Steps to create a sucessful online business

At this critical time of economic stagflation where the prices of essential stuff such as food and gas are soaring, every family need extra income to combat the rising cost of living. However, as the unemployment rate is also high, it is difficult to get part-time job. Fortunately, in this era of the knowledge economy, everyone has the chance to make money from the Internet in the comfort of his or her home, provided you know the way to do it. The best e-business model for a layman who doesn't have much capital is the undoubtedly the home based online business. Many big Internet corporations provide some sort of affiliate programs for people to join for free and earn money in the form of commissions. The most notable ones are Amazon.com affiliate programs and Google's Ad Sense. I join these two programs and I am able to earn enough part-time income to pay for the whole family monthly living expenses, including gas and food, and I am able to keep most of my salary from my full time job in the bank or invest in capital market. Further more, I am creating a legacy income as it has become like an estate where it can be passed down to the next generation! Does this sound too good to be true? Let me tell you this is not a scam and everybody can actually make it if you follow the guidelines which I am going to share with you.

The very first step to create a successful online business is to identify a niche market in which you have something to sell, be it information or products. This must be an area that you are good at in terms of interest, experience, skill and knowledge that you can share with other people. For example, I am quite good in Visual Basic programming language, so I created a Visual Basic tutorial website that teaches people Visual Basic programming. This tutorial website has attracted nearly 4 million visitors since its inception about ten years ago; I think this is quite an achievement for a personal website. Although a niche market might be a small market in the traditional term, it can be very big in the Internet because of its global reach. There are many areas of interest which you can write about, some of the examples are computer and Internet, education, health, cars, stamp and coin collection, sports, movies, music, literature, science, art and so on, and the list is endless.

After you have identified a specific area of interest, you can then create a website based on this area. You must create a good website so that it can attract many new visitors and able to retain a large percentage of loyal visitors who would visit your site again and again. In this way you can generate a large customer base. To build a good website, the first thing you must do is focus on the contents of your web site. You must make sure that your contents are interesting and have enough useful information. In order to create good contents, you must conduct some research by reading books, journal, and info from the Internet and etc in the topic you have identified earlier. Next, you need to design a framework for your contents; and get the main topic and subtopics properly arranged before you start writing your contents. If you are not good in writing, you can ask your family members or your friends to help you. Even you are good in writing, you still need to get someone to edit your work. You can pay a free lance editor to do the editing job for you or you can ask your relatives or friends to help you. As for me, I am lucky enough to have my daughter to edit for me. Secondly, you must design an attractive and consistent template for all your web pages. You should also ensure that it is easy for the users to navigate around various sections of your web site. You can use GUI-based webpage development programs such as MS FrontPage, Macromedia Dreamweaver and etc to accomplish the above tasks. Besides, you should also learn some basics of HTML so that you can customize your web pages better. After you have done all your web pages, you must get your web site hosted by a reliable web hosting company so that it will be available online 24 hours a day. Although you need to pay a nominal fee of something like US80, it is worth the investment and normally you can earn it back in days. Lastly, you must update your web site regularly because people normally get bored with old contents. To save time in updating, you might want to start a blog (web log) to complement your web site because updating a blog relatively easier.

Once you are satisfied for your web site, it is time to promote your web site, for free! The first thing you should do is to submit your web site to major search engines such as Google, Yahoo!, Web Crawler and etc., and you can engage free submission service providers such as http://www.freewebsubmission.com/ or http://www.submitexpress.com/ to do the job for you. However, in order for people to be able to reach your web site, you must enter all the keywords that are related to your web site in the META tag of your web pages, in fact in every page of your web site. For example, my web site is a free tutorial web site for Visual Basic programming, so my META tag includes the following keywords

“FREE Visual Basic Online Tutorial, Visual Basic, VB, VB, VB tutorial, Visual Basic Course, Visual Basic Class, VB Script, VBA, Visual basic tutorial, Visual Basic Books, Visual Basic CDROM, Visual Basic Programming, VB Programming, Visual Basic resources, Visual Basic Tips, Sample VB programs, vb6, vb2005, visual basic 2005, visual basic 6, Microsoft visual basic 6，Windows XP, Windows Vista, Intel Pentium Chips, CPU, RAM, visual basic.net, VB.net, computer, Java, C++, oracle, e-commerce, e-business, computer notebook, Microsoft Office, Microsoft Excel, Microsoft Visual Basic 6 professional, Microsoft Visual Basic 2005, Microsoft Visual Basic 2008” .You must try to think of all the keywords possible so that your web site can rank high in Google searched pages. My web site ranks first in Google searched page when people search for Visual Basic Tutorial, so I think those keywords could be one of the contributing factors for the high exposure.

The second way to promote your website is to join various discussion groups that are related to the contents of your web site. For example, because my contents are about Visual Basic, so I join the groups such as visual_basic_programmer, Visual_Basic_Languages_for_everyone, Visual Basic and so on. Try to participate actively in those groups but be careful not to promote your web site overtly because you may be banned from those groups. What you should do is you can try to solve their problems and lead them to refer to solutions available in your web site. For example, some group members might ask a question about VB programming and I always ask them to refer to one of the tutorial lessons in my web site, in that way I am promoting my site covertly. The main advantage in joining discussion groups is when you send a message to a particular group, all the members of the group can receive it, so the reach is very wide, even global. Another way to promote your web site to search for those web sites that are related to yours and participate in forums provided by those web sites(if there have forums). This is an interactive way to promote your web site to people having the same interest. If forums are not available in those web sites, you can also leave messages in guest books or whatever message boards provided.

And lately, I found another very effective free web site marketing tool but you need to use it carefully otherwise you might be banned forever. It is the Yahoo! Answer section. If you have participated in Yahoo! Answer section, you should have noticed that this section is made up of categorised topics and you can always find the topic which is related to your web site. What you do is you can try to answer some questions that are related to the topics of your web site, and covertly try to lead them to visit your web site which you think it can provide the answer. Abstain from using the phrase like “Please visit my web site..” but use phrase such as “Please refer to the following web site for further info…” instead so that you won’t violate terms and conditions laid down by Yahoo!. It is important that you genuinely want the person who ask the question to obtain useful info from your web site rather than to mislead them to visit your web site. If you can do that, you can ensure your web site traffic can increase many folds.

Now you might want to ask how to make money with high web traffic. The secret is you must participate in some good and high quality affiliate programs. It is not productive to join too many affiliate programs because you might jam your website with too many advertisements that might anger your visitors. So, I focus only on two affiliate programs, namely the Amazon.com affiliate programs and Google’s Ad Sense. Google’s Ad Sense is a free advertising program that will automatically generate the advertisements that are related to the contents of your web site. It is a pay per click program which means you earn an income when the user click on any advertisement that appears on your web page. The earning from each click varies from a few cents to a few dollars. Let say you have 100 clicks per day and average earning per click is 50 cents, then you would earn $50 per day. The best thing is you will be earning the income 24 hours a day, even while you are sleeping. Further more, Google’s payment is on time and convenient, they can bank into your bank account directly or pay you through Western Union Payment System if you are from outside the US. There are many tips on how to place the Google Ads in your web pages provided by the Google’s Ad Sense team, so you can get the best lessons from the team at no cost! In addition, you can also advertise your website by participating in Google’s Ad Words program, where you need to pay a small fee to get your advertisement place in other websites through Google. The small fee is worth the investment because you can drive more traffic to your site by capitalizing on Google’s large customer base.

Amazon.com associate program is also one of the best affiliate programs in the World Wide Web. Once you have become an associate member of this affiliate program, you can start earning commissions by selling the products provided by the company through your website. Normally the amount of commission is about 5% to 10% of the product price. Amazon.com provides a very lucrative commission system whereby the more you earn, the higher the percentage. You should sell the products based on the contents of your website because the people who visit your website are basically interested in your topic so naturally they might want to buy the products that are related to the your website’s contents. For example, my website is providing free Visual Basic tutorial so I sell things like Visual Basic software and Visual basic books. I have been with Amazon.com for around 10 years and I would say that the income I get is satisfying, though it may not be as good as Google’s Ad sense.

The third way to earn online money is to sell things over the auction sites. If you have some physical products to sell, you can always sell them through auction sites such as e-bay. Selling through e-bay has its advantage as it is the largest online auction site in the world which means your market reach is global. In order to guarantee that you can enough supplies to sell, you must find reliable suppliers who can provide consistent supplies so that you can deliver the products to your customers seamlessly. Besides, you must make sure the quality of the products match the prices, and you must engage a good transport or courier service provider to deliver your products to your customers in time. Moreover, you need to provide after sale service.

Lastly, I wish to say that you have to put a lot of hard work in order to build a successful and profitable home based affiliate business. Besides, you need to be imaginative and creative too. But I can ensure you that the initial efforts you put in will allow to enjoy the kind of income that will be way beyond your expectation, and it will bring you revenues even while you are sleeping! You will become a person that can enjoy uncommon freedom by having a lot of time and money. I am already walking along this path and I hope you can join me too!