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Archive for the ‘Online Business’ Category

As the economic times get tougher, the number of people seeking an alternative source of income is on the rise. Most of these people are turning to the online business option. But is it anyone that can succeed making extra cash from online business?

The truth is that if we think of skills, there is no one who can’t make a success working online. However, people who have the wrong attitude and are poorly motivated are bound to fail. Online business is no different from the ordinary business and you have to be geared for success in order to achieve it.

Online business has earned itself a bad name in the recent past not because it is a bad idea but because people have bad ideas about it. Lets first clear up one thing; online business is not a scheme to make you rich overnight. It is a business that you need to work on and invest in. The reality that one never gets anything for nothing is true about doing business online.

Most websites promising to show you a way of making a kill on the internet will try to convince you that you do not even have to work on it yourself. In fact, there are some online business gurus making millions passively. What these people are not telling you is that they did some real work before they got where they are.

It takes time to build an online business. There are methods you can employ and start earning cash in a short while but the income would be petty. If the idea is good, and you keep working on it, it may eventually grow to become a wonderful business that will earn you good passive income.

Opportunities of online business exist that you can take advantage of and start earning without investing your money. But such opportunities are not for anyone. You need to have the right knowledge to sail through. The good thing is that there are some credible companies that can provide you with a complete listing of available opportunities and even give you some really nice education on how to get about it; at a fee of course. But in the end, the results you get are worth the time and money you invest to get the knowledge.

Careful trending is however advisable when joining an online course on online business. Some people will provide you will a junk of useless information and yet you pay for the services. You should first seek a course that will comprehensively teach you practical ideas that you can use to set up your own business that you can work on from home.

Entrepreneurs need an online business to extend their reach to millions of prospects online. They realize that there is a huge opportunity on the internet for marketing to their prospects – it’s also a lot cheaper. However, this no small project. Creating a professional online presence requires planning and organization. Here are 10 steps you need to follow to launch your business online.

1. Domain Name

Register a name for your website using a domain registrar company. Choose a name that is short and easy to remember. When you tell people about your website, they should easily remember it, know how to spell it and know what business you’re in.

2. Web hosting

You don’t need to go for expensive web hosting at the start of your business unless you already have lots of traffic. However, avoid free web hosting with ads on them. It will kill your company’s image.

3. Face of the business

Decide on a spokesperson for your website. It could be the CEO, Director or Marketing Director of the business. Put this person’s photo on the website with their contact details. It will add a personal touch to your website.

4. About Us, Contact Us & Services

The common pages of a website are About Us, Contact Us and Services. Spend time planning the content for these pages. Make sure you give as many options as possible for people to contact you. e.g. telephone, email, mailing address and Skype.

5. Taking Orders

Decide how you take orders online. It could be via telephone, PayPal, credit card payment or money transfer. Have your order button displayed in an eye-catching area. Your visitors need to know exactly how to buy.

6. Good web design

With the structure planned out, hire a professional designer to create your website. You need to give a corporate image that is eye-catching and exciting. Your website gives visitors their first impression of your business, which determines the number of customers you’ll have.

7. Create a free report

Give out some valuable information in the form of a pdf file. This report should contain useful information your prospects can use, with links to your website and products. The objective of the report is to show your expertise in the market and to have your prospects remember you.

8. Squeeze page

This is a web page which describes the benefit of the free report. It instructs the visitors that they can download the report free of charge and sign up to your company’s newsletter when they submit their name and email.

This is how you collect targeted email leads and add them to your autoresponder account. Email good information to your list and occasionally remind them to purchase your products and any new promotions you may have.

9. Write Articles

To launch your business website, one of the most effective ways is to write related articles in your niche and distribute them to directories with links to your website. This will help your website rank better in the search engines and drive targeted visitors to your website.

10. Press Release

To announce your website to the public, write a press release that has a newsworthy story related to your business. With this press release, submit it to as many media channels as you can. This will send visitors to your website and may even get you interviews with journalists.

Online press release submissions also helps your website in ranking high in the search engines.

The above is a brief summary of the steps you need to go through, to create and launch your business online. Each step requires planning and careful implementation. You may consider outsourcing this to companies who specialize in creating and launching online businesses.

Incoming search terms:

Etsy is one of the best ways to create an online craft business for a new seller. You can quickly and easily set up an online store without worrying about building your own website or setting up ecommerce on your own. In under an hour you can be selling to a built in market of eager customers from all over the world! It just takes a little know-how and practice to make Etsy work for you in building a successful online business selling your crafts. If you’re just starting out on Etsy this article will show you how to build a new Etsy shop and start selling your crafts online.

First some statistics: Etsy is the world’s largest online marketplace for indie handmade goods and it is growing fast. $25.5 million worth of goods were sold on Etsy in August. That is a more than 7% increase over July, and a 75% increase over August of 2009! Etsy got 777 million page views in the month of August alone.

Here is how to build a shop on Etsy. First you have to visit Etsy and set up an account. It’s free. You will choose one account name that will never change (so choose well!). But one account can have several shops so if you have more than one kind of craft business, you can divide up your wares into distinct stores with their own branding. Try to make a shop name that is unique and memorable!

Once you have your account and at least one shop, you need to set up your storefront. You do this through “Your Etsy.” Click on the link for “Appearance” to start. First you have to get a banner for the top of your shop. Etsy provides some banners but it’s better to make your own. For good tutorials on making Etsy Banners and other aspects of selling on Etsy, you can check the Etsy Blog, called “The Storque.” They have “How-To” posts all the time that are really helpful. And there are great graphic design shops on Etsy who will custom design a banner for you for a small cost.

After your banner you will enter your one-line shop description, and also create a Shop Announcement, where you explain what you do and what makes your shop unique. You will also fill out sections on Shop Policies, which explains how you will handle shipping, and things like returns. Last, you will create a “Shipping Profile” that covers your domestic and international shipping rates. You can get an idea about how to do all these by checking other shops. It’s not hard.,

Once you get your shop set up, you can start listing items. Just click “list an item” to start. You give it a title (think about Google Search and put your keywords up front in the title–avoid whimsical or vague titles), and then describe it. Be specific. Include colors and measurements. Tell a little story about it what makes it unique. Then move on to materials, where you list what went into the item. Be careful to use commas between each material, and no periods or dashes. Then on the next page, you “tag” the item. You get 14 tags. Use them all! Tag with colors, especially trendy seasonal colors, seasonal themes like holidays, patterns (houndstooth, polka dot, etc.), shapes (square, chunky, etc.) and motifs (woodland animals is trendy right now, for example).

After that you upload 5 photos. Now this is the important part–your photos have to be good! You can use your digital point and shoot camera, but make sure it’s set on macro for closeup shooting (the macro function is the little flower button on most cameras). Get a good simple background that has some interest to it. For example photograph your jewelry on pretty rocks, or on a piece of wood. Take lots of shots!

Then, and this is important, import your photos into photo editing software like Photoshop or even Picasa (easy and free), and tinker with them. Crop them to highlight and magnify your product. Sharpen them. Use highlights and fill light to brighten them, and use contrast to make your colors stand out. Remember that the tiny thumbnail photos that customers see when they’re browsing are little squares so make sure your product is visible in a square version of your photo.

Finally, export your photos to a Pictures file in about a 1000 pixel size. Etsy won’t take photos larger than 2 MB. You can upload your photos from there into Etsy.

After you finish uploading, you just click “finish” and agree to pay 20 cents per listing, and you’re done.

Here are the fees: it costs 20 cents per listing, and then Etsy takes 3% of your sale. Paypal also takes 1%. So, price your items accordingly.

A note on pricing: don’t price too low! The word on the street at Etsy is: if you want to sell more, raise your prices.

It is a good idea to have at least 20 items in your store, and more if you can. Someone did some research and found out that sellers who have twice as many items do more than twice as much business. In other words, having a well stocked shop makes customers buy more!

Now that you have your shop set up, it’s time to promote it. Easy ways to promote are to use the Showcase Feature on Etsy (cost: $7), relist and add new items constantly (that way your stuff stays at the top of lists in your categories), and participate in the Forums that are on the “Community” section of the Etsy site. Join some Teams of other sellers that do similar work as you (find Teams in the Community section also). That gets your name out there.

Other ways to promote your Etsy shop are by posting your photos to free galleries like Craftgawker or ShowcaseEdge, setting up links to your site at resource sites like Unanimous Craft or Esellernow, and checking out membership sites like Handmadecraftshow and Handmade Spark.

And of course, you’ll want to create a Facebook Fan Page for your business and a Twitter account and a blog…but not all at once of course!

Last–be patient and persistent. For most sellers, it takes months to see traffic build on their Etsy site. You learn tricks of photography and tagging that help customers find you, and little by little you build a customer base. But, with some work and patience, you can use Etsy to build a successful online craft business.

Some say that advances in technology has finally enabled online business to run on full autopilot. The idea of complete autopilot replacing human intervention to manage online business makes you wonder if it’s true. If it’s true, how reliable is it?

Running your online business on full autopilot is impossible. This idea applies to all businesses. Whatever is the essence of your business, running on full autopilot is not an available option.

It is wise to embrace the idea that marketing is a process and it is unending. While you can rely on technology to do some things for your business and rely on other people to do tasks for you, you should also be ready to call the shots where your business is concerned.

The success of any business is at the mercy of its patrons. You might be the best in your field, but without patrons, your business will not grow. Ensuring that your patrons stick with you is vital to your business. Finding ways to attract more patrons is essential. Inability to keep up with industry standards and relying on early successes to see you through is one sure way to fail. Eventually, competition will get your patrons from you.

Search engine optimization can help you drive targeted traffic to your website. It helps your website to rank higher in search engines.

Your website lands on the first page in search engines. What’s next? Perhaps you are thinking running on complete autopilot will keep you there. The sad truth is no, it is not enough to keep you on top.

Technology is always changing and better businesses will come up to compete with your business. Keeping your place on top will require hard work more than ever. Slacking off on improving your business is one way to go down and let others take the reign.

Running on full autopilot is a dream for any business. It will prove to be wise to approach it with care.

Home business opportunities online are available just about everywhere you look. The trick is to be able to zero in on good opportunities and determine whether these are worthwhile for you or not. In this article we are going to talk about 4 ideas you could use to research opportunities to make money on the Internet with your own home business.

1. Google search. Type in the words “Home Business Opportunities Online” without the quotation marks and start looking at the results come up.

Google ranks websites based on their ability to deliver helpful results on these keywords. If you come across a website that you want to refer back to bookmark it because after time you will forget what websites you have been on.

2. YouTube. Google owns this shared video website and you can search for videos based on keyword phrases. Most of the videos will include a URL for a specific opportunity that you can then go to the website and check out closer.

3. The Warrior Forum. This is the largest Internet marketing discussion forum in the world. All of the top Internet marketers hang out here at one time or another.

There are many Internet marketers that are more than happy to share information on what is working for them. You can get involved in the discussions and ask questions, or you can look at the signature files of people making posts in various threads and check out the websites from there. Quite often, signature files are used as advertising avenues by other marketers.

4. Blog Rss Feed. As you come across Internet marketers that know what they’re doing you may want to subscribe to their blog RSS feed. One good thing to do is to receive updates via email whenever this marketer is making a new post.

This is a good way to keep up to date on what’s going on in the home business and Internet marketing world. It’s also a good way to get ideas for opportunities you may want to look into.

5. Google Alerts. You can subscribe to these for any keyword phrase and Google will send you updates directly to your email inbox.

These are five ideas on where you can go for home business opportunities online! However for maximum benefits, it is always a good idea to mix the various resources in your search for the best online business opportunities.

I know that there are many people out there looking to make a quick buck online. The sad thing is very few of us actually make a quick buck or any money at all. Having an online business is not a lottery ticket. It is a real business that you must work at. In order to succeed with an online business you must have the proper attitude, business plan, action course, and be able to make adjustments.

Having the right attitude makes all the difference between success and failure with an online business. People quit as soon as they find out they actually have to work at this business. You have to treat it like a full time job and attack it with the same vigor and excitement you would with something you truly love. Make it your passion. In order to break through and make money in this business, it will require this high level of commitment. Once you are dedicated to succeed with your online business, it is imperative for you to draw up a business plan. Make a budget and write down goals. Being unorganized in this business can lead someone to feel very overwhelmed. Write out a clear plan.

After researching and studying what needs to be done in order for you to succeed, you must take action. Traffic will not show up magically unless you are consistently taking action to make it happen. Write articles, blog, post in forums, use social bookmarking, traffic exchanges, etc. Whatever needs to be done, do it. Be persistent with your efforts. Push yourself that extra few feet and work harder and take more action. Failure is the result of not taking enough action. If at first you do not succeed, try, try again.

Not everything is always going to work for you 100% of the time. It is going to take some time to realize what works and what doesn’t in this industry. Some things that work for others may not necessarily work for you. To be successful will require some trial and error. Find out what is not working and make the necessary adjustments.

So now we know the real secret to success online. You have to have the will and desire to succeed, draw up a clear and concise business plan, take action, and make adjustments when something doesn’t go as planned. Somebody once told me that I had the ability to accomplish anything I wanted. Anything at all as long as I put my head into it. I strongly believe that we all have this ability. If you want to make a living online, you can. People DO make money online every hour of every day. To determine just how successful you will be, ask yourself just this one question. Ask yourself this… How bad do you want it?