Sawaram Suthar / 16 Mins Read
Updated: March 28, 2024
There are plenty of ways to start an online business. Take advantage of many free advice, resources and tools to help you start and manage your online marketing strategies. Know here
The Internet is not only a huge reservoir of information accessible from a smartphone but also a huge marketplace. The global marketplace has been so easily accessible to individuals and businesses worldwide via websites and social media platforms. The Internet has forever changed the way we do business. And it has changed how a traditional internet marketer responds to the everchanging online demands.
These days, eCommerce has become as commonplace as watching TV. It's something that many people do every single day. Many have launched small local businesses and used eCommerce to increase sales and generate a significant portion of their income.
Owning and operating an online business allows entrepreneurs to make money from anywhere in the world. The idea is enticing and more possible than ever.
It used to be that only a select few could start a business. Of course, that has changed in 2021
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Today, anyone, regardless of their professional background or past entrepreneurial experience, can start and scale an online business. However, many entrepreneurs simply don't know where to start.
You still need a viable product idea, determine your sourcing or manufacturing strategy and your sales model. But all of that shouldn't discourage you from starting an online business!
Whether looking to become a full-time entrepreneur or just start a part-time business for passive income, your product or service must meet specific consumer needs. This is where digital marketing service comes into the picture.
Let's see how you can start your online marketing business in 2024 with that out of the way.
A business niche means your "focus area," i.e. the market segment and target audience (TA) you primarily appeal to. This can be anyone from sports enthusiasts to stamp collectors or software developers.
Avoid niches that don't need your products, can't afford them, or aren't interested - otherwise, you'll make your life harder.
You can sell three basic types of eCommerce products online. Each has its pros and cons.
Physical products:
As the name implies, these are tangible items that must be manufactured, stocked, and shipped to customers. Selling physical goods can be profitable, but profitability can be low if you don't manage your operating costs well. Plus, you will need to rent a warehouse and find a reliable delivery service.
Digital downloads:
You can also sell digital products- anything a customer can download to their devices, e.g., online courses, ebooks, podcasts, webinars, etc. As compared to physical products, digital products have higher profit margins.
However, price setting can be tricky because such products are often seen as lower in value than physical products.
Almost any service available remotely can be sold online. Selling services is the fastest way to start an online business and make a profit. This is a business model in which you sell your time. This means that your earning potential is limited because you have a certain number of hours per day. That's if you don't scale your agency. That's if you don't scale your online advertising agency.
Since they run an online business, small business owners often assume that traditional business laws don't apply to them. That's not true. Although an online business requires fewer licenses and permits than a regular business, you still need to understand a few important legal details. Namely:
Find out what your TA needs, what they are interested in, and what they really want.
Market research is an important step on the road to starting your own online business. It helps you determine your chosen business vertical's depth, competitiveness, and profitability. Because the last thing you want to come up with is an offer that no one really cares about. The market research also helps confirm your product idea, pricing, and demand.
Here's how you can start your market research:
Check your search engine results. Find your product/service keyword variants and analyze their search engine results pages (SERPs).
The answers will help you assess your competitors in advance. Also, get information for a preliminary SEO and digital marketing strategy based on content that your TA prefers.
Research your competitors. You can use various digital marketing tools to closely examine your major competitors (beyond search engine rankings). What are the biggest businesses in your niche? How much money do they make? What are their strengths and weaknesses? How do they attract their TAs? You'll be able to gather information from your competitors on how to retain, expand, and make your TA happier.
By putting the other players "under the microscope," you will understand what might give you a competitive advantage over them.
Don't get it wrong; you shouldn't steal from your competitors. On the contrary, you should occasionally compete with them and analyze their customer acquisition strategies to tweak them to fit your business.
Track high-impact keywords. Analyze how demand changes for different products in your niche. Find out which content ranks best by tracking keywords relevant to your niche.
Here are a few good software tools to help you do that:
To make sales and then scale your business, you need to understand who your target audience is clear. You should research demographics and psychographics to learn about their needs and preferences.
These insights help you understand your customers' "perfect" needs, preferences, and factors that influence their purchases.
You want to comprehensively assess the viability of your product before you buy or make a large order. To do this, ask the following questions:
Remember, it doesn't matter how cool the product seems - what matters is that it's viable from a business standpoint.
The brand is the overall "feel" of your business. You want everything from your company name to your web design and text to convey a consistent visual image and ideas. The same goes for your external presence - on social media, email newsletters, and packaging.
As you work on your brand identity, pay attention to the following:
Your brand image should be the result of all these elements working together.
The website should serve as an information portal for your TA. When visiting your online resource, it should be easy for a person to find the information they need.
For that, your website should be convenient and easy to use, and, most importantly, it should contain useful and attractive content.
The Internet has several convenient website builders, helping to keep visitors on the site.
One of them is the world-famous Wix. Shopify is another great example. This is where you can find many pre-made website templates and modify them as you want so that the site corresponds to your brand's image.
Both platforms are solid options, but an essential difference between Wix vs Shopify is that the latter offers more payment gateways, applications, and themes. For those considering an eCommerce platform, comparing WooCommerce vs Shopify can provide insights into which is better suited to meet your specific business needs.
Do not forget that it's crucial to constantly increase the loyalty of your potential and existing customers while staying in touch (i.e. providing recommendations by phone, email, chat, etc.).
In fact, when it comes to a company website, digging just a little bit deeper will require following each of these next steps:
Of course, simply having a website is not enough - you need to work hard to make people aware of your existence. This is where website marketing comes into the picture.
Promote your site in search engines. Provide a title, description, and keywords, set your 404 pages, create a sitemap, add a custom search (if the number of pages exceeds 1,000), etc.
Use social media. Create an account/community on social networks e.g. Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Linkedin, etc. This will make communicating with your existing customers easier. Monitor your posts; post only what will interest your TA to convert your regular followers into customers.
Ensure your website name is posted on all sorts of company promotional materials: business cards, flyers, brochures, etc.
Keep an eye on what people say about you online.
A huge number of customers trust the information they find on the Internet. When it comes to choosing a product/service, customer feedback plays a huge role. After all, people always want to get advice and learn the truth about this product/service, company/person.
However, there's no guarantee that they will write only the truth about you; there can always be an unsatisfied competitor who will try to damage your reputation via a negative review. Don't leave them unanswered! Respond to negativity. Monitor and manage your reputation. This is the best way to do marketing on the web.
Once everything is set up, it's time to start attracting traffic to your online business. Make the following channels a priority:
The key to inbound marketing is powerful SEO campaigns allowing customers to find you before competitors. First and foremost, this requires quality, original, human-friendly content optimized for search engines. It should be noted that with all the value of SEO promotion, the work results appear only after a few weeks.
There are five of the most common types of businesses you can start with almost no money in your pocket:
This business approach is based on the idea that you, as a business owner, don't need to invest money and maintain a large inventory of goods (or you can work without inventory at all), as well as deal with the delivery of goods to customers. This immediately eliminates significant financial losses and risks of having goods you may not sell. After all, you sell goods from someone else's warehouse in dropshipping. On commission.
You focus your efforts only on marketing and advertising. Your only goal is to find a customer and make him/her buy. Everything that happens next is the concern of other people. You only bear the cost of attracting a customer.
Here's what the basic scheme of dropshipping looks like:
Looks simple, doesn't it? The dropshipping scheme allows you to offer potential buyers a wide range of products with minimal costs for purchasing and logistics. In fact, thousands of companies are ready to offer you hundreds of thousands of goods from dozens of categories:
Alas, dropshipping implies a few challenges. Thus, you need to find a reliable partner, a drop-shipper, who will not let you down to ensure the declared quality of goods and delivery time. Otherwise, you're the blame if the quality is not as advertised or delivery terms are not met.
Also, because this market is very competitive, your margins (the difference between your wholesale and retail prices) may not be high enough. Therefore, you need to generate significant sales volume to make good profits.
However, even considering these challenges, this type of business is available to everyone because of the lack or minimal need for start-up capital.
You can also use dropshipping if you already have a business and want to expand the range or test new products or niches. All you have to do is negotiate with a partner and put his product on the site, then see if there is demand.
To briefly summarize, the dropshipping business has the following pros and cons.
Pros:
Cons:
This approach to business is similar to the previous one. However, there are a few key differences.
Affiliate marketing means choosing a potentially attractive niche to do business in and finding an affiliate selling products/services in demand.
Next, you write unique selling articles for your site or blog and place links to products and services from affiliate sites. If visitors of your resource click on such a link and make a purchase, you will get a commission (the range is usually from 5 to 25%, and if we are talking about affiliate programs for info products, the commission can go up to 50%).
The most famous site offering affiliate program trading is AliExpress. However, the options for earning on affiliate programs exist in many industries. For example, in banking services, you can sell insurance products.
The difference from dropshipping is that you take on even less responsibility in this model. You only need to ensure that your site visitors click on affiliate links. The more clicks, the better.
To succeed in affiliate marketing, you can promote your site in search engines, set up contextual advertising, use social networks or email marketing campaigns, and so on. The goal is to make customers click on that link. After that, your job is done.
Pros:
Cons:
If you have the knowledge and passion for a certain topic, you can start making money through blogging.
The most important thing here is regularly publishing unique and useful content to a specific target audience. Your content has to be well-indexed in search engines and call your readers to action.
You might think that blogging is about writing articles. And yes, you can write articles if you enjoy it. However, it's not just that. After all, there are photo blogs and video blogs, as well.
So how can you make money on a blog?
What does it take to create a successful blog?
First of all, you need to create attractive content. No one will read if you publish boring information on your blog, similar to what they publish on other sources. Don't be afraid to showcase your unique personality traits on your blog and be unique.
Second, you need to publish your high-quality content regularly. People want something new all the time. This can be articles, videos, infographics - anything, as long as your readers will receive new materials regularly.
Moreover, it's desirable that your blog's information is updated less than once a week. Otherwise, your readers will have time to forget you.
And finally, be sincere. Yes, you want to make money from your blog, but that doesn't mean you have to sell all the time. By sharing useful content with your readers, you make sure more people learn about you and start to like you. People are used to trusting people they like. People are so short of genuine feelings and original opinions in the digital age.
You can create a blog in as little as an hour. However, it can take quite a long time before it will pay off. You need to build credibility and a loyal community. Even after that, not all your subscribers will buy something from you.
Your potential earnings should outweigh all potential difficulties because the best bloggers make $200,000+ a year.
So what do we get in the end?
Pros:
Cons:
When was the last time you watched a YouTube video? Yesterday?
It's one of the most (if not the most) popular sites worldwide. More than a billion people watch hundreds of hours of videos on it daily. And you can use this platform to make money.
You don't have to create a viral video with millions of views. Although, if it does, it won't get any worse!
All you need to do is follow a certain strategy to maximize the number of multiple views on your channel regularly.
Most importantly, ensure your channel visitors see the benefit of watching your videos: they should inspire, educate, or entertain your viewers. You can do this in many ways in a huge number of niches.
However, the basic scheme doesn't change:
You can make money from advertising that will be streamed on your YouTube channel. For this, you should do the following:
Another great way to make money from a YouTube channel is to get sponsors. If you provide your channel with many subscribers, many large companies will be happy to pay you money for reviewing their product/service or mentioning their brand in your videos.
To ensure the faster promotion of your YouTube channel, start promoting it on your social media pages, your blog, and other resources from which you can access your potential target audience.
Again, we come to the point that you can make money from video blogging, but it's also a two-sided coin.
Pros:
Cons:
If you want to create a business online, you don't have to sell physical products at all. In fact, info products, which exist only in digital form, are one of the easiest and fastest sources of income.
There are a huge number of options for creating info products, but the most popular formats include the following:
In addition, you can combine different formats to meet your customers' info needs best.
You understand that not everyone will get rich by selling info products. However, if you take the time to do a little online research, you will find out that making $15k per month is not something unattainable.
No matter your content creation format, it can provide you with passive income. The money will keep coming to you even when you sleep! Because info products are sold through a website, clients will be able to buy and download them at any time of the day or night. You can host free events using webinar software to attract more leads. All you will have to do is keep track of what sells best and create new info products accordingly.
Pros:
Cons:
Starting an online business doesn't have to be tedious. Take things one step at a time. First, research the eCommerce niche and identify products in demand. Then determine your business model and implementation strategy.
After that, start building your online business. Choose an eCommerce platform, customize its design, and add products to your catalog. Focus on attracting traffic to your online store.
Once your business is up and running, make sure you collect as much data as possible. Analyze that data to understand better what's working and what's not. Change your business strategy accordingly.
While you can quickly see the results of your marketing efforts, the reality is that marketing, especially the type that produces long-term results and recommendations, takes time. You are competing in an increasingly crowded and noisy marketplace. The better you can tap into your ideal market and build a relationship with it, the better the results. If you offer a great product or service and are attentive to your customers, they will leave positive feedback, which will help you stand out from the crowd.
The most effective ways to promote your business, whether you have no or limited budget, remain the following channels:
What part of your online marketing strategy you should implement and what elements of online marketing services you use depends on the nature of your business, budget, time, and goals. Many small business owners do everything on their own at the start. However, as their business grows, they begin to realize that your efforts and knowledge are not enough to get ahead of their competitors.
Don't worry that you don't know everything about eCommerce. No one does everything at once - we all learn as we go!
You don't necessarily need "marketing" as a business function to launch an online marketing business, but you will have to invest in some advertising activities during the launch. Unless you're launching with a previously acquired audience (such as your social media fans or blog readers). A strategic launch marketing campaign will pay for itself in a matter of months.
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Sawaram Suthar (Sam) is a Founding Director at Middleware. He has extensive experience in marketing, team building and operations. He often seeing working on various GTM practices and implement best one to generate more demand. He is also founded a digital marketing blog - TheNextScoop.
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