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Starting an Internet Business
Posted
July 2, 2009
By the end of 2009 over 2 billion people world-wide will have internet
access. This leads to many unique benefits to starting an internet business
these days. But where do you start? Just like anything in life
starting off with an idea is going to be the first step.
The Idea
You
will probably here from a lot of sources to start off with something
you know, or something that you are interested in. There's a few
reasons for this. One reason is so you don't get bored later on down
the road
and give up, or that you should do something you enjoy so it doesn't
actually feel like work, then you will be more likely to continue. This
is true for many cases in starting
an internet based business but not always. Many people
use the internet
for free information, so information products like eBooks and articles
are a great way to start out to help establish you as an expert in your
field.
But the main thing you need to determine is whether
or not your idea (niche) is going to be profitable. We need to
determine if there is a market for your product or service. Many people
have poured their entire life savings into a business idea just to
later find out that there wasn't a market for it and nobody was
interested in the products or services. Even if you think it's a great
idea other people might not.
So how do we determine if your
niche is going to be profitable? This is called test marketing, and
there are many ways to test market a product. My favorite way, and also
the cheapest, is to use the power of search engines. If people aren't
searching for what you are offering, than the chances are it's not
going to be profitable. But on the other hand, if too many people are
searching for what you are offering than there will probably be way to
much
competition in that niche and you will end up being left in the dust
not being able to keep up.
To get started pick a few keywords or keyphrases that describes your
niche. Then go to Google's Keyword tool found here https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal
and type in your keyword to see how many times it's searched for every
month.
For
example, let's see how often "weight loss" is searched for every month.
About 11 million times. Ok so there's obviously a market for weight
loss. Now let's see what the competition is like. To determine this go
to Google's homepage and type in "weight loss", using the quotes, to
see how many web sites have that exact phrase in it. About 65 million
websites with the keyword "weight loss". Which means way to much
competition if your just starting out in this niche.
What we
are trying to look for is something that people are searching for but
without to much competition. I'll use another example. Let's see how
ofter "starting an
internet business" is searched for every month. About
5,000 times. Then we go to Google search and type in "starting an internet business"
in quotes, and we see that about 120,000 web pages come up. This is
still a lot of competition but much more reasonable than the previous
example.
In general you want to find a keyword or keyphrase
about your niche that gets at least a few thousand searches every month
with the least amount of websites that show up for that keyword. Then
you optimize your web pages for that keyword and you will have a much
better chance of placing in the search engines for it.
Something that gets at least 2,000 searches with less than 100,000
websites is what I generally shoot for.
Designing a Website
Now
that you determined how to find a profitable niche the next step is to
build a website around it. This is not a requirement to marketing a
niche, you can actually make money through article marketing or
starting a blog around a niche and selling products through affiliate
marketing, but to maximize your profits you are going to want to build
a website eventually.
If your just starting out than the
main thing you'll want to consider is keeping your costs as low as
possible.
This means building the website yourself and just having to pay for the
domain name (around $8 a year at GoDaddy.com) and web hosting (around
$4 a month for the cheapest commercial host).
It's not that
hard to build a website these days. You don't even need
to know how to program or write in html code, but knowing a little
about programming will help out a lot. A WYSIWYG (what you see is what
you get) editor will enable you to build a website without much skill
needed. It works much like a word processor that lets you put in
graphics and a navigational interface. A commercial one like
Dreamweaver
will run you around 500 dollars but there are freeware ones available
like Kompozer.
After you pick up your WYSIWYG editor head over to TheSiteWizard.com
and you will be making a website in no time at all.
Advertising
Ok,
so now you have an Idea (niche) and hopefully a website based on this
idea. Now you'll want to start getting traffic to your website, and the
best way to do this is through advertising. But advertising doesn't
mean that you have to spend money. There are many free forms of
advertising that you will want to exhaust before you start spending any
money on it. When starting
an internet business for the first time remember to keep
your costs as low as possible just in case things don't go as planned.
The most popular
form of free advertising is probably article marketing. You write an
informative article about your niche and get it published in an ezine
like EzineArticles.com,
while
leaving a link to your website in the resource box at the bottom of the
article. Not only will this get you some visitors but it will also
build up the backlinks to your website, which is what most
search
engines use to determine how relevant your website is for search engine
placement. The more quality backlinks your website has, the more
noticable it will be.
Another form of free
advertising is viral marketing, which means word-of-mouth marketing. A
great way to get this started is to write an eBook and give it away for
free, mentioning or linking to your website. "Free" is one of the best
incentives to make people want to get involved in what you have to
offer. If your eBook has useful information than people will likely
want to spread the word about it.
Social networking is
another great way to market your website. Twitter is probably one of
the best social networking sites for this purpose. Get people to
follow you on Twitter then just mention your website and you will
likely get some people wanting to check it out.
Forum posting is another
good way to market your website for free. Although you don't want to
blatantly endorse your website since most forums have rules about this.
Instead, in most cases, just try to participate in forum discussions
while leaving a link to your website in your signature.
Paid
Advertising
There
are many ways to advertise your website, but of coarse paid advertising
is going to be one of the most effective. Keep in mind, unless you have
a product or service for sale, either your own or someone else's
through
affiliate marketing, than you'll want to stay away from paid
advertising. Otherwise the costs of advertising could easily surpass
what you are making.
PPC
(pay-per-click) Advertising
PPC Advertising is one
of the most popular forms of advertising on the internet. This is why
Google is a multi-billion dollar
company. It's essentially a bidding war. The people willing to bid the
highest for each click on their ad is generally going to place the best
for search results on the keywords or keyphrases that they are bidding
for. It's
not that hard to get started using PPC advertising, but I wouldn't
recommend using it unless you know what you are doing.
To get started head over to Google's Adwords https://adwords.google.com
and create an Adwords account. It costs 5 dollars to activate your
account, but after that you can set how much you want to pay for each
click on your ad and you can set a budget on how much you are willing
to pay
each day. Then you only pay if someone actually clicks on your
advertisement.
There's a lot of competition in PPC advertising but if
you look hard enough it's possible to find keyphrases that are not
very expensive. These are generally going to be long-tail keyphrases
like "starting an
internet marketing business",
almost a full sentence as you can see. The more generic the keyword the
more expensive it's going to be, (like cars, or hotels). Plus generic
keywords are not very
good at getting targeted traffic, and targeted traffic is the whole
point in using paid advertising.
If you do have something
for sale on your site than it's a good idea to mention the price in the
ad so you don't get people clicking on the ad that are not willing to
purchase something.
Monetizing Your Website
You have a
niche, you have a website, and hopefully you advertised your site to
start getting some traffic. You are well on your way to start an internet business.
Now is a good time to start monetizing your website to get as much out
of it as you can.
PPC
Advertising Networks
Google
Adsense is a great way to start out monetizing your site with. It works
just
like Google Adwords but instead of you paying Google when people
click on your ads, Google pays you when people on your website click on
Google's ads. It's pretty easy to set up an Adsense account and it is
completely free. You can start by applying to Adsense here https://www.google.com/adsense.
Just make sure that your website complies with the Adsense
Program Policies.
Adsense
is the most popular option but not the only, here are a few other PPC
advertising networks available to monetize your site with.
PPC
advertising relies on CTR (click through rate), with the average CTR
for most sites being around 1%. One of the downsides of PPC ads is
when people click on the ads than they're not on your site anymore.
This
is not really a good option if your website is an online store because
you want people staying on your site to purchase something. So a better
option would probably be CPM advertising.
CPM Advertising Networks
CPM
stands for cost per mille and refers to cost per 1,000 impressions. CPM
rates will vary from usually anything from $0.10 to as high as $10 per
1,000 impressions depending on the network, ad placement, and size of
the ad. Websites with high page views are an obvious good choice for
CPM
advertising.
Here are a few popular CPM networks.
Affiliate
Marketing
Affiliate
marketing has become very popular through the internet lately, and it
is
usually the first step people will take when they try to start an internet business.
It
generally entails a Merchant rewarding an individual (affiliate) for
selling the Merchants goods or services for them. Commissions for
affiliate products usually range from 4-7% for real life goods, like
computers, books, electronics, etc. to around 40-75% for digital
products like eBooks, and software products.
This is done by
the affiliate placing a link called an "affiliate link" on their
website, blog or even in an advertisement, and when people click on the
affiliate link a unique cookie tracks which affiliate generated the
lead so the affiliate gets credited for a purchase the customer
makes.
List of a few popular affiliate networks.
Other Ways to
Monetize Your Site
1.) There are a few services that will pay you to run a poll or survey
on your website. The most popular is
Vizu Answers.
Just sign up for an account with them and pick a poll that has
something
to do with your website. These generally run under a CPM model.
2.)
You could sell text links on your site, but this will only work if your
website has a decent pagerank. The higher your pagerank the more you
could charge for each link. Since the site you are linking to will get
a bigger benefit if your site has a higher PR.
A few text-link marketplaces:
3.)
You could charge people for a membership fee to your site. But
obviously you need to provide a real value for your members that they
will be willing to pay for, like premium content or secret techniques
if its a private forum.
4.) Donations can be a way to
generate income from a website. Especially if your website is a place
where readers gain some kind of value from your content. Such as
tutorials or "how to" articles. If you offer any type of free
information or service you may want to place a donation button on your
site. If you have a PayPal account than it's really simple to create a
donation button. You can make one here PayPal
Donate Button.
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by making a donation.
Tracking Your Visitors
Ok, so
you have a niche, a website built around that niche, an advertising
plan to draw in visitors or customers, and someway of monetizing your
site. Now you are going to need to track your visitors to understand
how to optimize your site better. The best tool I've found to track
website statistics is Google
Analytics,
and it's completely free which is a huge bonus.
Google Analytics will tell you a lot of information about your
visitors, such as how they are finding your website. Either through
search engines, referred sites, or direct traffic. Referred site means
links or ads that you have on
another website that visitors are using to find your site. Direct
traffic means people are using a bookmark or typing the url into
the
browser to jump directly to your site, and search engine is
pretty obvious.
You'll also want to set up an account with Google
Webmaster Tools to determine which keywords or keyphrases
people are using to find your website when using a search engine.
The
main purpose of tracking is trying to figure out why
visitors are coming to your website and which pages of your site
they are visiting the most or spending the most time on. The pages
where visitors flock to the most, we will call the "money pages".
After
you determined how people are finding your website than you'll want to
optimize your site, either around the keywords visitors are using in
search engines to find your site or advertising on other websites that
are bringing you traffic.
These "money pages" on the other
hand are going to need special attention. Having a "call to action" on
your money pages are a good idea. It can be as simple as requesting
visitors to subscribe to a RSS feed or newsletter to ensure you get
repeat visitors. Remember people rarely buy something when they
first hear about it. Most people like to research the product
first, so having them subscribe to a newsletter or mailing list is a
good way to ensure a sale later on down the road.
It's also
a good idea to place advertisement's on your money pages differently
than the rest of your site. Generally ad's placed closer to the center
or the top of the web page do better. Although ad's that are placed
directly into the body of your content might do well, it can be a bit
annoying.
Conclusion
To sum up all the steps
to
starting an internet business:
- The Idea (Find a Niche that is Profitable
Without to Much Competition)
- Develop a Website around that Niche
- Advertise Your Website to Bring in Visitors or
Customers
- Experiment With Different Forms of Monetizing
Your Website to Find the Most Profitable One
- Track Your Visitors to Determine What They are
Looking for, and Give Them What They Want
Best of luck to you in starting
an internet business.
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Starting an Internet Business
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