How to: Online Business

Do you dream of making money while you sleep? I know I do.  An online business can help you accomplish this!  In this post I will guide you through the basics of building an online business.  In future posts I will be posting a more detailed outline for a fictional business’.

Here we go.

1. Decide what your niche is going to be.  This seems like a hard thing to do … it can be. Too many people try to do too many things.  Don’t make an electronics store.  Make a high end digital camera store. The more specific the better.  Or you can go after a specific demographic. Let’s assume you want to start an electronics store for college students.  That narrows down your market more and helps define a very good niche. Don’t pick a niche which you care nothing about.  It will be about 1,000 times harder for you to focus on something that you don’t care about or have no connection to.  If you have a connection and care about the niche you will more likely to succeed!
2. Ok now on to the very practical! Our niche is going to be an electronics store for college students.  We need to find a supplier for the electronics.  Preferably a supplier that will drop ship the products for us so we don’t have to hold the inventory ourselves.  If you are looking for electronics for example simply type in to google your favorite wireless router brand for example D-Link.  Go to D-Link’s page and normally there is a ‘Where to buy‘ section.  On D-Link’s site they have a quality list of Distributors which work with D-Link.  That’s gold.  If we go to Linksys’s website as well we find they have a list like this as well.  It was a little harder to find but I found it here. It just takes a little digging! The search feature on most sites is also very helpful! Now compare the two lists.  Everyone on Linksys’s list is also on D-Link’s list.  You just found a list of 4 suppliers for your products.
3. Fill out the applications for each of these suppliers.  Most of them require a application fee but once you start selling products you can recoup that fee from them.  Some of the application require references from other business’ that you have done business with … now that can be a problem if you are just starting out.  From the searching that I have found I couldn’t find anyone saying they couldn’t get an account with these guys if they didn’t have any references.  When you are asking for ‘terms’ you MUST have references including bank references!  They aren’t just going to give you stuff on goodwill and hope you pay them back. Yeah right!
4. The next step is setting up some sort of online store front. This is where you are going to have to do some research.  There are just too many options to say which one will work best for you.  Here’s a couple to get you started. Resource 1, resource 2 and resource 3.
5. On to the marketing. Now that you have your site and your products set up! Its time to get your name out there and tell people about your site.  I would suggest a couple of ways of doing this.  Forums, twitter, facebook, and other social highways.  They can provide some amazing traffic! Funny enough … the SBA has some great ideas as well.  Check them out here.

That’s the very basics of starting an online business.  I hope this has been at least somewhat helpful for someone.  What do you think? Is there any other good resources you know of?