There’s a basic roadmap to starting an online business.

The type of business I’m outlining here is a theme website that has all the qualities and money making capabiities of some of the largest sites online. Don’t worry, I’m not going to suggest you build a monstrous website over night, but to slowly build a content website complete with products to sell, affiliate links and great information for your visitors.

First off, let’s start with you, we’ll need to assess just what type of online business you would enjoy working on over time. Don’t worry right now about how much money can be made in your business - save that for your second or third website - trust me here, once you see how much fun it is to run an online business you’ll eventually want another one. The secret here is to start with one that you enjoy, that you have a passion for; when you’re working on something you enjoy it will show in your business and the learning curve won’t be cumbersome, it will be intriguing and exciting.

Here we go.

Remember, your online business is all about you…

1. Draft a list of 5 or 6 personal hobbies, interests or areas of expertise that you have. You don’t have to be ‘the’ expert, but you will have to have some knowledge to pass onto your website visitors so make sure the theme or topic of your online business is something that you have experience with.
2. Start thinking of key words or phrases that a person may type into a search engine to find information on the topics you’re targetting. Yes, this is a lot of work, but the work you do beforehand will save you hours of tedious ‘fixing’ after the fact. You’ll need a list of 15-20 keywords or phrases for each of your 5-6 topics from #1 above. Here’s an example: if your passion is organic gardening, some possible keywords would be organic, organic vegetables, growing organically, natural gardens, and so on.
3. Now you get to use some of the tools in my marketing resources. This is a free tool and you’re going to love it and use it all the time. It’s called good keywords and it shows you how many times per month your keyword is searched for online. This is going to show you how popular your subject, topic or theme for your online business will be. This isn’t rocket science and your numbers do not need to be perfect before you choose your topic. You’re looking for an average of 6,000 searches per month to make a decent income from. Again, this isn’t overnight so don’t quit your day job just yet… For each of your 5-6 topics from #1 above tally the number of related searches. This gives you a good estimation of the size of your target market.
4. Time to check out your online business’ competition. This is a fine art and requires you to see other websites and online businesses with a marketer’s eye so if this is your first online business we’re just going to have to wing it for the first business. Without the skills of marketing, advertising, driving visitors to your website, and all the other techniques and tricks that seasoned marketers have you’ll need to look for the market that has the lowest, laziest competitors. You don’t want to be up against the seasoned hot shots right off the bat because you’ll get easily discouraged and start thinking that an online business is not for you. Don’t set yourself up for failure! The secret is a sizable market (lots of keyword searches per month), being served by crappy websites when you do a search on google or yahoo. In this case ‘crappy’ simply means not many pages, poorly optimized for the search engines, and old content. Add those three ‘crap’ factors up and you’ve got easy competition to beat!
5. Now you’ve chosen your market…time to register a domain name. You can register a domain name for one year at godaddy.com for $8. Don’t do it, register your domain name for a minimum of 2 years. Somehow the search engines can tell if you’ve only registered for one year and they’ll assume your a ‘get rich quick joe’ who’s not really serious about their business and never give your business the presense it deserves in their search engine results. So, what will you register your domain name as? Again, something that you get better at as you gain experience, but the best scenario is to have a domain name that contains one of your keyword phrases in it. And, always try to register a .com domain name - the others don’t seem to do as well.
6. Next stop, find a host for your online business. I strongly suggest this host to all my friends and clients. Why? 24 hours a day, 7 days a week online customer service. Fast, courteous, inexpensive, and most importantly will expand to meet your business needs. Order the baby package and you can host any number of websites on one account, with more email addresses and userids than you’d ever need. Plus, your account is managed by something called cPanel - later when you gain more experience you’ll see why cPanel hosts are superior…

Okay, right now I have to run, but in the next post I’ll move onto telling you the best (and easiest) way to start getting content on your online business domain.

Until then, rest easy knowing that your online business will soon be making you some money and you’ve only spent a total of $28…

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