Are you thinking of starting an online business? It’s a good idea on your part, as there are more good reasons to start an online business than there are reasons not to. The only obstacle that stops most entrepreneurs is understanding how to start an online business.
The first thing on your list is that you must select a niche to build your business. You may already have an idea about the niche you plan to work in, or have no idea where to start. Understanding what a niche is would be a good place to start. A niche is a defined market or a subsector of a market that can be targeted. For example, the dog market isn’t really niche, it’s too broad and difficult to tackle. But the dog training market would be niche as it is specific enough that it can be targeted.
Some things to consider when searching for a niche are…
Is the niche spending money?
You can determine if you are making money by doing some research in your niche. If there are sponsored ads on the search results pages, it’s a good sign that money is being made in that niche.
Are there sub-niches that would be easy to target?
Using the dog training example again, we can do some searching and see that training a dog not to bark is a sub-niche that we could target and probably get our web page or articles on the first page of search engines. The more sub-niches like this a niche has, the better chance you have of making faster profits.
What is a common problem for that niche?
Again, if we look at how to train a dog not to bark, we can see that if we have a product that can help you teach your dog not to bark in 7 days, you will have a very good chance of making sales. In other words, we need to determine what problem people in our niche have and give them the answer.
Now that we have our niche and we know what we are going to sell, we have to decide how we are going to build it. Many new marketers obsess over building fancy websites or blogs. These are fine, but you have to remember that in order for you to make money, someone has to buy something. It’s very easy to get sidetracked and lose track of why we’re building a business to begin with.
We are building our business to make a profit. To make a profit we need to sell something. Whether we create a product and sell it or sell someone else’s product as an affiliate, the only way to make money is by selling something. So instead of spending all your time building fancy websites, how about we create a sales page and focus all our energy on driving targeted traffic to that page?
I would recommend starting with a simple page that focuses on building a subscriber list in your niche. Send all of your traffic to that page so that if they do join your list, you have a chance to build a relationship with your subscribers. You can then send them to your sales page. The concept here is that odds are they won’t buy the first time they see the sales page. However, if they are on your list, you have an opportunity to continue to provide value and eventually your subscribers will convert to customers.