How To Start Your Business On The Internet Step By Step And Smoothly

Allow me to help you with your decision and take a few minutes to read the following report where in six simple steps I will describe what you must do to start an internet business.

By saying six simple steps, I do not mean that making money online is quick and easy, but it is possible if you dedicate time and study. The interesting thing about this business is that by doing things step by step you can set up your business from your home or if you wish from a small office, and using the right tools it will work almost on “autopilot”.

You will be amazed at the low cost of the investment to start it, where thinking about resorting to free resources will not be necessary. Buying your domain, your hosting, and some basic tools will give your business a better positioning, greater seriousness, and greater reliability to all Internet users who visit you.

First step: Do you want to start an Internet business?

If you are thinking of starting an internet business, it may be important that you initially ask yourself some questions. The first one would be: Is this web a business opportunity? If you answer yes, then the following question arises: Will I have enough tenacity to achieve what I want in this endeavor? If you also answer affirmatively to this, you are already an eligible candidate to follow in the idea of ​​becoming an electronic marketing entrepreneur.

The areas in which you can channel your business are simply endless. You can be a consultant or coach in your specialty, have a virtual store of whatever you want, advise dog breeders, if you are a lawyer you can give legal advice to distant clients, you can even set up an architect’s office and sell designs anywhere in the world, the sky is the limit! However, make no mistake, what comes next is to work and acquire knowledge day after day and along the way, you will learn all the skills and tools you need.

If you are one of those who have not had much friction with the use of the computer, the internet, specialized software, etc., do not worry about this, it is like everything, you have strengths and weaknesses where some you will overcome yourself and others you will take to carry out with the help of third parties. We will delve into this later. I intend to help you in the different stages of the formation of your business, where there are some variants according to the type that you are going to set up.

Second step: Get your passion and/or your knowledge

In the first step we talked about that before embarking on this internet thing, whether through a blog, web page, virtual store, or any other existing means, two questions must be asked. The first is: Do you think you can do a profitable or profitable business by this means? And the second, can you commit to putting all your efforts into this endeavor with the ups and downs that may arise?

Assuming your answer is yes, we can move on to Step Two.

One of the biggest mistakes that can be made in this business is saying: “I am going to sell product or service “X” because it is very good, I can get it at a good price and it has a high-profit margin!”. Although it seems strange, it is! The first thing you should do before selling any product or service is to find a market, a captive market where you can start the strategy of your new business. More than 70% of people who enter the internet enter in search of something, they do not enter in search of a particular product or service, they enter simply looking for INFORMATION. Additionally, today’s Internet users are very demanding when it comes to information, this must be useful, quality information, that is, it must be information that contains VALUE. If you dedicate yourself to writing information that is not interesting and your prospect feels that he is wasting his time with the information you give him, unfortunately, he will not return to your site. Prospects must first believe in you, and you do this with the information you give them. There will come a certain time when you will achieve their loyalty and the moment you offer them a product or service they will buy it and from that moment they will go from prospect to customer and start generating income for you.

A technique that can extraordinarily help you to define your business can be achieved through the following exercise:

• Make a list of all the things that you like to do and in which you have good knowledge, but do it with the things that you have always identified with and you think that learning more about them will be easy for you or it will become a pleasure for you. It may be that during your life you have been interested in learning something in particular, such as a specific sport, a type of music, sculpture, helping people get jobs, artistic drawing, etc., that’s where you could start.
• Make another list where you list all the things you have learned to do during your work or professional life and that you consider to be an expert and can provide knowledge and/or solutions to the people who come to you. In this case, the possibilities are also endless. Expert in accounting, taxes, graphic design, architecture, modern art, etc.

This does not mean that you cannot start your business in a medium that you do not know, we all can learn day by day, but it will take more time to do it.

On the other hand, if in the lists you make there is a trade, hobby, or work activity that is repeated or complemented in both, your answer may be there! If you decide to go for that option, there will be more opportunities for success in your business.

For now, I leave you with this, take your time and find a place where you can meet and make YOUR LISTS.

It is not easy to open a successful business, but if you start in a structured way and with the proper information, your chances increase substantially.

Third step: Who to sell to? We must find a market niche

You should start reading this step only if you have already made your lists with the things that you like or with which you have the experience to find that business you want to set up on the internet.

The intention that you have these lists is to be able to dedicate me to teaching you how to start defining what business you can set up on the web. We are going to look for that “market niche” where the demand is not satisfied and is waiting for you. I’m going to start by defining what a market niche is. Simply we can define it as a group of people who need and want something in common. As an example, it could be All those people who have a dog and want to learn how to train it. More specific could be all those people who have a dog who wants to train it to participate in competitions. It could also be all those women who are looking for information to make “chicken bone” necklaces J, even a niche can be more specific, for example,

Why look for a market niche and not send the information to everyone? Simply because it is a waste of time both for you and for all those people to whom you would send them and who are not interested. It is exhausting to send countless additional emails and try to convince all those people who want to get involved in a topic in which they have no interest.

Working with a specific market niche gives us a greater focus on the marketing strategies and the content of the information that we are going to prepare and use to win over that captive market and to be able to analyze the comments that we receive from them and determine what they want.

As you can see, the options are endless, however, to guarantee a good percentage of success, we must do a preliminary investigation to see if what you think may be a good market niche (business), really has a “demand for information” on the Internet.

Because we say a “demand for information”. Simply because more than 70% who enter the Internet enter looking for “INFORMATION”, they do not enter looking for a product or service.

So dear friends and dear friends, here is another recommendation, the best way to sell online is to previously create an environment of trust with the prospect, and the best way to achieve it by this means is by giving him information of VALUE and for free. Through this strategy, we are going to achieve the loyalty and trust of these Internet users and we will complete the first stage, which is to convert them into prospects by including them in our electronic newsletter and becoming our fans on social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, etc.

Now, the exercise you will have to do is very simple. First, you are going to determine THE DEMAND of that market niche, that is, to know how many people are

looking for what you want to offer. To do this, you must use an excellent tool that Google offers us for free which is called Google Adwords Keyword Planner.

When you get to this page you will find a box where you must write a sentence or phrase with which you can define your possible business. Then press “search”. Immediately you will see the phrases you wrote or similar and the number of searches they have made on the internet locally and worldwide. Based on the number of searches that appear, to that extent, you will make your decision. I would recommend that you take into account a range that goes from 5,000 to 40,000 searches per phrase. Why? Well, if you go below 5,000, you run the risk that not many people will be interested in your niche. On the other hand, if you go over 40,000 you will surely get a lot of competition in your niche.

After we define the demand of our market niche, we have to see the other side of the coin. This is not enough. We must analyze our competitors, that is, we have to see what is offered on the web to satisfy that unsatisfied demand. For this, we can include the same phrase with which we obtained the offer of our niche, but we will do it in a search engine.

Here you can see two things: first, see if there is a lot of offer that makes you give up this niche and look for another; Second, if you are still interested in working in this niche, see the sales strategy used by your competitors and find a way to make a difference concerning them and begin to gain ground by bringing the largest number of prospects and therefore future customers.

As you can see, the work is not complicated, it is just somewhat laborious because you must collect information from both your future clients and competitors and analyze them so that you make a decision and can go to the next step.

In a conclusion we can reach the following: On the internet, we cannot think that we are going to enter with a specific product or service and start looking for the market for that product. We must find the market and then see what products and/or services we can get to offer those people eager to be served.

Fourth step: Worry about the customer, not the product or service

After being clear about the market niche that you want to serve, the next step is to define all the strategies that you are going to follow to conquer that client who is waiting for you to satisfy a need, and that need, as we mentioned before, is initially satisfied with the information. valuable.

Note that at no time am I talking about the offer of any product or service, only information, and FREE, with the sole purpose of gaining their trust. Then the sale will come, and if you do it right it will be over and over again. Of course, the process of offering free information must continue, alternating it with the sale of your products and/or services. Your customers are always waiting for courtesy from you.

What I have told you is a great truth. However, a very high percentage of online businesses at this point lose the north, and focus only on selling the product or service they defined, making a great effort to highlight their advantages and/or characteristics without considering what they call the world of online marketing the “WHAT’S HERE FOR ME?”. Under this premise, these businesses fail to take off and become short-lived businesses. We must create a business that when prospects come to it feel that they have arrived at the place where you are offering them something they were looking for and not that you are selling them something they had not thought of.

So far you have already defined what niche or what group of people who have a common need are the ones you are going to address, now what you have to do is determine the PURPOSE of your business, and where you plan to focus it. You must determine what the mission of your business is going to be, where it must be focused on the client NOT towards you.

To facilitate this exercise, I give you the following example: Imagine a motorcycle business. The wrong way to establish what the purpose of the business is would be “Sale and maintenance of motorcycles”, where your greatest effort will be directed to informing the client of the different models and characteristics such as the type of engine, whether it is for mountain or for a ride, material with which they are made, paint, equipment warranty, maintenance, among others.

If you turn to look for the unmet needs of your prospects and future clients, the focus that you should give to your business may be “Helping people to move in cities”. In this way, people say: Here is something for me! They are thinking of helping me solve my problem. If we establish a mission to help people to move around the cities, the portfolio of products that you can offer becomes much broader than just selling motorcycles and maintaining them, for example, you can also sell bicycles and accessories, sportswear, helmets protection, insurance against theft and accidents, subscription to motorcycle and bicycle magazines, maps, GPS, etc. With the articles, you write on your blog, the electronic newsletters, and the comments you receive from them,

Fifth step: The Business Plan

Much is said about the realization of a business plan as the key to the success of your venture. However, many people skip this step and basically, it is because they consider it too complex to do it, they simply think they cannot or do not know how, nor do they seek any advice on the subject. My intention in this fifth step is for you to realize that you can do it and that you are convinced that making your business plan is your guaranteed ticket to achieving your venture, just let me explain how to do it in the best and simplest way

Why the simplest? Simply because what you need to do is how create a route from the beginning to the peak of your business, in which you are going to place everything you want to do, how to do it and when you want to do it. As you can see, this is very simple but very powerful to achieve the results you want and need.

Business plans that are complicated and require a large amount of financial information, advertising, marketing, sales plan, and competitiveness, among others, are those that are necessary to obtain financing from banks or find investors to give you the money. the capital you need, basically to form medium and large companies. These business plans are important and necessary, but perhaps for when the company that you are just starting is more developed. In these cases, it is recommended that you look for experts to help you prepare it.

To get started, you need a Preliminary Business Plan (PBP). A plan that allows you to leave your job, initially partially and then definitively, achieve the long-awaited financial freedom that you are looking for and fulfill the great desire of having your own company or a personal brand that is recognized nationally and/or internationally. , that is of prestige and with its brilliance.

How to start my plan?

I only ask you to see the steps that I mention below and complete them with your information. Do not be afraid of what you write initially, the advantage of this plan is that it is dynamic, that is, you can change it and update it as many times as necessary. I advise you to give it a revision number every time you change it, for example, Business Plan “XXX” rev.0, if you change it later call it Business Plan “XXX” Rev.. 1, and so on. You save them and in the future, you can review them and see how your business has progressed, or you can resume some action that you thought about in the past and that at the time of your review you think has taken effect to implement it.

Don’t worry if the PNP is not very long, there aren’t many sheets you need to do this exercise.

Steps for your business plan:

You will begin to ask yourself the following questions: What am I going to do and how am I going to do it? Answer both questions and you will title it Operations Plan.

Marketing plan. It refers to what market niche you are going to sell and how you are going to sell it. Just remember that in online business (Internet) I have recommended that the sale begins with the trust you give the customer to buy from you and you do this by giving valuable information and establishing a permanent relationship with your prospects and customers. When you feel the loyalty on your side, start selling your products and/or services.

The previous points are the ones that will take more time to write and in principle, they should not exceed 2 pages each. They are the ones who determine the strategy of your business.

Market

Here I mean who will be your audience, that is, who will be your customers. Make a list of your potential customers, and if possible, break them down in order of importance and/or likely date of approach. If you make a sales plan, it will help you a lot to better manage your time and your budget. If you think you should separate them in a different way than what I tell you here, go ahead! Keep in mind that you are the most knowledgeable about the business you are shaping.

Finance

This is a very important phase in the development of your business. Here you must include two budgets: the expense and the income. In the expenses, you must make an initial investment budget and another of fixed and variable expenses. This should be as detailed as possible because you have no idea how small expenses can become a threat to your working capital. The idea is that month by month you make comparisons between what you estimated and what you spent and see the differences. This way you can make the necessary adjustments.

The previous point is very important because based on the availability of capital you have, you will be able to determine if you can start your business at that moment or if you have to wait a while longer. You must keep in mind, especially if you intend to leave your job, that you must have enough money to support your expenses and those of your family for at least 18 months while you start your business, and on the other hand, the working capital that you have estimated.

Competition

This is a point that is always underestimated because competition is always present. Big mistake! never underestimate your competition, identify it and investigate it. You must have as a permanent objective to find a way to differentiate yourself from it in a positive way and use that difference as a sales strategy. Customers will always thank you for the best service or the best product you can offer them. If you do this well and continuously you will be amazed at how you can achieve customer loyalty using ideas that often do not represent the outlay of large amounts of money.

Look to the future. Make your PBP looking to the future, one, three, and five years and do it with a positive mind, do not be afraid of wealth. If for some reason you are wrong in any estimate you make, don’t worry, analyze it again and move on. So are the plans. You can’t imagine how many times the plans of medium and large companies deviate, and what they do is review the deviations and make new projections. Who said fear?

With these simple steps, you will have your first Business Plan and therefore the first photograph of how you see your business in a given period. It should occupy between 8 to 10 pages, if it is less or more, don’t worry, it will change over time, as your business changes/grows.

Although you intend to have a more complex Business Plan, I advise you to make one yourself that is the same or similar to the one I explained to you because it will serve as the basis for preparing a more complex one and will give you a better vision when preparing and evaluating it.

Sixth Step: What are the tools you must have to start setting up your business on the internet?

This step is where you will realize how little you need to start your business. Suppose your doubt in undertaking on the internet is your investment and implementation cost. In that case, you will see that compared to a traditional business it is much lower, and you will be able to make a greater investment in your business as it becomes more complex, if necessary.

Undoubtedly, your online business, like traditional businesses, has its strengths and weaknesses, but both alternatives are different and therefore deserve to behave differently. Given the impersonal environment you have through the internet (and fortunately we have resources such as audio, videos, and webinars to bring our communication process with our visitors to life!) we must go the extra mile to get our prospects to become customers.

According to the «National Association of Sales Professionals» the vast majority of prospects who visit you have to do it on average between 5 and 12 times before deciding to buy your products and services, in other words, they need to visit you between 5 and 12 times to earn YOUR TRUST. In a traditional business, the prospect is in direct contact with the seller and the product, where the seller has all the resources of his words and body language to achieve the sale in a single attempt.

However, this is not to discourage you, far from it, as I said at the beginning of this work, the advantage of having an internet business, in addition to the low investment, is that when you install it, you almost leave it on autopilot, having more time for yourself. and for your family.

Well, going back to the topic of tools, in general, I can tell you that with a blog, an email, promoting yourself on social networks like Facebook and Twitter, and an intelligent or sequential autoresponder you can start your business on the internet.

However, since it is not only about using them but also about knowing how to use them, I will give you some general comments about them based on my experience.

Basic tools:

Hosting (Web Hosting):

You need the place where all your information will be, that is, where your website will be. For this, I recommend that you do not subscribe to any free service and that you acquire your own  DOMAIN, with which you can position your personal brand or the name of your business and that will allow you in the future have reputation and prestige that no one can take away from you. or question you

Free hosting owns your information and can unsubscribe your page whenever they want and therefore lose your positioning work for all the time you worked, including the “borrowed” domain. Additionally, a domain name of your own gives your prospects and customers a sense of trust and credibility that helps them make the first sale on your site.

Currently, some platforms allow you to have both the benefits of a blog and web pages on your site, where you can create your landing pages to offer your electronic newsletters, and sales letters to promote your products and services, among others.

Today some companies charge you for hosting an average price of no more than 100 dollars a year and if you look deeper you can get better rates, yes, you should look for a reliable supplier, where equipment is always in operation and your page can be available to Internet users 365 days a year.

Concerning your blog and your website, you must be very careful in its design and depending on your business plan, I recommend that you use the services of a professional to do this work for you unless you are an expert in this. In principle, your greatest attention should be on your sales strategies and on constantly training yourself in acquiring and updating knowledge that will help you consolidate these sales. However, what I can recommend at this point is that your pages are simple, and elegant and inspire awareness of what you are promoting, be it a product or a service. Web pages overloaded with images that delay the appearance of your web page may represent an unrealized sale.

Another important point is that your page has, in addition to an email to contact you, a physical address and a telephone number where you can be located, regardless of whether your prospects are from another location, country, continent, etc. This is to achieve the trust they need for you to make the sale. Do not worry that only one or the other will contact you, the mere fact of knowing where to locate yourself personally will give your prospects and clients enough peace of mind to continue communicating only through email.

Smart autoresponders:

This is perhaps one of the essential tools you must have to set up your business. With it, you will be able to keep constant track of your prospects and clients almost automatically.

The autoresponder is a program that works directly with your email in such a way that when you receive a certain email, it automatically responds with another email previously prepared by you to the person who is requesting the information. In other words, whenever any person from anywhere in the world sends you an email to the address you indicated, the response will automatically be the same.

It is a reality both in online business and in traditional business (offline) that follow-up is the key to getting your sale over and over again. You must be mentalized to sell not once but several times to the same person. For this, intelligent autoresponders are your most precious treasure.

Autoresponders give you presents at all times and give you the time you need to do marketing and expand your business because they will be in charge of executing repetitive business tasks such as unsubscribing and registering your prospects in your electronic newsletter. , answer frequently asked questions, send valuable information to your customers, send promotions of your products and/or services, etc. If you also dedicated yourself to this, your work would be endless and you would become a slave to your business and that is not what we want, neither you nor I.

Advantages of using a smart autoresponder

The advantages are many, and if there were any disadvantages, I am sure that they would never make you give up the use of this extremely powerful tool.

Among the advantages that I can mention are:

• With the autoresponder, you will get the attention of your prospects and you will subscribe them to your electronic newsletters. You are sleeping and your autoresponder is working for you
• You will remain present in the minds of your prospects and customers by frequently sending valuable information and offers of your products and services.
• You will carry out an effective follow-up of the people who have already bought and become your clients so that they continue to make purchases consecutively.
• You will achieve a quick and timely response time so that the client can always establish communication with you. The time difference will not be an obstacle to gaining your credibility and making a sale.
• You will free yourself from routine tasks, which are essential in your business but would take away your time to dedicate yourself to expanding your business, training yourself in the knowledge of your product or service, and establishing marketing strategies that allow you to increase your income.

Training

As the last point, and not for that reason it is the least important, we dedicate it to training. It is essential to maintain a continuous learning process around your business so that you are not destroyed by the competition. You must be continually reinventing yourself, carrying out continuous marketing campaigns, developing products, and being attentive to all the new tools that appear on the market and make the Internet a more interactive medium. All this effort you make will be transformed into what you expect to happen, the growth of your business, a business that makes profits and allows you to enjoy what you have wanted.

To give you an example, ten years ago on the internet, audio and video were not tools in your online business. Email newsletters were the workhorses as was your website. If you had started your business back then and had learned everything you needed to promote yourself and follow up with your customers and you had not modernized yourself, now you were out of the market, you would have expired L. Social networks such as Facebook and Twitter did not exist either, to mention the most important and if you do not use them today you would be at a severe disadvantage.

That is why it is important that you continuously train yourself in internet marketing and that you do not settle for the information you get for free.

Although much of this information is valuable, to achieve your goal of successfully positioning your brand or online business, you must invest both in learning from experts in online marketing and buying specialized literature.

By saying this I am not inventing the wheel or the black thread, in most professions continuous training is essential. The evolution of technology and discoveries can make you stop being competitive in a short time.

You can leave a lot to web designers and technicians when it comes to maintaining your site, but writing your own sales letters, getting strategic alliances, devising your advertising campaigns, and writing the emails that will be sent automatically through your auto responders should come from you, at least in the early days of your business. Then time will tell if this can be delegated to someone else, be it an employee or a partner.

I hope that with this appetizer you feel motivated to undertake in cyberspace. Surely there are still many doubts to be clarified but I clarify that if you have doubts you are on the right path, it means that you are profoundly visualizing the business in search of a firm path.

For my part, I am at your service for any point in which you require my advice. I remind you that by receiving this document you have also signed up for my newsletter, where week by week I will give you useful information and keep you updated on what is coming out of online marketing and other related topics.

Note: A cordial greeting and please, do not have the slightest doubt to contact me in case you need any clarification or want to ask me any additional questions. My email is  gasparmoses@yahoo.com