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Start An Online Business On A Shoestring Budget
If you're looking to get your piece of the online profit pie, this is a must read article from an experienced online profiteer. Find out how to get started, and what you need to do.
So you’ve decided that you want to start your own business. You know that you want to do something online to make money, but now you’re stuck. Well fortunately you’ve come across this article, and we’re going to get you on the right track to grabbing some profits from cyberspace. The following passages are some experiences that I’ve had though my online journey. My goal for this article is for you to learn from my successes and failures so that you can streamline your path to making money on the web. I also hope to bring up some points that you may or may not have thought about before you delve into your own business. The first thing that you need to decide is what are you interested in doing. Do you want to publish an online magazine and make money from advertisements? Do you want to sell a tangible product online with a website? Are you looking to make money with online auctions such as Ebay and Yahoo? All of these are valid ways to get started putting profits in your pocket. There are a few questions that you need to sort out the answers to before you can get started. Let’s address each topic one by one.
Online magazines are everywhere and it can be difficult to get traction for a new launch. You need to build up a following, and gain exposure for your publication. This can be tough with all of the competition. You also need to take into account where you’ll gain your content from. Will you use submissions from paid writers? You can write your own content, but it can be difficult to keep adding new content every issue on your own. Will you reprint content from public online databases? What about donated content from amateur posters? It can be hard to get free content if you don’t have any exposure to attract readers and contributors. You can add paid advertisement banners and Adsense content from Google to start making money from your magazine, but again if you don’t have any readers, how will you gain any ad revenue? This is a very tough segment to break into, and it may end up costing you more money in hosting fees, paid advertisements, etc than you’ll actually bring in.
Starting a website can be a great way to make money for yourself online. The beauty of a website is that you can have it completely automated to generate money for you even if you’re asleep or on vacation. That’s the type of website that is the beneficiary of a lot of hard work and marketing to make it a cash cow. In order to get traffic to your website, you need to get high rankings on the major search engines among other things. This can be tough or expensive if you go the paid advertising route.
Then there lies the question of what you’ll sell on your website. There are a lot of “wholesale lists” that you can purchase from various sources such as Ebay. A lot of these lists are old, outdated, or filled with less than reputable sources that will only kill your business. Trust me, I’ve purchased or search through plenty of these lists and found much more coal than diamonds. There is also the problem of logistics. Spending time packaging and shipping products to your customers can be time consuming. It can also become very daunting if your business really takes off. These are just a few things you’ll need to think about before you get started with a web based e-commerce site.
Making money on online auctions can be a good way to get started if you are on an honest to goodness “shoestring budget”. The insertion fees for auction sites such as Ebay can be very minuscule depending on your product listing price, added features such as bold listings and pictures. You can also make some good margins from these sites. The key is finding a product that has a good track record of selling on these sites. You can use a feature on Ebay’s site which shows you the most popular past sales. One caution I will give you is that there are a lot of people that are all selling the same things. You want to make sure that your product stands out. If you’re selling the same thing as everyone else, it’s more luck than good business sense that will probably lead to you selling your product. Another thing to consider is your sales page. I can’t tell you how many listings that I’ve seen on Ebay that are just lines of text. These are boring and usually do not generate much interest for the buyer. If you can find one, use an HTML editor such as Microsoft Frontpage to create some listings that really pop. This is what I use to boost my sales factor.
There are also some similar pitfalls with online web commerce and having a website based business. First, you’ll need to figure out the delivery logistics of your product once it sells on Ebay. Shipping can be a real drag if you’re only doing this business part-time. Second, make sure that wherever you get your product from, they are reputable and offer quality goods. You are only as good as the products you sell. If you sell garbage, you’re reputation will not be very good online.
One product that I’ve found that fits all of the above criteria for an optimum product to sell are e-books. They can be delivered electronically so there are no shipping costs or hassles. You can write your own to have a unique product to sell on the auction sites. They are also very inexpensive to purchase. You can find quality e-books any where from 99 cents and up. A lot of quality e-books can go for around $5.00. If you pick up a few of these, you can re-sell them to recover your initial cost. Another great thing about e-books is that they are renewable. One e-book can be sold over and over to make several times your initial investment back. You can also create a website to sell your wares once you have a nice library of which to sell from. You can use products such as my free e-book on generating targeted traffic to your website to build your inventory and to build up a following for your website. Feel free to download my e-book at http://www.acgrei.com/Free_Traffic/Free_Traffic.zip on how to generate tons of free wbsite traffic to start your e-book collection.
I hope that this article has helped you on your path to online profits. Once you’re armed with the knowledge to succeed, you’re only limited by your own creativity. If you have any questions, or would like to join my mailing list, please send me an email at nkirt@acgrei.com. Thanks for reading, I appreciate your time. Have a profitable day!