Business Online

Over the past month I’ve been trying to add one more site to my list of online businesses, and at some point - because I didn’t have the time - I decided to look for a freelancer to do some part of the project.

To cut a really long story short, it wasn’t too easy coming up with the right person, primarily because it wasn’t too easy getting my hands on a good list of possible free lance web sites. So why am I putting up this post ?

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Since we’ve spent the last week trying to put together an e-commerce web site for our varying online businesses , I thought it would be useful if I gave one more tool that could help to attract more customers and clients to your online business.

A lot of the time you’ve put together this really cool ebook, or software , or you’ve bought the resell rights to some really cool stuff but the best you can do is put a text link to the download page , or use a shoddy image as the link. This might have worked ages ago but with all the eye catching stuff available on the internet you’ll be doing your online businesses a whole lot of harm and you’re not likely to have as much sales as you ought to. So what can you do ?

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We’ve already dicussed how wordpress can be the best e-commerce solution for your online businesses and the fact that its free and comes ready to go, ‘right out of the box’.It is important that you understand search engine optimization if your online businesses are going to be successful. You may not need to pay for professional services, but understanding the way it works will eventually drive targeted traffic and generate income from your businesses. There’s a lot of information  here about configuring the All-in-one-SEO wordpress plugin, please go through it and follow the advice and tips. So what’s the next step in setting up your e-commerce web site ?

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Its taken a while but I’ve managed to come back to this series. I believe it is an excellent piece for anyone trying to set up online businesses. Hopefully I’ll be tidying it up real soon. I plan to do about three posts on it and put up a live demo, here.

Like i said in the ‘prequel’ to this post setting up online businesses may take a bit but generally any one can get through it. So what’s in store next ?

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I’ve spent the last 6 hours going through a couple of firefox addons, to find useful addons for different online businesses. Here’s the list.

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If you’re reading this post I’m sure that you’ve come across a lot of these kind of posts and you’ve been trying to get your head round these networks, social bookmarking sites or whatever name you choose to call them. I’ve been there, I’ve done that and I’ve got a tee-shirt, and that is why I’ve decided to write this post. If you’re one of the lucky ones who are just starting out running online businesses please read through, you may not know how much this is worth since you haven’t yet wasted useful time chasing after apparitions, but I wish I’d found a post like this at the beginning.

If you have any experience running online businesses ( whether it’s a product or a service you offer, and whether it is a structured business or you just make some change on the side ) you would have noticed that these social bookmarking sites are pretty good - they’ll send decent traffic your way. But there’s that extra special gem to the whole idea, if you can make it to first/front page , you’ll have more traffic ( to the sites where you run your online businesses ) in a day than most sites can hope for in a life time . So what’s the problem with this? Who would complain about that?

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One of the things this blog tries to do is to provide your online business the best resources at the cheapest rates. So I’ve literally crawled through the internet looking for some really good web applications that may be useful for running an online business. From invoicing to file conversion I’ve tried to put up a very wide range of applications. Most of them are free, or at least have free versions. I hope you’ll find them useful.

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I’ve already given a background to this in my previous post . So I intend to be very specific and hopefullly brief in this post.

I already divided starting up and running a blog ( i.e as an online business ) into 4 areas. I clearly stated that these four areas are by no means exhaustive, but are a basic pattern to show how synergizing can be the extra edge you need to get you blog up and running. I gave the reasons why I chose to use blogging as an example but clearly thats all it is. The principles and ideas I’ve shared here can definitely be applied to any online business.

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In my previous post I discussed the fact that ‘going solo’ or trying to run a profitable online business on your own may not necessarily be the best thing for you. There are , and I do not deny this fact , people who have the discipline and perseverance to stay at it and build their online business empires no matter how long it takes. But for a lot of people it can get pretty discouraging. So how do you still manage to get your online business running, and ’stay the course’ in those slow but unavoidable periods ?

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I’ve been thinking of putting up this post for a while. A post that describes a way to keep up with all the multiple tasks involved in starting up and running a successful online business, like this blog. It’s apparent that as competition grows stiff and the distance between those making big time money from their online businesses and those just managing to get by widens, a lot may be needed to get in, get ahead, and more importantly stay ahead.

The truth is if you take the time to browse through the forums and read the blog posts, whether its on internet marketing, search engine optimization, or any other online industry that has grown to support the billion-dollar online business world, you’ll discover that the number of do’s and don’ts at best is staggering. It is literally impossible to remember and obey all of them - and thats when they aren’t clearly conflicting each other. Sometimes 2 market leaders in the same industry hold such different views that one begins to wonder …

I’ve read a lot of posts where potential online business owners either complain of having wasted $xxxx on worthless advice or information , or having spent so much time trying out some new idea which eventually failed or didn’t yield the right results. Even if these attempts don’t take money out of your pocket, the valuable time lost most times is as bad.

Since I put up my post on the next profitable online business I’ve been thinking a lot. Being able to decipher where the online business world is headed next is a task better left for geniuses , prophets or something in between - and I still wont place my money on it. Like I said in that post, the aim is to get everyone to put all their ideas in one place, and maybe by sifting and analyzing , we all will be able to get a fresh idea or two. Even though it may be possible to find and start up an online business that suits you , succeeding at it is going to have its challenges.

I believe that building your own successful online business , no matter the niche can be broken into a specific number of distinct areas of specialty, and in my opinion online businesses may have gone past a one-man show for people just getting in - that is if you’re determined to make it big. The basic idea is that if three or four people can get together, each with some experience or at least a firm grasp of a specific area within that online business niche, it will be easier to get that business off the ground without the usual hiccups.

By running your ideas past other people you suddenly become accountable, something that may have been absent if you were running a one-man show. Another advantage, ( and the reason I am bothering to put this post up ) is that over time each person can get specialized in his own specific area, learning new tips, following trends, building the right relationships, and generally keeping the online business ahead, something that would be an extremely daunting task for a single person.

Most big online businesses who have the money achieve these same goals , most of the time by employing people. If you are just starting out that may not be an option , It may even be outright unadvisable. But the fact that you can’t employ the right people to work for you doesn’t mean you should give up on finding the right people to work WITH you.

How do you find the right people ? How can you determine your own strengths and weaknesses ? Are there some weaknesses you can work on and improve over time ? These are some of the questions that I hope to answer in my subsequent posts. Specifically my next post will apply this idea or principle to the online blogging business, with an estimated 170,000 blogs being started each day, this idea I hope will reduce the number of start-up failures. I’ll break blogging into constituent parts and give ideas on how this synergy can be leveraged to give you an edge.

It would be wonderful to hear your comments and please feel free to subscribe to my rss.