How to Start a Successful Business Online (in a Nutshell)

How Everyday People can Become Successful Entrepreneurs Online

A common misconception with new online entrepreneurs is that one can no longer become wealthy pursuing web ventures today. Many believe the more desirable opportunities have already materialized and thus all playing fields realized, which to some extent is true but opportunity does, and always will knock. It could be said, regarding traditional inventions that most everything (at least at the most basic, primitive level) has been invented and that new inventions are essentially improvements/enhancements of existing inventions or share common characteristics of previously new product deployments on the market (i.e. a 3-in-one scanner/copier/printer machine, a fiberglass hull for a sailing vessel, etc.) Likewise, on the web, individuals seeking desirable income through this medium must research opportunities in-depth, particularly seeking niche markets with good potential for development while at the same time posing as a true interest of their own (passion is key towards developing a successful Internet venture.)

If you have good business sense but lack web design or development skills (or simply want to jump-start your business), no problem. You can find a number of professional quality web site templates at Template Monster, TemplateWorld and others. HotScripts.com is a popular resource for turn-key open source and commercial web-based software packages you can (usually) install within minutes on a web server. A web site hosting provider is necessary to host your site (make it visible to the world). If you are new to web development, ASP and PHP are currently the most popular web-based languages. Selection of one of these languages is necessary for choosing your web hosting provider as ASP requires a Windows-based hosting provider while a UNIX/Linux hosting provider is recommended for PHP-based programs. It depends on what language you are most comfortable with, or it may come down to what language a specific web program you like is based on (i.e. a photo album program called Gallery is written in PHP so you would need to find a UNIX/Linux hosting provider.) There are more open source programs available written in PHP and generally-speaking, you would need to invest more money with Microsoft ASP solution as quality ASP programs are usually commercial applications requiring you to purchase a license. A recommended UNIX/Linux hosting provider is HostGator while CrystalTech is a good Windows-based hosting provider for small-medium sized companies, assuming you do not mind having sharing your account/web site with other web sites on the same server. If your web site requires a mission-critical solution, requires a high degree of security, etc. you should do some research into companies offering what is called dedicated web hosting where you can rent a web server dedicated exclusively to your web site(s) or perhaps a semi-dedicated solution where you might share the server with a few other companies while realizing slightly less security risk, etc. than a purely shared solution at a fraction of the cost of a dedicated package.

Whatever solution you choose, you should ultimately find setting up and maintaining a web site is relatively easy, especially if you are accustomed to Microsoft Word, Publisher, etc. Microsoft FrontPage is a good novice web publishing tool featuring what is called WYSIWYG technology (What You See Is What You Get) meaning you can design or modify web pages/sites with a high degree of flexibility. Setting up new e-mail accounts, etc. can usually be done through your web site’s control panel provided by your web host (i.e. cPanel for Linux/UNIX accounts, CTsitecenter if you subscribe to a CrystalTech Windows hosting account, etc.)

Your web presence requires a clever .com (formally what is called a domain name, which can actually end in .net, .org, etc.) A good domain name provider is GoDaddy.com, which offers some excellent domain name administration tools, an intuitive domain name portfolio if you end up registering multiple names, etc. (there is a domain name search tool on their home page). Unless your trademark has these characteristics, it is generally not a good idea to include hyphens or numbers in your name and you should keep the name as short and easy to remember as possible (after all, what good is relaying an Internet address on the radio, etc. if someone would have difficulty remembering the name later?) It may be worthwhile to also register your new business name as a federal trademark with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.

Regarding building your web site, W3 Schools offers some great web site creation tutorials for free and you also might find a site called Webmonkey a valuable web development resource. When your site is ready to upload to the World Wide Web (share with the rest of the world), a good open-source (free) program to use for this purpose is FileZilla and you should find some useful file upload tutorials offered on this site as well.

So how can you make money on the web? That is largely up to the marketability of your idea (and perhaps how well you can keep your business idea secret). Many successful entrepreneurs have earned a considerable amount of money through web blogs by placing ads on their web site (such as affiliate-based marketing through Commission Junction or even the online giant responsible for the affiliate marketing buzz, Amazon.com. Successful blogs also tend to feature ads automatically driven from Google’s free AdSense service which displays ads relevant to the page content and pays you every time a visitor clicks on one of those ads (not a bad deal considering the ads are typically non-intrusive and the revenue has a potential of adding up.) Other’s have been successful creating targeted storefronts (i.e. an e-commerce site devoted to selling say posters) while selling their own items or participating in a relatively new trend called dropshipping. Worldwide Brands is a good drop shipping source if you are a bona-fide business with a federal tax ID (you’ll need to apply with the individual drop shippers) or Shopster is a great alternative designed to appeal to the masses, not requiring one to have a federal tax ID to sell their products.

From time to time you may want to consider redesigning your web site to maintain fresh appeal with your site’s audience, along with any other web templates you may use for perhaps any e-mail newsletters you send, templates used with your eBay marketing initiative, etc. If you are a retail company, you may want to consider creating a product feed for Google Froogle and/or Google Base for greater product exposure. You may even find some of the products you submitted with Google Froogle appear among the top 10 organic (standard, non sponsored) keyword/phrase results on one of your product queries, which places you at a certain advantage among your competitors. For more on search engine optimization (SEO) or search engine marketing (SEM), you may be interested in reading the various articles at WebProNews, SEO Chat or pursuing professional certification with WebCEO, considered to be the forerunner for SEO/SEM training (their SEO software is great to use as well.)

If you plan on building an extensive web site, you may want to consider implementing a site search function and researching what is known as page includes (allows you to embed multiple web pages within a web page, such as a header, footer, left side navigation bar, etc.) which helps you save time if you ever need to update a common page component on-the-fly across your web site. Dynamic features are nice, such as subtle Flash animations along with adding roll-over effects (when appropriate) to navigation components and keeping the site navigation as simple as possible. There is a good book on the later subject called “Don’t Make Me Think” by Steve Krug you may want to look into.

In the past, allowing one to contact you by phone, fax or e-mail from your web site was the norm but nowadays many web sites (i.e. Verizon, Bank of America, etc.) implement a live chat feature which allows your visitor to contact you to ask questions about a product or service. A popular live chat program, called BoldChat even allows one to upsell/cross sell products and services through initiating a conversation, while viewing visitor activity on your web site in real-time (knowing what page they are on at all times while being exposed to information regarding how they landed on your web site, any keywords/phrases they typed into a search engine, etc.) Likewise, if you run an e-commerce site and none of these visitors convert to a customer during their session, you would have knowledge of their IP address/DNS equivalent which is sometimes indicative of the visitor’s company/physical location, presenting a higher probability for a sales conversion to happen if you decide to ‘cold call’ any of these people later on.

This article has been designed to serve as a quick overview of the various components of setting up a web site and some ideas to help you get started building a potentially valuable web-based enterprise. There is certainly much more material to cover on this subject but this should help with your business endeavors. Feel free to contact me at cgcarmichael04@alumni.plymouth.edu if you have any questions.

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Posted by Curtis on Jan 9 2007. Filed under E-Commerce. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry