- Choose your cup of tea
Make a list of your amazing skills. Everyone is good at something better than somebody else.
Ask yourself what are you good at? What is something you can do better than anyone else.
If you are limitless of your options. Think about your interest and something you enjoy the most and that you can potentially turn into a business for yourself.
- Research Your Niche
Now that you found your idea your thinking now what can I do next? Well it will take some work but its pretty simple, you need to plan and research your idea. Best place is to start is using Google.com, research about the products or services you plan to provide to your customers, check and go through different websites. Every industry has competitors, search within your market and interest, find out what they are doing and how you can act to do something better.
- Action Plan
Every business requires planning on how to get started, Benjamin Franklin supposedly once said, “If you fail to plan, you are planning to fail.” If you do not plan on what you want to achieve or how you plan to operate and run your next big idea, you are setting up yourself to fail. Therefore, business planning is the crucial part to starting any kind of business.
Now you must be thinking, how do I prepare a great business plan? They are thousands of business plan templates that you can find online. I recommend to use a business plan template by Intuit QuickBooks It’s FREE to Download, you can use this template to plan out your business more in detail.
- Selling Products & Services
If you are selling any kind of products or providing a service it will be good to plan out where you will purchase these products or services?
If you are starting a business that plans to sell products online via your own ecommerce website and you want to know how you can find low and cheap products that you can sell online you do not know where is a good place to start, I would recommend sites like Ali Baba. If you are unsure about Alibaba I recommend you read this article on how to safely source products from the World’s Biggest Supplier Directory.
Alibaba is a great source to find a list of suppliers from overseas where you can find cheap wholesale products to sell online on your website.
If you are planning to start a business that will provide services to its customers, e.g. a mobile app, software subscription. You must plan how will you provide this service to your customers in your business plan, If you plan to sell online software or coaching service, that will carry a monthly fee. Think about who will build and support your product? Have you got a team who will deliver customer service? These are some great areas of focus you can work on before considering further.
- Register a Domain Name
Now that you have got your business planned out, you must be ready to hit the GREEN button towards the next stage, you will have to register the name that you can use for your website address, www.mywebsite.com this will represent your brand online, Choose something easy and simple that you and your customers can remember as this will be an ideal brand for your business. If you are not sure visit 10 Tips for Choosing the Perfect Domain Name by GoDaddy.
If you are based in Australia .com.au is a preferred option as it will give you a trusted appearance on the google search results and people can also identify if you are an Australian business by using .com.au in your domain name. Whichever country you plan to develop your business it will be a great idea to use the countries domain extension.
You can register your domain name from sites like www.godaddy.com.au, www.hostgator.com these sites can offer some good options that are cheap for registering a domain name for your business.
- Start Your Online Website
You must have heard that everything is online, we are interconnected to the world by the internet, daily thousands of searches happen online from Google to eBay from customers looking to buying products or searching for services, to researching information.All the attention of the world is online, so your business must have a representation online. Having an online website is the most useful resource for your customers, it can easily be available 24/7, it’s a place that never sleeps!
Now depending on your technical level and expertise you may be able to create a website yourself. I will explain more in the next section, but you can start thinking about building a website. We need to consider setting up Hosting service this is additional add-on to getting your website domain name as stated above, getting a hosting account is not really that expensive if you are starting out your business but also can be expensive depending on the nature of your business. You can visit If you are a beginner you may not know about hosting, basically the easiest way to understand without getting into to much technical web jargon, a hosting is storage space for your website, when your website is built it requires to be stored on a computer or server so it can be accessed when someone goes to your domain name e.g www.mywebsite.com. Godaddy is a great hosting provider to host your website and you can get a hosting for low as $3.99 a month with Godaddy they also 24 hours service incase you need help with your website basic issues and problems.
- Building your website
Building a website can be easy to difficult depending on your technical expertise, everyone is different though if you are new and unsure on how you can build a website, you can search on Google to finding a reliable website development company in your area, when you hire someone it may incur you some starting costs so you really need to plan carefully about your budget and cost. You may also visit YouTube to learn on how you can build you own website.
- Get Connected on Social Media
In order to connect your website and build a presence online you will need to setup different social profiles, this is because people use various sites for social media and having your business there can be ideal for you, a good place would be to start building the following:
- Lets Go Viral & Build Website Traffic
You got your business planned. You got your products/services ready. You have a team support in place. You have got your website online. You have created social profiles now Its time to GO VIRAL with your marketing.
A website that is on the internet and does not promote itself to build a online audience is like a land without people. To be successful in your business you need to work hard at promoting it so your website can drive more traffic. How can the online audience know you exist if your business brand does not SHOUT OUT LOUD to the world. You need to start engaging with your customers on social media. Start writing a blog. Here is a great article on 6 Best ways to build an online traffic
- Take ACTION& NEVER GIVE UP
According to Bloomberg, 8 out of 10 entrepreneurs who start businesses fail within the first 18 months. A whopping 80% crash and burn. This statistics is staggering on how many business can easily fail. We all have a big idea or dream we may wish to achieve but we have to remain persistence and never give up. In order to be successful online you must live and breathe your business. I have seen many businesses fail because they do not simply take action, nothing is perfect but I can truly say if you stay committed every single day and never give up. You will truly reach new heights.