Showing posts with label Have You Thought of Starting Your Own Online Business?. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Have You Thought of Starting Your Own Online Business?. Show all posts

Wednesday, July 20, 2011

Have You Thought of Starting Your Own Online Business?

By Roy Booth


Have you ever thought of starting your own on line business. As you lie back in your easy chair relaxing, letting your mind wander, you can create a website, pick your products, advertise them and then sit back and watch the money roll in.

If only it was so easy. The truth is, if you want to create a successful on line business it takes a lot of time and effort, especially if you are doing the work yourself to cut out some of the initial start up costs. Even doing it yourself be prepared for investment expenditure of around £20.000 equivalent to approximately $30.000. What you may ask do the start up costs cover, well if you are new to the on line business and web site creation, optimisation etc. you will need some assistance. Better to seek and pay for professional advice and get things right than to muddle along trying to figure it all out yourself. The professional advice does not come cheap. Then of course there is Bookkeeping and Tax Returns, it may seem expensive at first but compared to the initial expenditure it can save a lot of money over the long term. Also there is Web Hosting to be paid for, no good having a site if it cannot be published on the web. Web hosting is not particularly expensive by comparison often a reasonably priced re occurring monthly fee. Those are roughly the basic requirements for getting up and running, there will of course be other things but some will be specific to your particular venture.

Having reached the stage where you have a site designed and ready to go, you have selected a domain name that reflects what you are all about and you have decided what you are going to sell. When deciding what to sell remember that although the internet is a vast market place it is also a very competitive market place. If you have a unique product then you could well be a Big Fish in a small pond rather than a Small Fish in a Huge Pond. It is perhaps better to have a large share of a small part of the market than a very small share of a larger market. Do your research before opting for your particular choice of goods. You have at this time as many market advisers would say selected your Niche.

Now you have to decide how to source your goods. How do you source them. If it is something you are making yourself you have no problem, or If you have plenty of money you may decide to buy wholesale and then market the items you have purchased on your site, however, if like many of us that kind of capital is not readily available then perhaps Drop Ship selling is a better option.

Drop Ship selling is where you advertise goods for sale on your site, when you receive an order you pay the supplier who then ships the goods to the customer as though they came from you directly. A good method especially if you do not have the capacity to hold stock yourself. Most Drop Shippers require payment before the goods are shipped and you therefore need to have sufficient funds or business credit available to pay for them whilst waiting for your customers payment to clear into your account.

Remember most people who shop on line pay by credit card. You will have to make arrangements with a merchant bank or similar for this facility to be made available for you. Another part of the start up expenditure.

Once all the basics are in place it is a case of search engine optimisation (SEO) so that customers looking to purchase products you have for sale end up at your site not someone else's. This is an on going process as market trends are constantly changing and the way the search engines calculate your sites importance for its listing place also continues to change.

Having said all that, if you persist and get it right you should manage to recoup your initial outlay and make a reasonable living eventually. Do not expect immediate success it may take 12 months or more before you start to see the kind of traffic to your site you would like to see. How do I know this. I am going through this process at this time.

I have a site up and running with goods advertised for sale, all I believe at competitive prices, the cash flow is, however, still in one direction, outwards. If you would like to check the site out it is http://bestmobileentertainment.com Please pay us a visit and if you like what you see Like us on Facebook, recommend us to your friends so that they can like us on Facebook too or better still become a customer.Thank you for taking the time to read this article. I hope you found it to be of some interest to you.

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