In part one, we discussed the importance of finding a strong niche area and keywords without a lot of competition, and researching products and vendors. The remaining 3 R’s to starting online businesses from home successfully and quickly involve finding people to guide you along the way, using quality hosting services at the best prices, and finally promoting your new internet business.
Research for good mentors and forums
Any time you want to do something new, it is extremely beneficial to find people who have already done it successfully. Because they have been successful in a home based internet business, their experience can help you start online business ventures. A great place to find experienced online traders is the forums. Forums allow you to ask questions and seek answers from people who have been down the same road you are on. You can find mentors who can replicate your process and success, helping you avoid mistakes and shorten the learning curve to succeed much faster.
Research for Good Hosting (including shopping carts, store creation, and payment processing)
When you want to make money online selling products in a drop shipping home based internet business, finding good hosting is important. Hosting for this type of website should include a store builder, which allows you to easily create your storefront, shopping carts for people to effortlessly add their selections from your store to their virtual “shopping cart” to shop later, and a payment processor that can accept credit cards, eChecks, or PayPal (or any combination of payments).
Having quality and cost-effective solutions to run your online store will decide how quickly you can recoup your capital and start profiting from your efforts. Choosing high-end but very expensive solutions can really take a big bite out of your pocket, and to turn a profit quickly, you need to maintain a positive cash flow between what you spend each month to run your home-based internet business and what you expect to sell on a monthly basis. Most high end credit card processing companies have annual fees that are well above the average sales volume of the starting home based internet business. There are less expensive companies that can provide quality service for a lower-volume business owner, including PayPal and Google Checkout.
You can check various forums for advice from other work at home business owners on which merchants they use for their hosting. If you’re new to HTML, you’ll want a store builder that’s easy to use and has excellent customer support to help you get your first store up and running.
The hosting solution you decide to use should include a shopping cart that ensures your customer’s privacy and security. Shopping carts are usually programmed in ASP or PHP languages. It is important to consider which language(s) your hosting solution will support and to ensure that the shopping cart you select is in a supported language.
Internet Marketing Research:
This may be the most important “R” in establishing and running a successful home-based Internet business. If you have the best online store, it won’t make you money if no one knows it exists! You should work to promote your store so that people know your website is available and can buy from you. You can learn a lot about Internet marketing in forums from people who have experience. Try High Rankings for information on how to market your store on the Internet: http://www.highrankings.com.
Not only do you need to make your website visible to people online, but you also need to make it visible to the RIGHT people. If you have thousands of visitors per day to your site, but they are not people interested in what you are selling, you will not be successful! You must learn how to market to the people and groups that will be interested in your products and services in order to make sales and be successful in your online business.
One important internet marketing tip is to make sure you have quality links pointing back to your store. Quality links directing back to your online store will tell search engines that your site is well-regarded among the online community and will therefore position your site higher in search engine results, making it more visible. Avoid link farming, where you link solely for the sake of linking and you could end up linking to your competitors or worse still have illegal/porn sites linking to you. Search engines have evolved to detect this type of “black hat” SEO and will penalize your site if they detect it.
Another helpful caveat regarding Internet marketing for your home-based Internet business: Beware of companies that advertise marketing services. There are countless sites/companies that claim to have vast experience in their industry. They can help you optimize your site, but they don’t show effective results or they will end up costing you a fortune. Also be aware of click fraud, where you pay a company to help you manage your PPC campaign only to have them use software or pay people to click on your ads, leading to artificial traffic with no sales and high costs due to those artificial clicks.
Starting an online business with a dropshipping store may sound difficult and overwhelming, and you may think you’ll never learn everything you need to know to be successful, but if you stay positive and follow the 5R’s, you’ll be up and running successfully in no time. Set milestones and goals along the way, and celebrate each time you reach a goal. This will help keep you motivated to reach your ultimate goal of making money online with your own home based internet business.