

Notice, how I just start typing in “learn how to p” and google finishes the sentence beneath my search. This indicates that people are searching for that term. I also found that people are searching for information on how to play piano, chess, how to paint and how to play the ukulele. I just came up with more niche ideas that I know people are looking for information on. Isn’t that cool!

I can even find out how many people are searching for this term and if I have a lot of competition. Because ideally, a good number of people searching my niche with not a lot of competition equals a real good chance I will get a lot of eyeballs on my online business. So, how do I find out how many people are searching for this term and how much competition is there? A good keyword tool will give you this information. I use what is known as Jaaxy.

Here is a screen shot showing a search result using Jaaxy.

As you can see by looking at the above search results, “learn how to play guitar” has 10184 average searches per month, but does have some competition. The QSR results indicate how many other websites have a page or post about the same topic. So, there are 181 competing websites trying to “rank” for this search term. The KQI results indicate that it is “normal” competition.

But what we want is at least 50 searches a month with less than 100 competing websites if we are just starting out. This way we know as a beginner, we have a chance of having many eyeballs looking at our website.

I personally would try to target the term “learn how to play guitar chords”. There is 128 people searching for this term every month and only 28 competing websites with a KQI of “great”. That is, well, great!

Now, imagine if you had a website with just 5 pages written with 5 different search terms like these that each had 128 people searching each month. Well, that is 128 X 5 = 640 sets of eyeballs looking at your online business every month. Now, imaging 10 pages. Yep, that is right 1280 sets of eyeballs looking at your business.

Get the picture of how powerful this can be?

Oh, and by the way, Jaaxy has a free version where you can get access to 30 free searches. There is also a paid version where you get unlimited searches for a fee of $19.95 a month. I will show you later, how you can access Jaaxy for free and get unlimited searches. For now let’s move on to the next step.

Design and build an easy-to-use website

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This is where most people start to freak out.

Designing and building a website in the 21st century is nothing like it was back in the day. In fact, you can actually build a website in less than a minute. As far as designing it, well, that may take a bit longer, but not much.

And yes, you do need a website. Do not, I repeat, do not, ever, never (Am I making myself clear here) listen or answer an ad stating you can make money online without a website. It is utter CRAP to even go down that road. Why, because it will distract you from your original intent, which is to make YOURSELF an income online.

If you do not listen to what I am saying, you will end up making SOMEONE ELSE money online. It is that straight forward, OK, enough said on that topic. There are many scams out there, so stay away from anything that smells like make easy money. IT DOES NOT EXIST.

whew! Got that one out of the way.

Anyways to build a website is very easy and I recommend using a blog format and WordPress.

The WordPress platform is easy to use and easy to host and, most importantly, easy to drive traffic to. There are many themes available that make design simple and there are many plugins available to keep it simple.

You basically want to build your website around the idea of your chosen niche. If you want to teach people how to play guitar, then build a website all about guitars. Plain and simple.

Notice how we haven’t even chosen a product yet?

It will become clear why. You see, now that we have chosen a niche. Lets take learning how to play the guitar as an example. We now know we are going to build a website around guitars. I can now research and write all about guitars. It should not be that difficult, because I like guitar. So, I am essentially going to research and write about a topic that I enjoy. Isn’t that the way life should be?

I do not need to know what I am going to sell to write all about guitars do I? no, I do not. At this point I just want to write about information that people are looking for so that I can attract visitors to my website. A product doesn’t matter at this point, because there are no visitors to my business yet anyways.

So, how do I build a website?

Well you follow these simple steps:

• go to http://wordpress.org and download wordpress to your computer
• find a hosting company to install wordpress. Any hosting company will have instructions on exactly how to do this.
• You will want to search for a domain name that is relevant to your niche. For example learn guitar.com (might now be available) Your hosting company will give you directions on how to get a domain name.

That is really all there is to it.

Want a quicker and easier way?

Here is a step by step video on exactly how to build a website it less than one minute. Check out the video below 

See, I told you it wasn’t hard to do. And, it is completely free (two free websites).

Now for the next step.

Use the major search engines to drive eyeballs to your website.

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There are essentially two ways to drive traffic to your website using the search engines.

• Paid traffic
• Free traffic

Free traffic

For both of these methods you still use the following strategy. I am going to give you the simplified version, but it is the most effective strategy.

This is how it works. You write an article based on a search term that you know people are searching for and does not have a lot of competition. For example, let’s use the example keyword phrase from above. “Learn how to play guitar chords”. Remember from the second step? We learned that 128 people per month search for this phrase and that there are only 28 competing web pages writing about this phrase. That is only 28 pages in the whole world writing about that exact phrase.

So, we write an article all about learning how to play guitar chords. With a little knowledge about Search Engine Optimization (SEO), we can target this keyword phrase and rank this article in Google. Anyone can learn how to use the basics of SEO, it is not difficult at all. Later on I will show exactly where to learn how.

So, you then write an article based on this search phrase.

You then, rinse and repeat. You look for other search phrases within the guitar niche and do the same thing.

Make it a goal to write 2 to 3 articles like this a week. After a while, you will see a bunch of traffic to your website. Remember above how we said if you wrote 5 articles with 128 searches per month, that would equate to 640 searches a month? Yes, it adds up folks!

Now you can start to look for related products!
How? You ask. Well, again, let’s ask our friend Google. In the search area, type is learn how to play guitar affiliate programs and check out the results:

 

Below the paid ad section from the image, you will notice a number of guitar lesson affiliate programs. These type of affiliate programs are all free to join. You do not have to pay to promote these products. Many of these products (if not all of them) are digital products so your readers can download them instantly after purchasing them and you earn a commission. Pretty cool right?

So, how this works is you write an informative article on how to play guitar chords because you are somewhat familiar with it or you have researched chord diagrams and you give people some free content about guitar chords. You then recommend a product for them to learn in more detail. That is it! If you wrote 5 articles you would have over 600 people a month looking at your website and can potentially be interested in a recommended product.

You are not aggressively selling them you are simply recommending a product that they have already shown an interest in.

Paid Traffic

Now you start to see some traffic and sales, but you want to scale up. Now it’s time for some paid traffic. I recommend to start with Bing Ads. Bing Ads Network is advertising you can purchase for 3 different search engines with one ad. They target Bing, Yahoo and MSN when you purchase a single ad. Here is how it works.

Again, you write an article based on a search term, but this time you are not as concerned about the competition level. So, in this case we may want to target the keyword “Learn how to play guitar” instead of “learn how to play guitar chords” because there are more people searching for this term.

Now instead of trying to rank your article, you are going to pay the search engine to display your ad towards the top of the search results. Similar to what you see in the image for affiliate programs above. You see the three top search results are ads that were purchased. They will appear up there regardless of SEO because someone paid for those positions.

So, in this case you would write an ad with a headline with something like “Learn how to play guitar like the pros” Click here form more information. And then, boom! someone lands on your page, reads the article and then is led to your affiliate link on a recommended product and hopefully they buy the product and you make money.

The advantages of paid traffic is you get traffic quicker, but your return on investment is higher than that of free traffic. Free traffic gives you a better return on your investment because it is free, however, it takes more time to rank your articles to page one of the search engines. The best thing to do is a little of both.

Establish authority in your niche and on your website

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This is really an ongoing thing. As you write more articles about your niche and conduct more research on keyword phrases using Google Instant and a good keyword tool like Jaaxy, you will become an authority in your niche.

As your authority in your niche increases so does the authority of your website. This is what is known as an authority website as apposed to a small niche site. The difference being the number of pages and posts within your website. Can you imagine if you wrote 2 to 3 articles each week to your website what would happen after a year or two. Yes, that is right, you would have an authority website.

It is at this point that you will start to receive income on complete autopilot. Google and other search engines favor websites like this and you will constantly be ranked for many search terms in the search engines.

You should not at this point that we didn’t really worry about a product until after we started to receive some traffic to the website and started to establish authority. This is one of the reasons why it is crucial that you follow these steps in order, which leads me to the next step.

Follow up with your prospects through email marketing

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I am sure you have heard of email marketing. All the big players do this. Walmart, CVS, Amazon, and just about every retailer now practices email marketing. Again, it is one of the final steps for a reason.

Why?

because it doesn’t do any good to start getting peoples email addresses until you are getting regular visitors to your website. This is known as the “content first” email marketing strategy. This is different from the “funnel first” email strategy, which is totally different. You can get the details of these two strategies by reading my article entitled “Best email marketing strategies”. It would be good to know the differences between this two strategies to get the full impact.

So, basically the idea here is that toward the end of your article, you place a form on your page that asks your prospect for their name and email in exchange for giving them a gift. A gift can be any free download or free guitar chord chart PDF file that you have created or anything you have to give away. Once you collect their name and email address, you can email them future product recommendation through email.

The reason this is so powerful is that you never lose the customer. Since you have a steady stream of traffic now visiting your website, you can keep promoting and recommending products to them over and over if you collect their email address. Otherwise, you may never see them again until they visit your site again and unless they have bookmarked your site, there is a slim chance they will return. This is very powerful indeed.

It is especially powerful if you use software tools such as an auto-responder, such as aweber or GetResponse. These tools allow you to practice effective email marketing and gives you the ability to ad one of these forms to your web page. Once the prospect fills out the form, you collect their email and you can set up automated email messages to them. These messages can be scheduled over a duration of time giving your prospect both valuable information mixed in with affiliate product offers. This is where top marketers really make a huge amount of money. Through email marketing

Do things in this order

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This brings us to the last step. I believe it is critical that you do these steps in the order that I laid them out. It is more efficient and allows for the most profitability for your business. You don’t want to lead your business with the product for example, because it causes people not to trust you and it is difficult to establish authority that way.

Plus you don’t want to start developing your email list until you have provided valuable content to your prospect by providing information they are searching for. Not to mention, it is easier to build an email list when already have a website that is attracting a large amount of visitors.

So, if you are interested in getting detailed information regarding step by step, university type of training on how to start your own business online and get access to a whole community that is dedicated to your success, then read my

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