Your Questions About Business Online

Jere answers:

I would buy anything but food … I shop online for mostly everything i need for my fish, dog, and hermit crabs … I like online stores that clearly state where they ship too … I can not stand going to a website and having to spend 20 minutes figuring out if they ship to canada … I like websites that will accept paypal … I like websites that do not try to make money by inflated shipping charges … I ordered online a hermit crab decoration, paid over 20 dollars in shipping, and when it arrived the shipping was only 6 dollars and the decoration was shipped in the original box so no packing material was used to increase the cost … I will not deal with those people again …

Jere answers:

Hi Julia,

The answer is most definitely Yes!

Here is a brief overview – My advice is to follow these steps (in this order);

1. Find a subject that you feel really interested in, your ‘Niche’ which will become the main subject of your website.

2. Decide to become a real expert in your chosen subject, gather all the information you can and really work to understand it all.

3. Carry out searches in the most popular search engines to see who your competition are in this specific area, visit all the websites in the top 10 results to see what content they are offering and what their website looks like and how they are laid out – this will give you lots of ideas for your own website. As you are going though all these websites remember to take notes and save all the website addresses with your notes so you can refer back to them later and monitor them.

4. Check to see if there are adverts around the search engine results, this will give you some idea of the money being spent to your niche, if people are spending money advertising then normally other people are buying.

5. Look for existing products that relate to your niche that you can sell for a percentage of the sales price (Affiliate Programs) start with Clickbank where there’s lots of good advice about how to make money online.

6. You will find free ‘keyword research tools’ online where you can put in your main niche description and you will see all the words and phrases that people are searching for and how many times, this will give you lots of ideas for things to include in your website.

7. Find a domain name (shouldn’t cost more that $10) that included the words that describe your niche. If you choose to use a free website service then point your domain to it, or, you can setup your own server for around $50 per year.

8. Start to create content that is written with the objective of answering your visitor’s questions and giving them solutions to their problems – people search the internet mainly to learn something or find an answer to a problem, your websites success will depend on how well you satisfy these requirements.

9. You will then mix your content (text and images) with information of a suitable product, or products, that you found earlier

10. You then start to promote your website in places that relate to your niche such as in forums, commenting on blogs, facebook, twitter (create accounts using your niche keywords) and you can even use ‘Pay Per Click’ advertising if you have some money available.

If you want much more detailed information you can download a free eBook at Carl Henry Global.

Good luck!
Carl

Jere answers:

Use your library and check out this book: http://aquabrowser.skokielibrary.info/?hreciid=%7clibrary%2fmarc%2fskokie-iii%7cb1510887

Jere answers:

Austin, you can do it anyway you choose. Preferably whatever will make your customers happy. What you should do is give yourself a window time of say 3-5 days to ship out once its paid for so that you’re not making hundreds of trips to the post office each week.

What would really help even better, is if collect all your shipping materials and create a certain cut off time in processing orders, to allow yourself time to package everything and pass on to the mailman whenever he shows up. That’s basically how it’s done with UPS.

Remember though that if start getting really busy and you do use UPS then it could be issue with the city in zoning and permits. That’s actually complicating the process right now anyway but that’s just a heads up for future references. Right now. I’d stick to the US mail and handing to everything to the mailman to save time, gas, and to speed up your shipping out process.

Jere answers:

Your lack of computer knowledge is not holding you back. I can develop your website, and even if you hired a professional design company the costs are so low you wont even notice. What you lack is a business idea. This is what we all lack. Many people have the skills to run some part of business or other, but the people that are successful have the foresight to develop an idea that will work. Spend some time developing your idea for the web. You can hire out any work that you need. The only work you cannot hire out is the business idea.