How to Start an Internet Business and Work From Home on the Internet

Starting an internet business doesn't have to be complicated, even though it can seem intimidating. The key is to do some research and make a plan. Once you have a plan, all you have to do is follow it. This article will help you to create that plan and will help you start making money online in no time.

Step 1: Choosing an Online Business

Of course, the internet is limitless in it’s money making possibilities, and the different ways people use the internet are expanding every day, but for our purposes, there are basically four ways to make money online, and you can do all of them:

1. Starting from Scratch: Selling your own unique product or service

2. Affiliate Programs: Marketing other people’s products and taking commissions

3.Direct Sales: Directly selling products, ranging from cosmetics to kitchenware, etc…

4.Reselling Wholesale: Reselling other people’s products

Step 2: Financial Aspects of Starting an Online Business – Getting Realistic

While online businesses require much less start up cash than a traditional "brick and mortar" business, one of the most common causes of any business failure is under capitalization, and this applies to the online world as well. But whereas in the brick and mortar world, under capitalization usually causes businesses to fail because rent is so expensive, in the online world, under capitalized business failure usually comes in the form of business owners needing a given income to survive, and relying solely on the internet to produce that income immediately.

While the internet is definitely a viable place to earn a living, those who do make their living on it (including myself,) often take existing work from the physical world online, and also have supplementary incomes to live on while their online businesses grow. While it’s important and necessary to start out with high expectations, most internet businesses take at least a couple years before they can provide what most of us would call a viable income stream.

Step 3: Legal Aspects of Starting an Online Business

Check zoning laws and business requirements for your local area before diving deep into starting an online business. You should also check the US FTC regulations regarding online businesses. It can be possible to get all the information from government websites, but it might be wise to enlist an attorney to ensure you’re on the right side of the law.

Step 4: Establishing Your Own Online Presence

No matter what online business model you decide to tackle, a website will be the center of your online business.

First let’s go over some simple website vocabulary:

Domain – A domain is a web address. It’s what you type to go to a web site, like google.com

URL – This specifies the location of publicly available web sites, like http://www.google.com

Host – A company that stores the files for a web site

Server – The program that provides services and storage to another web site.

While some affiliate programs and direct sales companies provide you with a replicated website, there are ups and downs to these. While these templates are excellent, tested tools, they are usually not customizable, and will not promote what is unique about your services and specialties, and cannot be SEO optimized (more on SEO later).
Choosing a Domain Name

Your domain name should be descriptive of your business and easy for people to remember. Stay away from names that are too clever and use puns or need explanation. You can test your domain name by telling friends the domain name over the phone and having them write it out and spell it back to you. If they can spell it out correctly, you’re on the right track.

While you could use the web address that your Internet Service Provider gives you for free, using your own is crucial, and far more professional. Using a custom web address will give you professional business emails, and will work as an advertisement for your site and help you come up in search engines, which is absolutely necessary.

Search engines look for domain names with key words (among other things) to use in their results, so using popular keywords for their business is wise in choosing a domain name. There are millions of articles and books about search engines and domain names, but those are the basic things you need to know.
Choosing a Web Host

It’s important to choose a reliable web host that allows business sites. This won’t be hard to find, there are hundreds of hosting companies offering similar services. You generally won’t need more than 25 or 50 MB of storage space; in fact most web pages are under 50k in size! Bandwidth is another consideration; bandwidth is the amount of traffic your page can support. It isn’t hard to find unlimited bandwidth, but 2 GB should be plenty. Other things to consider are email accounts; you’ll want at least one, to correspond with customers; customer service, software, back ups, etc., but most reputable web hosting companies will give you more than you need for under $10 a month. There are free hosting services, but I advise against using them, free hosting will put ads on your site that you can’t control, often in the way of annoying pop up ads. More importantly, free hosting sites scream "amateur." Would you want to buy something from a shopkeeper that wasn’t willing to spend ten dollars a month on their own site?

Step 5: Designing Your Website

The design of your site is crucial to your image. It’s the storefront that advertises your services. Whether you design it yourself, purchase or use a template, or hire a pro to build it for you, make sure it’s intuitive to use, looks professional, is quick to load, and has great content. Look at competing sites and compare and contrast. What do you like about what they are doing? What can you do better? The subject of web design could be talked about for years, so I’ll let you do your own research there, if it seems like too much, just hire a pro and get it over with.

Step 6: Promoting Your Website

Once your web site is up, you’ll feel tremendous excitement. It’s not unlike moving into a new house that you’ve always wanted. Your welcome mat is out, and you can’t wait for people to come over and check out your new place. But you have to get them there. This is the business of promotion. You started promoting your website back when you chose your domain name, choosing one that would be attractive to consumers using search engines.

Now you will promote by building on your website. You should research ways of using Search Engine Optimization to build content that will attract visitors and expand your online presence. As time passes and you analyze what your businesses strengths and weaknesses are, you will be able to effectively update and revise your website. Figure out who your customers are, how they found out about you, and what they are looking for.

By exploring your options, keeping your chin up, and not relying on a new web business to provide a wealthy income stream immediately, you’ll be able to build on your strengths and establish yourself and your web business, and both will grow and prosper.

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