What to sell online?

There are many things you can sell online. In fact, what you can sell in the traditional brick and mortal business, you can sell them online.There are advantages and disadvantages of both types of businesses. Personally I think the online business have more advantages than the offline business. The biggest advantage of an online business is its global reach. By engaging in online business you are able to sell your products to the whole world. The beauty is you can do it even though you don't have big capital!

Another advantageous aspect of an online business is that you can even sell certain kind of products that don't need physical delivery, they are the downloadable products.. You can operate this kind of  business from home, earn money while you are sleeping, just like what I am doing at the moment. Basically what you need is a laptop and a broadband connection.  So, what do you mean by downloadable products? Let's dwell deeper into the topic in my next post.

Ideas, Ideas everywhere......

Some people think that getting business ideas is a very difficult task. However, as a matter of fact ideas might just appear from deep down your subconscious mind, or you might just come across an idea by listening to people's conversation.

The other I had lunch with an old friend and who is a dancing coach in a social club. As it has been a long time we have not met, naturally I was curious to know what he is doing right now. You know what did he tell me? He is making some money through the Internet, and he even has buyers who come all the way from overseas to look for him. And he is already in his 60s! But he is doing something many younger people were not able to do. 

You guess what is he selling? As I've mentioned earlier his interest is dancing, line dancing to be more specific, his business is selling dance steps created by him. To be more accurate, he is selling his own line dancing guide book through the web.

It was a very fruitful lunch for me having learned a new idea. Initially I thought you need to be IT savvy in order to start an online business, but in actual fact is you don't have to. You can just think of something related to your interests and it can become your online business. My interest is computing so I created the computing website and selling my own e-books. If you are a chef and even a housewife who is good in cooking, you can sell recipe online. 

So, start thinking of new ideas today and tomorrow you might become a successful online entrepreneur!

Steps in starting an online business-part 1

Business means selling products and services, whether brick and mortal or online. Deciding what to sell online is the single most important process you have to go through!


You might want to ask where and  how to get the business ideas? Experts may suggest a few ideas generation methods such as brain storming, the Delhi method, focus group and problems inventory. Yes, while you can still use these methods, it is time consuming and not suitable for an online home business. 


For online business, the best source of ideas is the world wide web! Do a search in the search engines for online business and you will get billions of related links. From those links you should narrow down your search to those websites that match your interests and skills. For example, if you are a doctor by profession, you can create a website that provides medical info as well as promotes medical services and products. For a teacher, you might want to build an educational website that guides parents how to teach their kids at home, and you can use the website to advertise education products and services. Besides, you can also build a website based on your hobbies. I like computer and programming, so I created Visual Basic Tutorial website more than 10 years ago. Now it is ranked top in Google search and it is generating a steady and substantial stream of  passive income for me.


What do I sell to enjoy such income? How to market my website? I will share with you my experiences in future posts. 

Factors of Success in online business

Before I discuss the actual online business, let me share with you a few critical success factors to become successful in whatever thing we do,including the Internet business.

The other day I read a book by Zig Ziglar, an American top motivator. In the book, one of the quotation summed up what it takes to become rich. The quotation says" The profile of a wealthy person is this: hard work, perseverance, and most of all, self-discipline".

Yes, to be successful , you need to work hard, persevere and have self-discipline.However, working hard is only at the initial stage, once your online business is up and running, it literally runs on auto-pilot and generates passive income for you. Perseverance is also very important at the initial stage, don't give up when you don't see positive cash flow for sometime. You have to keep on adding contents and market your business until your website ranks high in the search engines. When you reach that stage, money just keeps pouring in.

Off course you need a lot of self-discipline to be sucessful in online business. Managing business at home might makes you lazy as you are living in a very comfortable environment, there is no one to push or motivate you. The only person that can push and motivate you is you yourself!

Okay, will tell you what to sell next time.

Starting an online business

Starting an online business is much easier than a brick and mortal business. Online business offers a few advantages over the conventional business. Some of the advantages are:

• Zero or small start-up capital
• Easy accessibility  to global market 
• No time and space limits

Usually you don't need a big capital to start an online business. If you know how to design webpage yourself,you might just need to pay for the domain name registration and hosting fees. Domain registration fee is around $3 to $20 dollars a year and hosting fee might be only a few dollars a month. These fees are really nothing compared to a normal shop, where rental alone can come to a  few hundred dollars a month!

As Internet connects everybody in the whole world, doing business in the virtual world means you have global reach in the online market! Even a niche market is infinitely big at global scale.

And the best part is you are not bounded by time and space . You can conduct your business anytime anywhere as long as there is Internet connection. The products and services can automatically sell themselves 24 hours a day, even while you are fast asleep or enjoying a vacation.

Then what can we sell online? That is the topic for next post, right now I 'm going to take a nap while I let my Internet business runs at autopilot mode.

Starting a business-offline and online

Starting your own business is a very good idea because it can increase your wealth. However, starting a brick and mortal business is not an easy task. First, you must think of an idea. You can get ideas from your hobbies, the existing products in the market, the existing companies in your surroundings(take a walk down the street and observe the things they sell) and more.

Next, you sit down and write a business plan, which includes what you want to sell(products or services), the business objective, the name of the business and more.

Then you can discuss your plan with a consultant, preferably an accountant or businessman. After that you must decide what type of company you wish to form, whether sole ownership, partnership or limited liability company.

One of the most important aspects of the business is the source of finance, how much financing is it coming from your own pocket, and how much from loans, and where to obtain the loans, either from banks or other sources.

Last but not least, you must consider the location, which means you need to do a survey. There are many more things you need to do before you can actually start a business, but the aforementioned steps are the most basic ones.

However, there is an alternative to the brick and mortal business, that is the online business. Starting an online business is much easier, you can bypass many of the above steps, and with much less capital too. There is no location problem as you can work from home, and the market is global! 

Can you make money online?

Traditionally, to get rich by doing business, we need to sell some physical products or services. To do that we usually need to buy a shop, set up a  factory or rent a a building, and set up all necessary equipments and facilities. On top of that, we have to invest money to buy raw materials and maintain the inventory and pay the employees. All these need substantial initial capital outlay. So, not everybody can start a business, most of us end up as employees, working for other people whole life and never have a chance to get rich!

Fortunately, the advent of the Internet technologies changed all that. Now, almost everybody can earn some money from the Internet, part-time or full time. Some of us can even become a millionaire. The reason why anybody can start an online business is because we don't need a big initial capital to start a business, we can even start with ZERO capital! I repeat, ZERO capital!

But you may ask "What products can we sell online?". I will tell you in the coming post.