Five Basic Tips For People Who Want To Start An Online Business
Filed under: Internet
Here are the top 5 pieces of advice that I would give to anyone who wants to start an online shop.
1) Do not mistake your liking of a given product or idea with that product or being sellable. If your product or idea doesn’t generate traffic and clicks reasonably soon, be prepared to move on to some other business idea.
2) Make test sites and create advertising campaigns for them, just in order to evaluate if the product/idea you intend to sell would generate enough interest. If it doesn’t, refer to advice number 1.
3) Start small. Try to keep your costs low, until you are reasonably sure that investing more money or time on your online shop will provide some return. In particular, I would recommend:
- choose boilerplate shopping carts and templates, and don’t waste too much time trying to beautify them and customize them
- don’t get a Merchant Account until you are sure that your site is able to generate some revenue. A merchant account adds considerably to your fixed costs.
4) Don’t overdo SEO. Only when you followed the 3 previous tips thoroughly start seriously thinking about search engine optimization. Why? Because if your product is not sellable, no amount of search engine optimization will generate enough traffic and sales towards your site.
I know this is not what most beginner entrepreneurs want to hear about their Internet idea, but believe me, it is well-intended advice. You can achieve considerable marginal improvements in sales and traffic of your site, but no amount of SEO will cause the interest in your product idea to grow dramatically.
5) Do not have the “vending machine” misconception about your online business. Any business (online or not), requires a lot of your attention. Just because your business is online instead of brick-and-mortar, that doesn’t excuse you from doing all the things an owner/manage would do for his business to succeed. Please shed the idea that you will somehow do some initial setup work and then your shopping cart will “take care of itself”. It will not. I think this is true even for the vending machine business.
In general, I would recommend going online to be only the natural outgrowth of a business you have already working at some other level, or to be the natural complement of a natural aptitude you already have as a businessman or seller. Despite all the “success stories” you hear about selling online, if your strategy to start an e-commerce operation consists in simply a garbage dropshipping directory and set up a PHP shopping cart, your chances of success are very limited. If that is your business plan, you better stick to your 9 to 5 job.
Gonzalo Díaz
http://www.onlinebusinesstips.info
Tags: ecommerce advice, online business advice, online business tips, SEO advice
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