Presentation
If at the moment you are reading this work, it may be that you are in search of additional income maintaining your current job, you want your financial freedom and dedicate yourself 100% to an internet venture or perhaps you are looking to change your life project thinking of the internet as a possible option.
Give me the opportunity to help you in 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 on the internet is quick and easy, but if possible if you dedicate time and study. The interesting thing about this business is that 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 “automatic pilot”.
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.
Step One: 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 on the web really a business opportunity? If you answer affirmatively, then the following question fits: Will I have enough tenacity to achieve what I want in this endeavor? If you also answer yes to this, you are already an eligible candidate to pursue 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 of your specialty, have a virtual store of whatever you want, give advice to dog breeders, if you are a lawyer you can give legal advice to distant clients, you can even set up an office of architects and sell designs anywhere of the world, the sky is the limit! However, let's not kid ourselves, 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 a lot of friction with the use of the computer, 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. carried out with the help of third parties. We will delve into this later. My intention is 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 mount.
Second step: Get your passion and / or your knowledge
In the first step, we talked about the fact that before embarking on this on the internet, whether through a blog, website, virtual store or any other existing medium, two questions must be asked. The first is: Do you think you can make a profitable or profitable business through 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 there can be in this business is to say: "I am going to sell product or service" X "because it is very good, I 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 get a market, a captive market where you can start the strategy of your new business. More than 70% of the 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 they waste their time with the information you give them, unfortunately they will not return to your site. Prospects must first believe in you, and you will achieve this with the information you give them. There will come a certain moment where 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 will start generating income for you.There will come a certain moment where 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 will start generating income for you.There will come a certain moment where 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 will start generating income for you.
A technique that can help you in an extraordinary way 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, if not, do it with the things that you have always identified with and think that learning more about them will be easy or it will become a pleasure for you. It may be that during your life you have had a desire to learn something in particular, such as a specific sport, a type of music, sculpture, helping people to get a job, artistic drawing, etc., that is where you could start. list where you list all the things that you have learned to do during your work or professional life and that you consider to be an expert and you can contribute 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 have the ability to learn day by day, but it will take you more time to do so.
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, this may be your answer! 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 find yourself and make YOUR LISTS.
It is not easy to start a successful business, but if you start in a structured way and with the appropriate information, your chances are substantially increased.
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 you like or with which you have experience in order to find that business that you want so much to set up on the internet.
The intention that you have these lists is to be able to dedicate myself to teaching you how to start defining what business you can set up on the web. We are going to find that “niche market” where the demand is not satisfied and is waiting for you. I'm going to start by defining what a niche market is. In a simple way 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 want to train it to participate in competitions. It could also be all those women who are looking for information to make necklaces of "chicken bones" J, even a niche may be more specific, for example,men and women over 50 who want to learn how to make their own blog to write articles and interact with like-minded people but who first need to learn to operate a computer.
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 a waste to send countless additional emails and try to convince all those people who want to get involved in a subject 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 you are going to prepare and use to win over that captive market and be able to analyze the comments you receive from them and determine what it is really 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" in 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 them information of VALUE and for free. Through this strategy we will achieve the loyalty and trust of these Internet users and we will fulfill the first stage, which is to convert them into prospects by including them in our electronic newsletter and by becoming our fans on social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, etc.
Now, the exercise that you will have to do is very simple. First, you are going to determine THE DEMAND of that market niche, that is, 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 and 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 5000, you run the risk that there are not many people 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 for our niche, we have to look at the other side of the coin. This is not enough. We must analyze our competitors, that is, we have to see what the offer is on the web to satisfy this 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 will 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 on this niche, see the sales strategy used by your competitors and find a way to make a difference with respect to them and start to gain ground by bringing in the largest number of prospects and therefore future customers.
As you can see, the work is not complicated, it is just something laborious because you must gather information from both your future clients and competitors and analyze them so that you make a decision and can go to the next step.
As a conclusion we can come to 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.
Step Four: Worry about the customer, not the product or service
After being clear about the market niche 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 discussed above is initially satisfied with information valuable.
Note that at no time am I talking about offering any product or service, just for information, and FREE, with the sole purpose of gaining your 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 clients are always waiting for a 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 the advantages and / or characteristics of the same without considering what They call in the world of online marketing the "WHAT'S HERE FOR ME?". Under this premise, these businesses fail to take off and become a short-lived business. We must create a business that when prospects come to it they feel that they have reached 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 which niche or which group of people who have a common need are the ones that you are going to address, now what you have to do in determining the PURPOSE of your business, towards where you plan to focus it. You must determine what the mission of your business is going to be, where it is important that it be focused towards the client NOT towards you.
In order 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 best effort will be directed to informing the client of the different models and characteristics such as the type of engine, whether it is mountain or touring, material with which they are made, paint, equipment warranty, maintenance, among others.
If you turn to looking for the unmet needs of your prospects and future clients, the focus 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 as a mission to help people to get around in 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,you will have enough arguments to decide that you can sell them.
Step Five: 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 it is basically because they consider it very complex to do it, they simply think that they cannot or do not know how, nor do they seek any advice on the subject. My intention in this fifth step is that you realize that you can do it and that you are convinced that making your business plan is your guaranteed ticket to the achievement of your undertaking, just let me explain how to do it in the best and easiest way.
Why the simplest? Simply because what you need to do is to create a route from the beginning to the peak of your business, in which you are going to put 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 that require a large amount of financial information, advertising, marketing, sales plan, competitiveness, among others, are those that are necessary to obtain financing from banks or find investors to give you the capital you need, basically to form medium and large companies. These business plans are important and necessary, but perhaps for when the company 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 what you need is a Preliminary Business Plan (PNP). A plan that allows you to leave your job, initially partially and then definitely, achieve the much desired financial freedom that you are looking for so much and fulfill the great desire to have your own company or a personal brand that is recognized nationally and / or internationally, that is prestigious and with its own shine.
How to start my plan?
I only ask you to see the steps that I mention below and complete it with your own 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 and update it as many times as necessary. I advise you that every time you change it, you put a revision number on it, for example, Business Plan “XXX” rev.0, if you change it later you call it Business Plan “XXX” Rev. 1 and so on. You are saving them and in the future you can review them and see how your business has progressed, or you can take up 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.
Do not worry if the PNP is not very long, there really are not many sheets that 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 call it Operations Plan.
Marketing plan. It refers to which market niche you are going to sell and how you are going to sell it. Just remember that in online businesses (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, it begins to sell your products and / or services.
The previous points are the ones that will take the longest to write and in principle should not exceed 2 pages each. They are what 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 am telling you here, go ahead! Keep in mind that you are the best connoisseur of the business you are shaping.
Finance
Very important phase in the development of your business. Here you must include two budgets: the expense and the income. In that of 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 every month you make comparisons between what you estimated and what you really spent and see the differences. In 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 time or if you have to wait a little longer. You must keep in mind, especially if your intention is to leave your job, that you must have enough money to support your expenses and those of your family at least for about 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 the competition is always present. Tremendous mistake! never underestimate your competition, identify it and research it. You must have as a permanent objective to find a way to differentiate yourself from her 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 that you can offer. 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 high amounts of money.
Look to the future. Make your PNP looking to the future, one, three and five years and do it with a positive mind, do not be afraid of wealth. If for any reason you make a mistake in an estimate you make, don't worry, analyze it again and move on. So are the plans. You cannot 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 of time. It should occupy between 8 to 10 pages, if it is less or more do not worry, it will change over time, as your business changes / grows.
Although your intention is to have a more complex Business Plan, I advise you to make one the same or similar to the one I explained to you because it will serve as a basis for preparing a more complex one and will give you a better vision when preparing and evaluating it..
Step Six: What are the tools you must have to start setting up your business on the internet?
In this step is where you will realize how little you need to start your business. If your doubt in starting on the internet is your investment and implementation cost, you will see that compared to a traditional business it is much lower, and you will be able to make more investment in your business as it becomes more complex, if necessary.
Undoubtedly, your online business like traditional businesses have their 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 give life to our communication process with those who visit us!) We must make an additional effort to ensure that our prospects pass to clients.
According to the "National Sales Executive Association" the vast majority of prospects who visit you have to do so 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 recourse of his egalitarianism and his body language to achieve the sale in a single attempt.
However, this is not to discourage you, much less, as I said at the beginning of this work, the advantage of having an internet business, in addition to the little investment, is that by installing it you almost leave it on automatic pilot having more time for yourself. and for your family.
Well, returning 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 auto-responder you can start your business on the internet.
However, since it is not only using them but also knowing how to use them, I will give you some general comments about it 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 an OWN DOMAIN, with which you position your personal brand or the name of your business and that allows you in the future to have a reputation and a prestige that no one can take away from you. or question you.
Free hosting is the owner of your information and can remove your page whenever they want and therefore lose your job positioning for all the time you worked, including the domain "borrowed". Additionally, a proprietary domain gives your prospects and customers a sense of trust and credibility that helps them make the first sale on your site.
Currently there are platforms that 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, sales letters to promote your products and services, among others.
Today there are companies that charge you for accommodation an average price of no more than 100 dollars a year and if you look further you can get better rates, yes, you should look for a reliable supplier, where their equipment is always in operation and your page may be available to Internet users 365 days a year.
Regarding 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 the acquisition and updating of knowledge that will help you consolidate these sales. However, what I can recommend at this point is that your pages be simple, elegant and inspire a knowledge of what you are promoting, be it a product or a service. Web pages heavily loaded with images that delay the appearance of your web page, may represent an unsuccessful sale.You must think that not all prospects or your clients have state-of-the-art computers and the access speed may be lower than yours, and only in a matter of seconds a person can decide not to wait for your page to load and look for a second option (without even having seen what you offer! L).
Another important point is that your page has, in addition to an email where to contact you, a physical address and a telephone where to locate you, regardless of whether your prospects are from another location, country, continent, etc. This in order to achieve the confidence they need for you to achieve the sale. Do not worry that only one or the other will contact you, just 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 that you must have to set up your business. With it, you will be able to constantly monitor your prospects and clients almost automatically.
Autoresponders is a program that works directly with your email in such a way that when it receives a certain email it automatically responds with another email previously prepared by you to the person who is requesting the information. In other words, every time that any person from anywhere in the world and at any time sends you an email to the address that you indicated, automatically the answer will be the same.
It is a reality both in the online business and in the traditional business (offline) that follow-up is the key to getting your sale over and over again. You must be mentalized in managing to sell not once but several times to the same person. For this, intelligent autoresponders are your most precious treasure.
Autoresponders give you presence at all times and give you the time you really need to do marketing and expand your business because they will take care 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 dedicate yourself to this, your work would be endless and you would become a slave to your business and that is not what you or I want.
Advantages of using a smart autoresponder
The advantages are many, that in case there were any disadvantages I am sure that they would never make you give up the use of this 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 auto responder is working for you You will stay present in the minds of your prospects and customers by frequently sending valuable information and offer of your products and services You will carry out an effective follow-up to the people who have already bought and transformed into your customers, so that they continue to make purchases consecutively.You will achieve a quick and timely response time so that the customer can always establish communication with you. The time difference will not be an obstacle in obtaining your credibility and making a sale. You will free yourself from routine tasks, which are important in your business but would take away time to dedicate to expanding your business,train you in knowledge of your product or service and establish marketing strategies that allow you to increase your income.
Training
As a last point, and not for that 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 that you make will be transformed into what you hope will 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. E-newsletters were the workhorses just like your website. If you had started your business back then and you had learned everything you needed to promote yourself and follow up with your customers and you had not modernized, 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 ones and if you don't use it today you would be at a severe disadvantage.
That is why it is important that you continuously train in internet marketing and that you do not settle for the information that you get for free.
Although much of this information is valuable, to achieve your goal of successfully positioning your personal brand or online business you must invest both in learning with 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 indispensable. The evolution of technology and new discoveries can make you stop being competitive in a short time.
You can leave many things in the hands of web designers and technicians when it comes to maintaining your site, but write your own sales letters, get strategic alliances, devise your advertising campaigns, write the emails that will be sent automatically through your cars. Responders should come out of you, at least in the early days of your business. Later, time will tell if this can be delegated to someone else, be it an employee or a partner.
I hope that with this snack you already feel motivated to undertake in cyberspace. Sure 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 visualizing the business in a deep way 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 upon receiving this document you have also signed up for my total investment newsletter, where week by week I will give you useful information and I will keep you updated on what is coming out of online marketing and other related topics.
Note: Kind regards 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 personal email is [email protected]. copyright 2011 © inversiontotal.com
