10 Golden Steps to Starting Your Own Business

All of us at some point or the other would have had to pass through the crossroads where we were very confused about which path to take after university. I was there, two years ago. I graduated with a Bachelor's of Engineering after 5 long years of assignments and exams. I was waiting for the day when I would be finished with my course, but when the time did arrive - I was filled with uncertainty and did not know what I wanted to do with my life. All my mates from University were frantically applying for every job with the word graduate and engineer in the job ads online. I had been reading about the online media and been fascinated with online marketing, social media and everything to do with world wide web. There was a position advertised for a 12 month internship role in a company that was trading online. Wanting to find out what the fuss was all about with the online space, I applied for the position and was called for an interview the next week. It was a small company with one retail outlet looking to branch out and open and online store. My involvement was to use my IT skills in the project of setting up this new channel for the business. The 12 months in that firm gave me some absolutely invaluable skills and knowledge into setting up and managing a company's online space. You could say I was lucky to be at the right place at the right time. As not everyone would have similar opportunities, you can gain these skills by playing around and researching online and I can provide the starting point for that. I see a lot of people so unhappy in their jobs and wishing for a change but find that it is too big a risk to take and end up doing nothing about it. If you are serious about a change, can can easily achieve this by allocating a couple of hours a day to learn about the online media and how it can help you reach your goals. For all the graduates who are really confused and the people who are unhappy with their jobs, here are a few tips which you can work on to broaden your scope career wise and setting up your very own online business with little capital. All the basics I learn in 12 months will be summarised in this article and you can use this powerful tool to start something new or turn your passion into a secondary income. Step 1: Brainstorming - Picking a product or service Think of a niche in the market which you can fulfil or a product / service that has high demands without too many players. For example, you are very good at fixing computers and want to start an online computer fixing shop or you are really good at painting and want to start selling your work online or you want to sell bath toys online or sell cakes online or anything you think would work. Step 2: Finding out what the demand is for the product / service With respect to the online space there is one giant which dominates all the search traffic in the world. As you guessed it is Google - there are other players like bing and yahoo, but they have negligible market share compared to the Giant (for now. It may change in the future!) So all the tools you will be using for your business with be Google's. Google Traffic Estimator is a great tool which estimates the searches in google for the keyword you want to analyse. Example: Cakes New York; Bath toys; Computer repairs Sydney etc. You can see how I geo targeted some worlds and not the others. You need to find out if you are going to service the whole country, the whole world, your state or even down to your suburb or city. For products that you can deliver country wide, you choose non geo targeted keywords, for services such as laptop repairs, you will want to estimate traffic only to your particular city or state. Once you have estimated the traffic for all the possible keywords you can think of, you can now move to the next step. Step 3: Sourcing the product If you are looking to sell a product, then a good start would be to research and find out who distributes that product in your state. If you want to introduce a new product into the market and you need to import it, alibaba.com has some great resources on manufacturers all over the world. In the end of step 3 you would have found out how much it costs for your to land a product in your warehouse, how much it would cost if you drop ship directly to your customer, or how much you would charge for the time and effort you will need to put in for a service related work to make it worth your while. If you are low on capital, it is better for you to negotiate drop shipping with the supper at a higher cost price or buy only the minimum order requirement stock to start with. Once the business picks up, you can always try to get larger volumes of stock for better cost price and higher margins. Step 4: The Math In this step you want to determine if the business is going to be viable. A safe start would be to assume that 2% of the search traffic for the keyword would end you buying from your site. So lets say, there are 2000 searches per month for the term "Laptop repairs Sydney" and 2% of them use your service. So that is 40 jobs per month at $50 per job (assume), which is $2000. You need to decide if the time and energy you are about to spend is worthy the money you expect to make the end of the month. If you find that the demand for the service/ product online is not as you expected, don't waste any more time and move on to thinking about a new idea. Step 5: Building the online shop (Website) The first step to setting up your website is to choose a domain name for the site eg: www.sitename.com, check availability and buy it. Choose a name that is related to your site, example - a plumber in sydney would choose www.bestplumbingsydney.com.au as it will be better in the point of optimising your site. A domain name should cost around $12 a year, if you go to an IT company to buy it they would obviously charge you more than double of that. Next find a hosting plan for your site, this is like buying a space in the world wide web where you site will sit at. This would be an monthly ongoing payment and you can get packages as cheap as $5 per month. For Domain names I use Godaddy.com and for hosting I use OsmosisDigital - I find they are reliable and competitively priced. Now not everyone is IT savvy and you always tend to think, "I can't build a website without IT skills". This is not true at all, there are a lot of website building software out there which are as easy as writing some content and pasting images as on Microsoft Word. If you are looking to sell products online, I would recommend that you use the Magento Platform. It is very user friendly and if you get stuck with anything, all you need to do if google your problem and you will immediately find a solution. A lot of amateur programmers and people like you use magento and experience similar problems and look for solutions online. So you will find that there will be an answer on some forum or the other, and incase you don't find one, you can post your question on the magento form too. If you are not going to be selling any products online and simply offering a service, which requires the customers to give you a call, I would recommend that you use this software called WordPress. Both Magento and WordPress are Search Engine friendly, so a brand new website built with either of these have better chances of being found online as opposed to others. rnOnce you have decided the platform, there are a lot of free and paid templates available online for both Magento and Wordpress. Browse through the ones you find suitable for your business and it is as simple as downloading the template and installing it on your website. The template should come with instructions to do so or you will be able to find that online too. You will find excellent Magento and Wordpress templates at templatemonster.com, they constantly keep adding new and high quality easy to use templates. Install the template, add your details, add a lot of content (don't copy from other sites, Google does not like that) and upload your products. For payments, Paypal is the easiest and simple way to go. With Magento, it is as simple as adding your payola email address in the configuration settings, and off you go! ready to receive payments. Step 6: Advertising The best way to bring traffic to your site would be by optimising your site for the Search Engines so that you site comes up while searching for the related keyword. You can do this by making your website error free and following some guidelines to ensure that are visible on the search engines. Search engines are merely programs and have their limitations, so while designing you site, you need to be keep them in your mind. Research about Search Engine Optimisation online to find out the steps you need to do. There are also high quality SE0 packages available which guide you step by step as to what needs to be done and how you can do it. An example of this would be Click Factory in a box which costs about $49.99 a month. This also provides you with a reporting software which tells you exactly where you rank for each keyword on google. When you are doing the hard work of optimising you site, the reporting software would constantly keep updating to show you if your rankings are increasing. So you see the results as you put in the work. If you are happy to pay for advertising, Google Adwords is a great way to bring relevant traffic to your site. This is called pay per click advertising. So you would essential pay on when someone clicks on your ad and ends up in your site, and ad would come up only when relevant keywords are typed in. For example, I am a plumber in Sydney and I am running google adwords. I would set it up so that if anyone searches for Plumber, Plumber Sydney, Cheap Plumber, Cheap plumbing, etc my ad would appear on Google. I can set up my daily budget and the maximum cost you are willing to pay per click for the online advertising. I can also specify that the ad show be visible only for people who conduct the google search from Sydney, so that I am not wasting money when a person in Melbourne is searching for "Cheap Plumber". This is called Geo- targeted searching based on your location which is determined by the IP address of the computer they use to access the internet. I told you, the internet is amazing! Step 7: Analysing The next important step is to analyse the traffic coming to you site. With Google Analytics, you can track how many visitors are coming to you site everyday, which city they are from, what operating system they use, what internet speeds they are using, what keyword they searched for on google which brought them to your site, which pages they visited on your site, who long they spent on each page and much more. This is a great tool to better the flow of your site in order to convert more visitors, which can either result in a sale or a call asking for your service. If you do these basic steps you come a long way to creating a new passion and sharpen your entrepreneurial skills. After my 12 months internship I was pumped and rearing to go! I started my very own online toys shop - Tinytoys.com.au by the age of 24 and within 2 months I made my first sale! Then it was a matter of adding more product and the sales still keep growing till date. Good luck to all of you and feel free to post a reply if you have any questions!