Market Research
Finding a market in which to operate is a vital step in the process. “Follow your passion” is good advice. However, you might prefer to start with a large market rather than a small one.
The key is to find a hungry crowd with money to spend. Indeed, find a crowd which is already spending money, and place your sales page where they’re sure to come across it.
Do research using Google Zeitgeist, Lycos Top 50, Yahoo Shopping and similar sites, not forgetting the Clickbank marketplace.. I like using Nichebot for keyword research.
Register a Domain Name and sign up for Web Hosting
Choosing a domain name isn’t that hard. There are thousands of good word combinations which haven’t been used. Use Dotster, NameBoy or MakeWords to get hundreds of suggestions based on your keywords. Don’t use hyphens in a domain name, make it a .com, short but memorable is best.
Hosting is also critical. There are lots of great hosts. Beware of hosts which promise the impossible – 100% uptimes, say, or unlimited bandwidth or disk space. It’s still possible to overpay for hosting. Try to find hosting which allows multiple domains in the same account – either through ‘add-on’ domains or by means of a reseller account. I use Hostgator and ResellerZoom.
Create a product
You should create your own product to sell. This is easy these days. Brainstorm and write a short report on a hot topic for your market. Read through the report, expanding on what’s on the page, and record your comments using Audacity. Release the report as a PDF and the audio as an MP3. If you reveal something new and different, people will gladly pay for the information.
Or use Camtasia Studio (download the free 30-day trial) to create a video tutorial. How to use your favorite software product; secret tricks and tips that people don’t know. Use Powerpoint or Open Office Impress to create slides about any topic at all, and record a Camtasia video of you reading through and expanding on the bullet points.
Write a sales letter
You don’t need a twenty-page sales letter to sell something good. Describe the product, let your passion for it show. Don’t be boring. Make sure the sales process works properly. Use Clickbank to sell it – it’s not perfect, but it’s easy to use and not too expensive.
Ask your customers for their email address so that you can notify them of updates. You can also ask them for testimonials. You should learn enough HTML to write a sales page – you can always outsource it later. Try SeaMonkey if you need a good WYSIWYG HTML editor. I use Filezilla to upload files to my host.
Get Traffic with a Content Site
Build a content site to generate traffic to your sales page. It can be on the same domain – just have a link to the ‘Home page’, which could be your sales letter. It could be a blog, an article directory, a forum – as long as there’s plenty of good quality content. The best way to get good content is to allow your readers to post articles, comments, forum posts – interactivity is always rewarded.
Use all the social networking tools at your disposal to get backlinks and traffic. Post comments on other people’s blogs. Post articles to article directories. Get links from StumbleUpon, Reddit, Digg, MySpace, Squidoo and hundreds of others. OnlyWire is a great resource which lets you bookmark a page to 20 social bookmarking sites almost instantly.
Once you have some traffic, monetize your content pages. Rather than using Adsense, use an ad server (for instance OpenAds) and sell your advertising space to others.
This post is being submitted to Problogger’s Top 5 Group Writing Project. One of the great things about this kind of project is finding other great blogs. As I write this, over 500 bloggers have contributed to the project. I’ll link to some of my favorite Top 5 posts over the next few days.
No tag for this post.
My mugshot.
Pingback: Group Writing Project - Lista Final - Rockerspace.net
Pingback: Jestertunes » Group Writing Project Full List
1) Domain names. Theory is that search engines like the hyphenated version, people don’t. This is probably due to the fact that if people link back to you using only your domain then the keywords are in the link.
Get both if you can. Also get misspellings if they are common. Such as I have breakpal.com and brakepal.com
Don’t forget the plural version if it is used in speech commonly. I find that in many niches people more commonly search on the plural version of the word.
Hosting- do your research and don’t skimp. It’s so competitive that hosting companies are fighting to be competitive and slacking in customer service. I’ve seen many good hosts go bad. Do your research and then keep your fingers crossed.
Phil
Pingback: Randomness: 893 Top 5 Lists… | Joseph Szymanski | Photographs, Drawings and Other Creations
Market research is definitely important. It might also be important to not get yourself into an already over-saturated market. It could end up being too costly to compete.
These are some very useful tips for people wanting to start an online business
I am thinking of taking my business online with more advertising. This info really helped me think about what I can do with my other business
Pingback: ProBlogger’s Top 5 Writing Project entries amounted to a total of 893!!! | Interesting Observations
Nice job! I can appreciate your post at its true value. It’s gorgeous indeed. Keep on writing on the same high level. Clever and useful article.