So you may be wondering why I’m jumping straight into the world of social networks and media instead of the more traditional advertising methods such as Email Marketing, Google Adwords, Directories etc. Well I will cover all of those eventually but Social Media and Social Networks are huge at the moment and they are also very easy and also enjoyable for businesses to make the most of. You may know what I mean when I talk about social networks and media but if you don’t then I am talking about websites such as Facebook, Twitter and Youtube. I will also be looking into blogs and forums.

Facebook and Twitter are great for businesses in completely different ways. My next few articles will explore getting started with these websites and in later articles I will show you ways of using them for your business to generate interest from potential customers. Youtube is not as widely used by businesses but online video is on the increase and youtube provides a great service to get your videos out to the masses.

Blogs and Forums are also great places to get your business out there. As I said in a previous article, people use the Internet as an information tool but they also like to voice their opinions and blogs and forums are great for this. Forums also build up great little communities within your niche which you can use to enhance your reputation.

The next few posts will be exploring all of these in more detail and showing you how to get set up on them and how to get likes, followers and subscribers quickly and easily.

Once you have your website set up you need to have visitors. Now unlike a regular shop you don’t need to have the most attractive website to bring people in. If no one knows about your website it doesn’t matter how amazing  it looks, no one will visit it. I’m not saying you should have an ugly website though. Your website still needs to look professional and easy to read and navigate. I will go into more detail about this at a later date.

So lets concentrate on visitors. First of you want to be able to monitor how many visits you receive. Even before you get them it’s good to have a system up and running and the best one by far is Google Analytics. This service is pretty straight forward to use and install but again it’s something I will explore more at a later date. There are a couple of different things to look for when viewing your stats in regards to visitors. They are the following:

Unique Visitors – Often referred to as ‘hits’, these are how many different people have viewed your website.
Page Views – How many pages in total have been viewed between your visitors.

In addition to these stats you can also view where in the world your visitors come from, which browsers they use, how long they spend on your website and more.Now onto some facts about website visitors in general:

Truth #1 – On average people spend about 8 seconds on a website before they decide whether to read on or browse some more. That’s just 8 seconds to entice potential customers. I will be exploring ways to do this successful in the future.
Truth #2 – Most people use the website as an information tool, not a shopping centre. It’s easier to get people to your website by offering quality content as well as quality products.
Truth #3 - On average only 1% of your unique visitors will be customers. So out of every 100 people who visit your website only 1 of them will buy from you. Now that may sound like a very low number indeed and there are ways to increase this percentage but even to get that figure to 10% or 20% requires a lot of work and targeted marketing. Once again, this is something I will talk about in future articles. Before that I will be delving into increasing the number of unique visitors to your website. Starting with the world of social networking…

So now you have a domain name and hosting for your website it’s time to get some content on it. Now I’m not going to give you a step by step guide for making a website from scratch but there are some great software pieces you can use to create your website with. The two most popular types of websites which people use for selling on the Internet are content based websites (such as this one) and eCommerce websites (online stores).

If you’re creating a content based website like this then I highly recommend using Word Press. This website uses it and you’ll find many of the best content websites or blogs also use it. Why? Well not only is word press easy to use but it has good SEO and navigation built in which is good for your Google rankings. There are also thousands of free and paid templates available and the software itself is very easy to use and you can create new content and pages in minutes.

If you are making an online web store then there are a lot of decent software options out there. I was young and broke when I started Bitzbox so my only option at the time was free software, in this case oscommerce. It’s a very basic shopping cart system however it’s main advantages are the huge amounts of support available for it. There are other shopping cart software packages based of the oscommerce package such as Zen Cart and Tiger Commerce. I have used Zen Cart myself too and although it has a lot of better features than oscommerce, it is harder to edit the template of your website.Although these types of shopping carts are free, to get all the features you may need you may have to pay someone who specialises in using these software packages to implement changes for you. I have personally spent hundreds of pounds doing so myself. I have yet to fail in finding a feature I have needed though which is another great advantage of having such huge support available for the software.

You may choose a more pricey option such as Actinic Catalog which is a very good piece of eCommerce software however I have not used it myself yet but I have seen how it’s used and the professional looking websites it produces.

As mentioned before there are also hosting plans with built in shopping carts such as 1and1. Again I recommend that you get a decent plan on these so you’re not restricted in what you can achieve with your website.

These are just a few pieces of software to use. I have seen website which use word press for their main site and then link to an eCommerce package for their web store. Just make sure it’s obvious to your customers how they can buy for you. I personally do this the other way round and link to a blog from my web store.

So now you have your domain name you now need some web hosting. If you’re unsure what web hosting is it is basically a service that stores your website on a server and makes it visible to the world via the Internet. You cannot have a website with web hosting. There are literally thousands of web hosting services out there and it’s important to find one which is reliable and fast with as little down time as possible. My first business (my failed one) must have had at least 3 or 4 different web hosts over the year it was active. Why? Simply because I chose the wrong hosts. Believe it or not I was finding cheap web hosts off eBay, some of which would experience hours of random downtime and most of them eventually just disappeared. Imagine if you’ve worked hard on making and promoting a website only for it to vanish overnight.

There are many different types of web hosting you can buy from shared hosting services to dedicated hosting. I wont go in to detail on all of these now but you will be fine finding a good shared hosting package to start with. As your traffic increase you may wish to upgrade to Virtual dedicated server or a dedicated server.As well as the different types there are also different sizes of hosting. These are usually how much web space you have and bandwidth. There are other factors too such as number of SQL databases and email accounts too. I recommend having at least 3 SQL databases available, especially if you run an online store where you’ll need at least 1 anyway for the store itself. You don’t need to jump in and buy the biggest web hosting package available. A good web host would be happy to upgrade a smaller account if you reach your bandwidth limit or web space limit.

So how do you decide on which web host to go with? Well this website is hosting with a great affordable web hosting company called BlueHost. They are very reliable and fast and offer good support also. I’m not saying you have to go with them but they are my personal recommendation. Having said that if you know which software you wish to run on your website, lets say something like oscommerce for example then you could find a host who are dedicated to hosting websites using this software. You would also find they offer great support for that type of software too.

If you want a shopping cart but have no idea how to instal or use your own shopping cart software you may decide to choose a host who has their own built in shopping cart software such as 1and1. A friend of mine used their shopping cart service but went with one of their cheaper packages and found it very restrictive. If you are going to use this sort of package then you may need to go for the best one available just so you have the freedom to make your website the way you want it. A cheaper option may see you having to use one of their free templates and can restrict how many products you’re allowed to sell.

To summarise: Have a good look when it comes to web hosting. Don’t host with an eBay reseller. Don’t go with anyone you’re not sure off. Make sure they are reliable and fast and have little downtime.  If you wish to choose a website with it’s own shopping cart be prepared to buy their best package to get the freedom you need.

So now you know what your store is going to sell and it’s time to create your website. So how do you start? Well first things first you need a domain name and web hosting. We’ll start with a domain name. Now there are two ways you can go about deciding your domain name. First is to use your business name. So your domain name could simply be www.yourbusinessname.com. The other way is to use a keyword phrase as your domain name. The point of doing this is to get yourself high in Google for that particular phrase. So if your business sells buttons for clothing for example, your domain name could be www.clothingbuttons.com. I personally don’t think this is completely necessary to do and would recommend just using your business name. Of course nothing is stopping you from doing both and you could forward a keyword domain to your home page or even a sub category of your website. I will go into more details about that at a later date but lets just assume you want to register your business name for your domain name.

So how do you get your domain name set up? Well firstly lets see if it’s available. A great online tool you can use for this is called Domize. By typing in the domain name you wish to register in the search box (without the .com on the end) you can see if it’s available. It also gives you other suggestions of similar domain names you can register. Once you’ve chosen your available domain it’s time to register it. Domize gives you links and prices to websites where you can register your domain too. I personally recommend 1and1 or godaddy. If you’re in the uk and the .com and .co.uk address are available it could be worth getting both.

The next part of this series is all about choosing the right web hosting for your business.

The name Anthony Morrison might not mean a lot to most people but he recently came to my attention with his Fast Cash Commissions software. Anthony is a young Millionaire who made his money from commissions online. Now I have purchased his software (it’s very cheap) and despite the fact I wont make millions online for him system I think the fast traffic sniper software that’s bundled with this is very useful for ANY online business. Granted there’s nothing really special that you can’t do elsewhere but with this software you can do it all in seconds. You can look up keywords for your niche, it has a handy ‘competitor spy’ where you can see where your competitors rank for various keywords and how many back links they have. Of course you also get videos explaining how Anthony made his millions and with some work and investment you could make some decent cash from the system.

Check out the video here. Don’t expect Anthony’s riches but you can make money from this.

Hello I’m Craig Randall and welcome to my new blog which is all about online business. Before I begin allow me to tell you a little bit about my own credentials. At the time of writing this I am 24 years old. I am currently running my second online business from my 3 bedroom  house which I recently bought. I started my first online business when I was just 19 and I’ll be honest with you it made a little bit of money but ultimately in my eyes, it was a failure. If I knew half of what I know now the outcome would have been very different. I will go into more detail about my failures and successes in the future. I don’t want you making the same mistakes I did.

This guide is about finding your niche. You need to sell products to a specific audience. You’re not going to be the next Amazon or Tesco so don’t try and sell whatever you can. Target your products to a certain group of people. The hobby market is a good example of finding a niche and one where I make a good living in myself. What might surprise you is that even when my first business failed I already knew success could be had in the hobby market but I never even considered it. I had a tutor at my college who had a very successful business selling Calligraphy supplies. We both have a hobby we are passionate about and we’re both making a good living from it. It’s important that you are passionate about what you sell in your niche. Of course it doesn’t have to be in the hobby industry at all.

The best way to find a niche for you is to write down a list of your passions, your problems and fears. If you can find 5 of each of these then that’s 15 niches you could explore for your business. Remember it’s not just about selling physical problems, you can sell information, advertising, affiliate links etc.

I’m going to assume you now know what it is you wish to sell on your website. Now think about if you can be even more specific within your niche. A niche within a niche shall we say. You may be thinking ‘the more specific I am with my niche the less customers I will receive’. This is a mindset I had with my failed business. Sure my potential target market is larger but it was almost impossible trying to get them to find me because my competition was much larger too. Think of this scenario too, if you search for something specific in a search engine and find that exact term then aren’t you going to be more likely to buy?

Let’s go back to my tutor’s website again. His niche is Calligraphy but a Google search for that isn’t going to find his website at the top, there’s far too much competition for that keyword. That doesn’t matter because his niche within that is selling Calligraphy Supplies and a quick Google search finds him at number 1. He was number 1 when I was started college 8 years ago and I’m sure in 8 years time he’ll still be there. It’s not just products you could sell within your niche, you could sell information, tutorials, training etc. Just be clear exactly what you want to sell and stick to it. You can always add extra products in the future but focus on your primary niche for now.

The next step in this guide will show you how to get a domain name and which domain name you should pick.