How To Start An Online Business 11 Steps With Pictures

Let’s say you make jewellery—but so do a few million other people. What makes yours different? If one-of-a-kind jewellery (or another product) is your gig, make sure it’s truly original. Offer expertise in an area. Even if the product itself isn’t very unique, your expertise might be a strong selling point. If you’re selling a line of skincare products, for example, it helps if you have a degree in a field related to skin health. Check into the competition. Figure out what isn’t already being offered, and find a way to fill the hole with your product.

Before you register your business, it can help to have a business plan laid out. Consider your production costs, shipping costs, taxes, and web hosting fees. Know the business regulations in your state, and be sure to comply when you get things up and running.

Some hosting services are highly structured, allowing you to choose from among different templates to create a website quite easily. Others allow you to do your own programming, giving you greater flexibility.

Make sure your site design matches your product. For example, if you make traditionally styled diamond jewelry, having a website that looks like shredded cardboard with edgy fonts and images taped to the cardboard would tend to drive away your potential customers. Consider setting up an online portfolio. Whether you are a programmer who specializes in Javascript, a graphic designer who works on commissions, a plumber who is on call 24/7, or a copywriter who will write about anything at all, having an exemplary website where potential clients can evaluate your work is crucial to your online business success. You don’t have to design the website yourself—there are professional designers who are more than up to the task, plus ecommerce websites will offer dozens of appropriate templates for you. If you know in advance what you want, you’ll make selecting a designer or a template that much easier. When designing your site you need to remember to focus on what is important. Your ultimate goal is to make your site simple and easy to use. Your customers should have to make no more than 2 clicks in order to land on the page where they can make a purchase. The top of every page should have a link to your shopping cart if its an ecommerce store Buttons should be large and clear to read and input boxes should be large and easy to enter your information Less is more. Don’t be wordy when you don’t need to on payment pages Make sure your logo at the top of the page always links to the homepage If you have dark backgrounds use light text and vice versa.

You can also use an all-inclusive ecommerce web service. Sites such as Shopify and Volusion offer competitive packages, with free templates, custom packages, credit card processing, and more. Ecommerce web services makes it easy to sell your products on the web, without a lot of overhead. There are no custom interfaces or templates to work with; you simply create an online store within the framework of the service.

Don’t use jargon. If you are offering technical expertise, include descriptions that appeal to your client base, not your peers. For example, if you are showing that you can code with PHP and AJAX, don’t say “in this case, if the input field is empty (str. length==0), the function clears the content of the txtHint placeholder and exits the function. " The person who needs you to work on their site will just scratch their head and say “huh?” Say, instead, “Start entering text into this field, and it will auto-complete. "

For example, if you are an affiliate marketer for Musician’s Friend, an online musical instrument retailer, you can advertise their products on your site. If a person visits your site, and clicks on the link that takes them to the Musician’s Friend website, and they purchase an instrument within a certain amount of time (24 hours or more, typically), you get a commission on the sale.