Build an Online Business

All successful products and services are designed to solve a problem for a customer. The starting point for your business is to identify a customer problem and solve that problem with a product or service offering. You should also identify your ideal customer for the particular solution you create. If you’re selling online, a service business may require less capital than a company selling a physical product. Once you have the base of knowledge you can design your online business. Create an engaging website that is easy to navigate. Post good content that keeps viewers coming back to your site.

Steps

Creating a Solution For Customers

  1. Solve a customer problem. Consumers buy products and services to satisfy a physical or emotional need. However, customers only buy when the need is paramount in their mind. For example, a homeowner will hire a plumber if he has a leak, men and women will buy new clothes to enhance their appearance, or a student will take special lessons if he believes completion will lead to a better job. Your online business product or service must stimulate and then fulfill that need before a sale occurs.[1]
    • Use your industry knowledge or experience to identify a customer problem that needs to be solved. In your work or life do you see any common problems with no obvious or simple solutions?
    • Think about ways this problem could be solved by a company. This is your business idea.
    • Say, for example, that many of your friends are interested in purchasing vintage wristwatches, but don't have any way of verifying that they are genuine. If you have an eye for detail and the right knowledge, you could turn identification of these timepieces into an online business.
  2. Analyze your skills, interests, and capabilities. Before starting a business, you will need to assess your own ability to do so. Look at your own skill set to determine what, exactly, you are good enough at to do professionally. What industry or profession are you most knowledgable, experienced, and skilled in? You need to be able to compete against existing businesses.
    • Next, analyze your interests. What would you do if money weren't important? You need to love whatever it is that you're doing, or your business will not be successful.
    • Finally, look at your capabilities. Do you have the financial stability, savings, time, and personal stability to start a business right now? Make sure that your family is behind your starting a business. If they're not, this will lead to problems down the road.[2]
  3. Identify your ideal customer. Your ideal customer is the set of traits shared by people that who are likely to buy your product. Knowing these demographics (age, sex, income, etc.) will help you focus on this audience and tailor the rest of your business model to their wants and needs. Whether you’re starting a product from scratch or improving an existing product, you can perform research on your ideal customer.[3]
    • Your ideal customer becomes the basis for your marketing strategy. You develop your marketing strategy with the ideal customer in mind. To learn more about marketing strategy, see how to develop a marketing strategy.
    • To identify your ideal customer, simply consider the type of people that would be most interested in your product or service and have the financial ability to purchase it. In many cases, this is more art than science, but a Google search for consumer trends may reveal useful information.
    • Assume, for example, that you want to research the ideal customer traits for your timepiece identification service. You could start by considering who would have the money for this kind of hobby (probably adult to middle-aged people), who would have an interest (mostly men), and what type of person is likely to demand this kind of verification.
  4. Refine your offering. Determine the features of your product or service and whether they provide real benefits and solve the needs of your potential customers. Use what you find to reassess and refine your product or service until it more perfectly meets the described need. Try to identify changes that other businesses have made to similar products that have resulted in higher sales volume.

Planning your Business

  1. Determine the market size. Assume that you’re considering ideas to start an online business for the first time. You use the same process as you would to assess an existing product. You’re taking more risk because the sales performance of the product is completely unknown.[4]
    • Find tools to research your potential market. You may choose to examine existing businesses that offer a similar service. What are their clients like? What are they willing to pay for this type of service? How crowded is the market?
    • For your identification service, you might choose to examine the type of people who comment on watch forums and other watch websites. Assess their needs and really consider if there is enough of a market for your services to make starting a business worth it.
  2. Determine your costs. In order to plan for your business, you'll need to assess how much you will need in startup money. This will vary widely between business types, with some requiring almost zero startup money, and others requiring many thousands of dollars. Start by looking at equipment or inventory you currently have. Then, figure out what you need. Think about inventory, production equipment, website building expenses, and any other costs that you can expect in your first months of operation.
    • Locate these items used or at a discount if you can and then record the prices to determine your startup capital needs.[5]
  3. Forecast Sales Before Starting a Business. Financial projections can be difficult to project, especially if you haven't yet begun operations. However, do your research by searching for sales data relevant to your industry online. Check with the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) to find this data and other important information. Then, use this data to estimate your sales volume over your first three years. Your projections don't have to be perfect, but they need to be reasonable and backed by concrete numbers.
    • Subtract your projected startup costs and cost of goods sold during this time to estimate your profitability.[5]
  4. Assess your capital sources. Unless you have startup and working capital in a savings account, you will need a source of capital to get your business started. Your options include loans from a friend or family member, bank loans, and selling equity to investors. Bank loans may be difficult to obtain, unless you opt for one backed by the Small Business Administration (SBA). Check with local banks to see what SBA loans they offer. You will need to have a strong business plan to qualify for such a loan.
    • Loans from friends and family are a great source of capital as well. However, the risk is that you lose the money that they lend you and your personal relationship may suffer as result.
  5. Write a business plan. A business plan is a roadmap for your business and its growth over the years. It includes several distinct parts that outline your operational plans and business information for prospective investors or lenders, or just for your own guidance. Include all of the above information in this part in your business plan. In addition, you'll need:
    • A description of the business and its offerings.
    • A marketing plan.
    • A description of business structure.
    • Management profiles.
    • A break-even analysis.
    • An explanation of how and where borrowed funds will be used.[5]

Building an Online Presence

  1. Build brand equity. Once you start selling a product that solves a problem for clients, you can build brand equity. Brand equity is how customers recognize that your product is better and different than products offered by your competitors.[6]
    • To find out more about brand equity, see how to build brand equity.
    • As customers use your product and get good results, they may keep buying your products and not consider your competitor’s brand. Think about products or services that you buy repeatedly. You may have that same view, which is why you keep buying the same product.
    • Brand equity can result in customer loyalty. Loyal customers may continue to buy your product, even if the price increases.
    • Most importantly, a loyal customer is more likely to refer other people to your business. Generating referrals is the fastest way to grow your sales.
  2. Set up a website. Your website is normally the first impression that you make online. The first experience a prospect has with your online business is seeing your website. It’s critically important to have an engaging website.[7]
    • Think about hiring a professional website builder to design and build your site.
    • Use search engine optimization (SEO) to direct traffic to your website. SEO allows your website to show up higher on search engine results. This drives internet users looking for a specific product or service to your website before your competitors'.[8] SEO involves researching keywords and setting up your website in certain ways.
    • For more on SEO, see Optimize Your Website.
    • Consider an online publishing platform to create your site. These platforms allow you to build an attractive website without needing any programming knowledge.
    • WordPress is a publishing platform that is used by over 20% of all sites on the Internet. This platform gives you hundreds of themes that you can choose for your website.
    • Once you choose a theme, you can build pages and decide how to layout the information on each page. It’s particularly important to have a home page that gets a viewer’s attention.
    • Your goal is to have a great home page that attracts readers to stay on your site and find out more about your product or service. Once your client decides to stay, make it easy to navigate your site.
    • Google has recently changed their search ranking criteria for websites. Sites with good online content are now ranked higher. If you continually add good content to your site, you will move up in Google search rankings.
    • Track all of your online marketing results. Analyze your website traffic, the number of opt-ins and the percentage of viewers you are able to convert into customers. Make changes to increase the results of your online marketing efforts.
  3. Build easy navigation and e-commerce features into your website for customers. Your initial goal is to get viewers to see your home page. If they want to find out more about your product, make it easy for them to navigate to other pages.[9]
    • Make sure that the pages and drop down menus are clear and easy to access.
    • Organize your pages into a logical order. Assume that you have page links that are listed vertically on the left side of your website. You put the home page at the top as the first link. Below it, you provide links to product/service information pages. Below those, you list ecommerce links.
    • If viewers have to invest too much time to understand how your site is set up, they may leave. Keep the prospect engaged by making page navigation easy.
    • Work with an ecommerce consultant to set up ecommerce functions like accepting orders and payments on your website.
  4. Use content and provide your audience with useful information. A great way to build a relationship with customers is to provide content, such as blog posts and articles. If you consistently add good content to your site, viewers may visit your site frequently. For more on blogging, see Start Making Money Blogging.[10]

Marketing Your Online Business

  1. Maintain Customer Contact. Provide an opt-in button for people who read your content. The button allows a viewer to subscribe to your site. The reader provides their email address, so they can get more information and content from you. If a viewer subscribes to your site, they are more likely to buy your product. Over time, you will build up a valuable email list of subscribers that you can send out regular updates to.
  2. Market your site using social media. Consumers are spending more of their time on social media. If you want to get in front of your customers, make sure that you have an effective presence on social media sites.[11] This is a good place to start advertising, because posting on these sites is free.
    • Create a complete LinkedIn profile for yourself and any key managers at your firm. Post links to the content you create, including blogs and articles.
    • People use LinkedIn to network, to look for business and to find jobs. Many professionals look at LinkedIn several times during the day. Build your connections by adding people to your network.
    • Create a presence on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and any other sites that your customers frequent. When you survey your customers, ask them which social media sites they use the most often.
    • All social media sites continually make changes. Make sure that you stay on top of site enhancements that can make your marketing more effective.
    • Post regularly in online forums. Forums are where internet users congregate to discuss common interests. Think of users of a forum relevant to your product or service as potential customers. By posting regular, insightful, professional comment, you can gain the trust of these online communities and actively promote your product or service.
    • This is especially relevant for providers of services. Displaying your knowledge will help you gain clients more easily.
    • For example, your watch identification service could get started by providing free advice or help on forums relevant to watch collecting.
  3. Advertise through Google AdWords. Those ads on the side when you search for something on Google are the result of companies paying for Google AdWords. This service allows websites to advertise on certain keywords that internet users search. It also displays your ad on relevant websites that also contain your keywords. Google AdWords drives traffic to your website in return for a fee paid per click.
    • Even a small AdWords budget, like $10-20 per day, can drive a lot of traffic to your website and could bring a large amount of potential customers.[12]
  4. Engage in joint marketing efforts with complimentary businesses. Almost any website or blog with a readership with sell you advertising space on their site. Remember to make sure that any site you advertise on is very relevant to your own business and that the users of the site are your target audience. Focus particularly on niche websites, like blogs and highly-specialized websites, to save money. The advertising costs on this type of page will likely be cheaper than it would be on a large site.
    • You can also engage in Do Joint Venture Endorsement Marketing to take advantage of an established business's customer base.

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Sources and Citations

  1. ↑ http://www.businessknowhow.com/marketing/solveprob.htm
  2. ↑ http://articles.bplans.com/business-ideas/7-steps-to-starting-your-own-business
  3. ↑ http://www.saleshacker.com/prospecting/customer-success-growth-engine-ideal-customers-advocates-upsells/
  4. ↑ http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/175242
  5. ↑ 5.0 5.1 5.2 http://www.va.gov/osdbu/docs/vepBusinessPlanOutline.pdf
  6. ↑ https://www.mindtools.com/pages/article/keller-brand-equity-model.htm
  7. ↑ https://wordpress.org/
  8. ↑ http://www.forbes.com/sites/steveolenski/2014/03/26/7-reasons-why-your-business-should-invest-in-seo/
  9. ↑ https://www.parscale.com/san-antonio-web-blog/how-to-create-a-successful-e-commerce-site
  10. ↑ http://coschedule.com/blog/find-your-target-audience/
  11. ↑ http://www.entrepreneur.com/topic/social-media-marketing
  12. ↑ http://www.smallbusinesscomputing.com/slideshows/10-inexpensive-ways-to-advertise-your-small-business.html
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