Planning on starting your own online business? Good for you! It’s tempting to just get going, put up your site, and start trying to make money. But be warned: it’s easier to start an online business than a traditional business, but it’s harder to become profitable because of the low barrier to enter the market.
We highly recommend writing a business plan before you get started. It’ll save you so much time and energy down the road if you do this right away. It’ll also help you make smarter business decisions and ensure you’re spending your time wisely.
Address these elements in your business plan through simple market research and you should have much stronger ground on which to succeed.
1. Understand your value offering
Figure out how much you should charge for your product or service. See how similar products or services are currently priced. Also, understand why there is a demand for your business: answer this question well in the beginning and you’ll be much more likely to succeed.
2. Identify the market
Who will you be selling your offerings to? How many people are approximately in this market?
3. Analyze your business’s needs
First, how much money will it take? How many years do you expect it will take before your business to become profitable? Having a loose sense of your business’s trajectory for growth will be crucial.
4. Choose your web platform
If you want to have a content site beyond Fiverr®, there are many free web platforms, such as WordPress. But you may want to pay for other, more well designed platforms like Wix.
5. Develop a marketing plan
It is essential to have a clear marketing strategy, especially for an online business. Here are a few steps to keep in mind:
- Brand your business
- Generate content. This will be crucial for SEO and generating traffic to your site. Think about ways to create consistent social media, blog, and other forms of content. Also think about ways to generate video content, which keeps viewers on your site much longer than text.
- Deliver content and drive traffic. Once you’ve created content, the next equally crucial step is figuring out where you will distribute that content. Which social media channels will you use? Which bloggers and brands could you create relationships with and “swap” content, promoting each others’ content? Which media outlets could be useful to pitch pieces to when you have substantial news?
- Convert traffic. This piece from Quick Sprout has great tips on how to convert traffic, or in other words, convert your site visitors into customers.
- Analyze traffic and refine accordingly. Identify which tools will help you analyze your traffic so you can evaluate your efforts and adjust as you go along.
Design and develop your web presence to set the atmosphere and tone of your brand with potential customers.
Those are the basics! As is always the case, planning can help but won’t get you the whole way. You’ll need to pivot and change course as needed. But with good planning, you’ll have a better idea of where you’re headed, which is essential in the beginning.
Best of luck!
What do you think every new entrepreneur should do before starting a business?
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