Setting Up An Online Business - Tips, Tools and Techniques

This is a guest post submitted by cashback.co.uk. Initially their director, Neil Durrant, approached me and asked if I would include a link back to their site from mine - a good technique for off-page search engine optimisation (SEO). I agreed on the basis that it formed part of an article which would be useful to Online Business Consultant readers. That article follows below - at the end I've added a few SEO notes and tips for you too...

Today, as many people are looking to set up their own business, going online has a number of advantages:

• Your market is everyone with an internet connection.
• You can get going cheaply and quickly since you will not need expensive premises
• Your costs and prices will be cheaper

But the key to profitability is thorough preparation.

Here are 10 useful tips to help get your business going and profitable:

1. Write a business plan. Who are you trying to sell to, will they buy online, where are they based, can your product be sold and distributed online, are delivery costs low? If your idea stands up to scrutiny, you might be in business.
   
   [For more information about scrutinising your ideas, see the Business Ideas Litmus Test]
   
   
2. Find the right ISP provider to host your website. There are hundreds of businesses ISPs. Look at issues such as speed, customer service availability, back up services as well as cost and ability to switch.
   
   
3. Register your domain name. Before you establish your company name, do a search to make sure your chosen URL is available and make it memorable. Your ISP may be able to help register your domain name.
   
   [Tip: when choosing a domain name, try to ensure it is strongly related to your brand or contains keywords relevant to your market - which is good for organic SEO]
   
   
4. Set up your own website. You can find DIY site builder solutions on the net. These sites may not be as distinctive as you might like. Otherwise use a web designer but ask for samples first. They will advise on content, customer engagement tools and on navigation to make it for customers to buy from you.
   
   [WordPress is becoming increasingly popular for general website building as well as blogs. You might want to look at the Thesis theme (and why it is considered to be the best available) or have your site set up for you.]
   
   
5. Display the following information:
   
   - Contact details
   - VAT registration if applicable
   - Privacy policy
   - Terms and conditions of sale
   - Exchange/refund policy
   - Up to date prices and stock availability
   
   
6. Set up a virtual shopping cart to allow customers to select items for payment later through the check out page. Again your ISP may have an integrated shopping cart or you can buy specialist shopping cart software.
   
   
7. Set up an account with a provider like PayPal to collect payments. Charges are usually a percentage of each transaction.
   
   
8. Promote your website. Use your URL everywhere... business cards, brochures, letter heads, e-mail signatures, adverts. And make sure you capture customer e-mail addresses to let them know about new products and latest offers and promotions.
   
   
9. Market yourself on search engines. Either by paying for an ad linked to your site on a pay per click basis so you are only paying for visitors or by working with a specialist to optimise your content so that you appear high on search engine rankings against selected key words. Both approaches should be used in the early days.
   
   
10. Finally, test your site just before you go live and regularly. Do all the features work? Is the end to end process slick and straightforward?
    
    [Make sure you site is tested by your intended customer with no instruction from you. Even if everything works, if they don't 'get it' and end up buying from you, all your time, effort and money will go to waste!]
    

You are now well on way to having your online business up and running and giving you the ability to earn money. As with most things in life, you will rapidly learn 80% in the early days and spend the remainder of the life of the business learning the finer points. But it is a rewarding journey.

...

So I promised you a few SEO tips and already mentioned that the reason Neil approached me was not only to promote his site, but also to improve his site's rankings in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs). You see, the fact is, that no matter how well you do your on-page optimisation (those things on your site within your control), inbound links to your site have a much greater impact on your ranking position. However, it's not quite a simple as that...

The quality of inbound links matters greatly. You can actually be penalised by Google for trying to cheat the system with 'black hat' techniques (and your pages will go down the ranks or even disappear from the indexes altogether). The good news is that you get bonus points for:

• Links that appear on relevant sites -
  I.e. if the topic of the page the link appears on is the same as the topic of the page it links to, this is good.
  
  
• Good use of anchor text -
  Anchor text being the words you click on to follow the link. A terrible example of anchor text would be 'click here' - it means nothing. Notice how Neil's researchers used 'earn money' for their anchor text above. It tells Google that the page being linked to is about earning money, i.e. it contains keywords they're trying to rank for. Also, it is much better for the anchor text to appear in context within a paragraph (ideally high up a page) than in a bullet list.
  
  
• Variety -
  It's the spice of life, and Google knows this. If all of your inbound links go to the same page and have the same anchor text, Google will get suspicious - it's all a bit too convenient. Google wants to see things happening naturally. For example, Google doesn't want to think that Neil approached me to try and get cashback.co.uk in the number 1 spot. Google wants the most popular relevant site to appear in the number 1 spot, and that is the site that people are talking about on their blogs and linking to because they want to. Everyone is different, so everyone would have different anchor text. Google rewards these patterns of behaviour. On that note, it's also worth mentioning that providing facilities to make it easy for visitors to promote and link to your site is therefore very wise indeed!
  

Here are a few links to articles and videos on the subject that you may ind useful. I posted all of these on my Twitter account, so you may like to follow theOBC on Twitter.

• Link building guide
• Link building stimulus plan
• How to get awesome links (video)
• Why you shouldn't create a link farm (video)
• More about off-page over optimisation (video)

P.S. I changed the link I was originally given to the cashback.co.uk site when I noticed that they had an affiliate program. If I'm going to include a link to their site, why not a link that I get paid for - this article is all about making money online afterall! I hope you found it useful.

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For the full course you have to pay to join, however, they're also giving away a significant proportion of the premium content for FREE. To get the free content all you need to do is submit your email address. Don't worry, you won't get any spam from them and you can unsubscribe at any time with a single click.

Why am I so enthusiastic about this?

Quite simply, this is the course that lead me to quit my well-paid job as an employee. Before I set up Online Business Consultant I spent literally years (hundreds of hours in total) researching how to achieve this without succeeding in making it a reality. Then I joined the course and soon after became my own boss. It's scary but exciting (and let's be honest - a whole lot of work too).

How to get the FREE premium content...

As I mentioned just a moment ago, all you need to do is sign up on the Project Mojave site and they'll send you emails as new content becomes available. What I'll be doing is writing articles about the materials that are made available so you can better understand what they're about and how they're useful to you. It's worth signing up for my updates too as I won't just be writing reviews on Project Mojave, but will also provide lots of other useful information to help you set up, promote and generally make a success of your business - whether it's an online business or a traditional business with an online presence. You may now be asking yourself:

Why give away valuable internet marketing information?

I've previously stated on my main site:

The truth is that there is nothing special, clever or secret about what I do. Anyone with basic computer literacy, lots of time to dedicate to research and a willingness to work hard can do what I'm offering.

This information is freely available anyway and shortcuts some of the hard work searching for advice that works. All I'm doing is giving you a helping hand and pointing you in the right direction. Hey, if you ever wanted more support with any of this, you might end up employing my services anyway.

But more than that - I suspect you might be a little like me. A lot of this is about becoming the master of your own destiny and creating the life you want to lead. Project Mojave is SO MUCH MORE than an internet marketing course. It's about identifying what you're passionate about and providing value to others by sharing that passion. There's no sleazy sales techniques here, it's about genuinely helping others. The bottom line is that if you provide real value, people will pay for it.


FULL DISCLOSURE: As always I like to be totally upfront. The links in this article and future articles on free Project Mojave materials contain affiliate links. It's worth repeating... I'll never promote anything which I wouldn't spend my own money on, and I did spend my own money to become a Project Mojave member. However, these articles aren't here to persuade you to sign up for the course, they're here to guide you toward some of the best free articles and videos on this topic that are available on the internet today. I do hope you get as much out of them as I have.

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Here's the deal...

First of all, this offer is aimed at those of you who don't yet have a domain, website or blog (for this venture at least). The reason for this is that you'll separately be purchasing the domain name and deluxe hosting* from GoDaddy.com - this costs approximately $80-$90 for the first year. Just to be clear, the $39 you're paying Johnny is for him to do all the hard work in setting up your blog.

*Deluxe hosting allows you to have unlimited websites on the one plan, so you can add more sites at a later date for no extra cost.

Please note that you cannot use any GoDaddy promo codes with this offer. So 'all in', you'll be paying around $130 to have a whole, professional-looking, fully-functional website that you can administrate on your own for a full year. That’s pretty cheap.

If you want to know how a Wordpress blog can be just like a website, click to read what Johnny has to say on the subject.

What Johnny will do for you...

1. Install Wordpress software on your site, so that you have a blog.
   
2. Tell you how to get into the place where you can write posts and tweak it.
   
3. Upload the theme you chose and make it active so that your blog looks all pretty.
   
4. Upload some basic plug-ins and activate them. They are:
   
• wp-spamfree to fight blog comment spam
  
• all-in-one-SEO pack to get you started with search engines
  
• Google sitemap generator, also to help you with the engines
  
• Subscribe to comments, which in Johnny's opinion is essential to encouraging conversation on your blog
  

What Johnny will not be doing for you...

1. Move your posts or database over from Blogger or whatever old hosted blog you have, if you have one.
   
2. Personal blog tutoring.
   
3. Pretty much everything else.
   

Don’t worry, it won’t overwhelm you. It’s fairly intuitive, and you need to learn it anyway. Johnny will do everything that is essential. All you’ll really need to do is to write posts, and anything else you figure out how to do is just easy.

How it works...

1. You follow an insanely easy 10-step process Johnny has written up to buy your hosting and domain name.
   
2. You pick a theme - your blog’s “look” as described at the end of the 10-step process.
   
3. You email Johnny the information he needs - GoDaddy login info, theme choice, and more. Don’t worry, he can’t get at your credit card info or anything with that login info. You should probably log in yourself and poke around to assure yourself of this.
   
4. Within a few days, He’ll install your blog, your new theme, and some blog plug-ins.
   
5. Johnny will then tell you how to get to the new blog and its control panel, which is where you’ll write posts and all of the fun stuff. Then you change your passwords so Johnny can't get back into your stuff.
   

Get your website and blog now...

That's it - nice and simple. If you want Johnny to set up your website and blog, just click the button (it'll take you through to Johnny's site - then all you have to do it click 'buy now')...


Who is Johnny and why should you trust him?

Johnny B. Truant is a website developer with over a decade of experience. He has his own blog called The Economy Isn't Happening - and if you click on that link, you can read what he has to say about himself. More recently Johnny has been working with Naomi from IttyBiz (again, click the link to read one of their articles). Naomi is a bit of a guru, and I learned a lot about of what I do by starting with her ebook, SEO School. They're well established in the online world - and successful too. A word of warning though - their language can be a little 'blue' at times! Other than that, they're both straight-talking nice folk.

Still not sure? Read all the good things people are saying about Johnny...

Get your self-hosted Wordpress blog or website installed for only $39!

FULL DISCLOSURE: The links to the $39 offer in this article are affiliate links. This means that if you take Johnny up on his offer, I receive a percentage. Does this mean I'm trying to make money? Well, yes - but I have my reputation to consider, which is why I'll only ever promote anything I'd be happy to spend my own money on. It's also why I've taken the time to explain why you can trust Johnny to do a great job creating your website and blog at such a great price.