Starting an Online Business
The hardest part of building a business online is getting started. If you are anything like me, you do not like working for months on something and finding out later that it was all wrong.
Sadly for me, I have done that a couple of times but I learned so much from those experiences that I am glad I went through them.
When I first got interested in building a website, I came across a website called 2createawebsite.com. Lisa (the owner of the site) teaches people how to build websites and make money from them. She suggested that we purchase Site Build It because of the tremendous education value it offers.
I bought “Site Build It” and over the next year I built a website over movies. I will say that if you want some very good training about how to build websites and how to research the topics to build your site around, Site Build It has excellent training and tools for you to use. I credit Site Build It for preparing me for my journey through all of this.
After I had gone through this training I still struggled. I was not consistent in my writing and I soon stopped writing entirely. I wanted quicker results but I didn’t understand what it took to be successful online. Also Site Build It only sparingly went over how to promote a site. I later found that I needed to learn how to promote my website.
I then took a 3 month break and decided to try again so I built a new website over Dating. I chose dating because I learned that you needed to be really passionate about what it is you are writing about. I worked on this site for about 9 months but still I got very little results.
This is when I really got discouraged and started to doubt if building a website was for me. So I decided to explore some other forms of making money online.
Now I am no stranger to network marketing but I had never tried doing it online. So, I figured why not and began to dabble again in network marketing. Now the funny thing about this was that the reason why my websites had failed miserably was because I was not promoting them.
I thought that writing good content was enough and people would just find my blog and it would grow. Inadvertently, I had found the answer to my questions by exploring network marketing.
To make a long story short, I found a network marketing business (The Renegade University) that focused on generating leads through attraction marketing or “education marketing”.
The best way to build a network marketing business or any online business is through the very same techniques that web masters use to promote their websites.
This site had video tutorials and an e-book about how to promote an online business. I watched the tutorials and purchased the e-book and I have to say that I got my moneys worth.
I was even tempted to actually try and build a network marketing business. I resisted the urge and began to apply the techniques to my website. Here is a summary of what I learned during those 2 months of research. You can apply these promotion techniques to your business.
13 Ways to Promote A Site
1. Blogging
2. Viral Marketing (Video Submission sites such as Youtube)
3. Article Marketing
4. Content Sharing Sites (Squidoo, Hubpages)
5. Bookmarking Sites (That do have a link back)
6. Social Networking Sites
7. Search Engines
8. PPC (Pay Per Click)
9. News Presses
10. Commenting on Blogs/Forums
11. Email Marketing through Lead Capture Pages
12. Creating a free automated “system” if your site concept applies
13. Writing a free ebook
All of these methods are effective but I will not attempt to explain each one in this article because they all are very in dept and I will write a full article dedicated to each them. I will give a quick summary of the three major techniques.
Blogging
Writing a blog around a single niche keyword can generate large amounts of traffic because you can conquer that keyword easier than a popular one. You can do this because your building an entire site around one niche keyword as opposed to just having one page for that keyword. They suggested that you use Wordpress.org and not Wordpress.com. You could use the free blogs but your not doing yourself any favors going that route.
Article Marketing
The best way to get traffic is to give away free value. This is what the net is all about. So writing articles to the free article submission sites such as ezinearticles.com is effective if you write quality articles and place a link to your site in your signature.
Note: Go download the new Google Toolbar because they have a page rank feature that will tell you how Google ranks the page your on. Its a green bar and has 0 through 10 rankings to tell you where the page stands.
Viral Marketing
This as well as article marketing may be the most effect ways to promote your site. Video marketing has a ton of advantages and sites such as youtube have a place for you to place a link to your site in your description. You also can put up a link to your site from the video itself by the annotation feature they have.
Note: I have noticed that if you just copy and paste other people’s descriptions, your video will struggle. I believe that google wants everyone to do things right and rewards people that write unique content descriptions. The key to youtube is to build a useful channel that has a lot of people are subscribing to. That way when you submit new videos, those videos will get tons of views very quickly.
Having some combination of these methods working together is the best way to promote your site.
My Path to Blogging
Now, I had to make another very important decision after doing this research. I found that blogs offered some very important benefits that websites did not offer. That was the ability to interact with the visitors who wanted to engage the owner or just give an opinion.
I decided in the end to take my content and start over once again but this time with a blog. It was a long process but I am very glad I decided to do it. I have a few blogs I write in but I focus on this blog as my main business. I do not advise people to have more than one blog starting out because you need to focus on one blog. I personally have a home based business that pays my bills, so I have all the time in the world to spend on two other blogs.
One blog being a fun blog (The Dating Niche I talked about before) and the other a spiritual blog I write in once a week.
The last part of this learning curve has been a 3 month journey through the techniques of pure Internet Marketing. I have learned the significance of building email lists, providing e-courses and online communities. I have learned how to create products and sell those products. So all in all I have a well rounded knowledge base of how to build an online business.
This journey has taken two years to finish but the wealth of knowledge I have recieved has been been worth it. I started with no knowledge of anything to having a pretty good knowledge base of the whole process. I have spent hundreds of hours learning this stuff and I continue to research and learn.
I want to share my knowledge with you so that you don’t have to have the big learning curve to go through that I did. This section about getting started will be a 5 step process that will show you what you need to do to get started building your online business.
This biggest hurdle for a complete newbie is to find out what it is you need to do in the first place. Where you can learn how to do those things and have the support you need to be successful.
So here are the 5 steps to getting started building an online business…
Step 5- Promotion Strategies- Social Media, Bookmarking, Blog Commenting, Forums, Pings, Adwords
Discussion
If you have anything to add or feelings about your own journey, go ahead and comment below.
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Nice list of options! You inspire me to write a post myself on how to decide what is the best starting point! Blog on!
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