Your Questions About Business Online

Jere answers:

I have run a full time online business for several years now and I can tell you that your question could potentially take literally a week to answer. Let me give you a starting point.

First, your business should be based on market demand. That’s where you need to start. Don’t think about what you should sell or how to build your website or how to get people to your website until you do some market research. While doing market research isn’t that difficult, you do need to get educated on how to do it.

Next you develop or otherwise source the products to fill the market demand. One question I have for you is this: Is there some particular reason that you want to sell physical products? I’ll be very honest, and don’t take this as a slam against your judgement but, Selling physical products is pretty much the very last thing I would ever consider doing as an online business. I have done it. It sucks. In a major way. I would rather work at McDonalds. My opinion, unless you have a very large budget and a very high tolerance for frustration, I would stay away from the whole importing and distributing thing. Personally, I had nothing but problems at every phase with a similar business. Just my opinion based on my own experience.

After your source your products you will want to build a website as packaging for your products.

Then you start your marketing to get visitors to your site.

There are really only those four steps. You will really want to educate yourself well on each phase of the process. Even if you intend to outsource some of the work (highly recommended) you still have to understand what you are doing in order to convey that to someone else and to be able to determine if you got your money’s worth.

Starting an online business is the best choice I have ever made, but it was not as easy as many would have you believe. But it is totally doable if you arm yourself with the right knowledge and mindset. Both are critical to your success.

Good luck to you. I wish you much success!

Jere answers:

MASSIVE ACTION!

If it is a blog, start writing a blog post every day or if it is not, create a blog and write about the topic of your online business and then include the link to your business site with each blog post so people can get to your site from the blog.

Create an Ezine.com account and write articles about your business and include link

Create a twitter account centered around your business topic with a link to your business site in the description…

Same thing with YouTube.com Start making video’s talking about your business but do not make the mistake of trying to sell people to your idea, instead give them something valuable like some information about the importance of something. People buy from people not companies my friend.

Provide solutions to other people problems in your area of business and they will follow you and ask for your advice because you proved yourself as the expert.

You then can use list build sites like list joe, ad jockeys just to name a few.

The most important thing to do is take massive action! Find a business your passionate about so you will enjoy learning more about the subject when your not making money so you can develop more as the expert my friend.

I have created a free training for people to get started on the right track instead of wasting time..

Oh yeah, and keep your wallet in your pocket, this training is 100% Free

you can learn more about it by visiting my personal blog below

http://DavidSaundersBlog.com

Jere answers:

Even for a freelance online business you need a business plan. If you’ve never been in business before, I would strongly recommend that you talk to a business counselor before you do anything especially spend money. I’d call the local office of SCORE (go to http://www.score.org and input your zip code to find the chapter nearest you), the advice is FREE.

The counselor at SCORE will most likely advise you to write a business plan which is very good advice because it will force you to dig out all of the start up details and the costs of starting a freelance online business and force you to also understand all of the aspects of this business including the customers you’ll concentrate on (your market ) and how you’ll go after them.

Try this link :
http://www.ychange.com/small-business-consulting-articles.html
and read some of the articles especially the ones about a business plan and starting a business.

Good Luck

Jere answers:

What I’ve personally experienced and found that’s better, if you want to work online, is to start up a business and partner up with a company that direct sales a product or service. My wife and I got involved in this type of business over six years ago. We collaborated with a company and had them set up a web site for us to sale the products and services that we were providing. After doing this, you’ll have to generate traffic to your site. The most effective way we’ve found is simply word of mouth, or referring people to our site.
You can partner up with a company that gives you monthly earnings from services that you put people on either by in person, phone or from your web site. What I mean is for instance, my wife and I partnered up with a telecommunications service provider and all the cellular phone companies. Someone purchase a cell phone from our web site, or a land line or Internet service or whatever, the product itself your able to provide at a lower cost through the providers. When someone gets on the services, the company pays you a percentage of that person’s billing every single month, month after month for the referral from you by word of mouth or by your web site.
If you’d like to see an example of what I’m talking about, your more then welcome to take a look at my wife’s web site at www.tiffanyvague.acnrep.com Take a look at the products and services there, tour the company etc and to give you an idea of how you should have each of the companies and make a continued monthly income off the companies rather than just a one time sale, off the effort that you provided to these companies.
Once you decide on a product and/or service, you need to start driving “traffic” to your web site. A lot of work but well worth the effort when your income starts going and continues to increase as the more you sale and having loyal customers bring in more customers from their referrals that get linked to you and you make more money.
Offer a product and/or service that’s high in demand and something that’s going to continue monthly income regardless if they buy or replace a product. That’s my advice.
If you have any questions, feel free to contact me at kaiden4@aol.com

Jere answers:

Hi!

Starting an online business can be at any part of the world since the internet connects you to almost anyone who has connection with the internet. However, in China, sometimes, the authority can blocked websites and even all websites that are from a particular zone.

In business, you need to know what target market, where they are, and what they want. If you are thinking of a market in China, there are not many people using English and the other thing is that not many people trust the internet. However, that does not mean you cannot do anything. Paypal has set up a Chinese system and they have good reputation, so this might be a good payment system option to consider.

If you know Chinese, try marketing highly priced branded goods (provided you have means to get it into China), since most people that surf the net in China are young people and many Chinese went overseas to get branded products.

It is important that you need to know what you are good at and can offer. In business, there are three Cs to consider in order your business will be profitable and these are :

– Competency; your skills, experiences, etc.
– Connectivity; a hungry targeted market
– Creativity; your unique selling proposition

Hope this information helps to get your mind going…

Patrick Stephen Oh
(Located in China)