If you're thinking of bringing your existing home business online, you must have already heard of the numerous benefits which come with it. For starters, let us take a look at your current "traditional" home business. You market your business through word of mouth, flyers or perhaps even advertisements on your local newspaper. Some might even put in that extra effort to come up with a mailing list, making frequent trips to the post office and spending a small fortune on postage. "Office" hours are likely to be about 14 to 16 hours a day. Now lets take a quick glance at an online home business.
Your market is limited to the entire World. You spend nothing sending out emails to a 1000 times more people (not to mention saving the daily trip to the post office.) Your business remains open 24/7/365 and accessible to anyone anywhere.
Everything seems to favor of bringing your home business online. But there's just one problem, where do you begin? This very question is the reason hundreds of thousands home business owners never brought their businesses online. And for those who did, they probably got stuck not knowing how to market it. Let's begin with doing your homework. Before you dive in you might want to take sometime off thinking about who your potential customers or clients maybe.
If your selling some products, shipping shouldn't be much of a problem how ever if your providing services such as photography or moving homes, there's no point marketing your side to someone halfway round the world, unless of course there's a substantial amount of profit to be made. Having done that the next step is to check out your competitors. A famous strategist by the name of Sun Tze once said "Know yourself and know your enemy and in a hundred battles, you will be victorious." And this is exactly what you will be doing in time to come. Here are a couple of points to look out for when your checking out your competitors. Namely the services provided, price of goods/services, marketing strategy and finally design and functionality of their website.
To go about doing this you could do a search with popular search engines such "Google, MSN or Yahoo". If you don't find anything, don't be disheartened because that's a very good sign. It means currently there's no one to compete with you! However, if you get thousands of return result, just carry on with your home work. The next step would be to register a domain name. When registering a domain name, think of alternative names in case your first choice is taken.
Here's another tip when your registering a domain name. Use keywords related to your business and always keep it simple and short, something easy to remember. In every business, you will be needing some methods of payments. To date, there are numerous ways this can be achieved, some simple ways of receiving online Credit Card payments would be through a ClickBank or PayPal account which is ideal for small businesses. It saves you a tremendous amount of work and provides your clients with secure transactions.
Having set up your website, the next important step would be to market your website. Earlier I mentioned doing a search on Google for your competitors. The trick to get ahead of your competitors is simple. You must get your site on the first page of the search result but before that, you obviously have to make a submission to the various search engines telling them of your existence.
Since an entire topic could be written on this alone, here are 2 main points to remember. When a potential customer does a search say "Buy Dog Shampoo Online" The more times the 4 words appear on your site, The more relevant it is to the search therefore the higher up your site will be. The other factor is the number of other sites with dynamic links to yours.
1 way of doing that is to actively participate in forums and add the URL of your site to your signature. Another effective method of getting your site noticed is to advertise it with Google Adwords. This is a must do if you want instant presence on the internet.
But before you do, do your research before hand or you'll end up burning a hole in your pocket and not getting a single sale. Marketing effectively on the internet is a vast topic which you will have to spend time and effort and there is only so much I can touch on in an article. But with the knowledge you've just gained, it should point you in the correct direction to head in brining your home business online.
Benjamin Chia is the Top Internet Marketer of online profit making sites such as CreditsToCash. Dedicated in his efforts to provide quality advice on business marketing on the internet, he has mentored countless people in creating their very own e-commerce solution with the CreditsToCash Franchisewww.techfinance.ws
