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For me to start telling you how often it is reported that business fail in their very first years of operating, at an alarming rate of 95% to 97% is not going to help you very much. But please bear with me, that is not my intention, to discourage you from starting an online business, even though the great majority of those that fail, actually fail within the first year! No, what I like to do is letting you know the basics of setting up a profitable online business. If you start a business without much foundation and knowledge of business operation, you are setting yourself for failure. That is why I embark in this effort to get you a solid foundation of business operation that will prevent you from driving blind into a war zone! So keep reading these online business basics, revealed for you to get a good start in the internet marketing world, that will increase your chances of success online. There are so many online business models you can choose from. You’ve probably heard a few mentioned often, like selling physical products, these being shoes or cars, toys etc. Digital products which are downloadable: e-books and videos and also you can decide to sell other people’s products and services. But you can also choose to create your own products as well, and sell them yourself or get affiliates to sell them for you too. The thing to concentrate at the beginning is to know precisely which model you are going to dedicate your business to, and to stick to that model. This may be perceived by you as something perhaps too easy for me to say, but not to do this is like going around trying to do that and the other, and so not being able to channel your energy properly. Failing to arrive at your most wanted outcome is not so terrible either. You can always try to make some digital products and upload them to affiliate networks for other affiliates to promote them for you. This is a very lucrative model which can make you a lot of money. More on this later. While it is true that you can make money in the internet simply by doing direct linking, that is getting the prospect aligned to the products that solve their needs and wants, you are going to need sooner or later, registering your domain name. This can be a short, catchy or memorable domain name or it could be one that contain relevant keywords, that have a lot of traffic, free search engine traffic related to the number of searches per month. After that, the domain must be hosted somewhere. You need reliable hosting and so, don’t consider using free hosting, since this could get your site removed at any time, causing you a lot of trouble with considerable loses of revenue. Instead, try to research for the best hosting companies out there, and you’ll come up with one that is very reliable, affordable (around $10.00 per month) allowing you to host tens of sites in one account. Consider their customer service, speed of their servers, downtime periods, features etc. You don’t want to face a lot of downtime with restricted features, bad customer service and so on, so research in this matter is very important always. Take your time with your research so that you arrive at the hosting company that you desire, right from the beginning. Another thing that is going to help you a lot is to consider using other people to do for your business what you feel are difficult for you to do. These people called freelancers, can be very skilled and help you speed up your business, and at the same time, free you to concentrate more in expanding your business. But you need caution really; take care in choosing those that are reliable and very capable. Ask for samples of what they do and of course ask for references always. Not all freelancers are alike so pay attention. So, when you decide to create your own products and if you want to go the route of freelancers, make sure you have a clear outline of the business you want to create, to give to the freelancer dealing with your order or contract. Give them even content for them to include in your site if necessary. Now let us talk about the traffic that you need for your business. This will be the life and blood of your business and as you may know, without it, there is no business online. You are going to need to start with a sales letter to create traffic to your sites. Clearly sales copy is not everyone’s favourite. It is rather difficult to get it right and you are better off to outsource it to a very experienced copy writer like Joe Vitale, Joe Sugarman or Dan Kennedy. Mind you, for any of these you would need a lot of money, but no, use other more affordable copy writers after you seek references about them and you can afford their charges. Find out about sales letters that you know are effective and store them in your computer, so that you can refer to them later when you need them to find ideas for your own copy. Store sales copy for the niches you are in, to give you ideas that you can expand later on when you write your own sales copy to promote your products or other people’s products and programs. Next, you need a very important thing: yes your own payment processing system, so that you can get paid by your customers. A preference for many online people is to use PayPal since their fees are low and they make it so easy to get cash when you need it. Mind you, they do not have a built-in affiliate system. But you can have an external script that will allow you to have PayPal with affiliates like the Rapid Action Profits script which is not cheap although very powerful, allowing you to share commissions with affiliates, without manually sending payments. Affiliates are paid instantly in fact! And now back to Affiliates. Yes, use them as often as you can to sell your products and services weather you are selling physical products or digital products. Just think about all that traffic that affiliates can bring to your sales page and that you do not have to pay for! The more resources you provide for your affiliates to promote for you, the easier they will find it to get you lots of traffic to your website. One thing you must avoid is to be relaxed about marketing. Many online business owners don’t do marketing on a consisting basics and that is a big mistake. Now it is not like in the past when you put up a website, submitted it to several search engines and without much effort the traffic would come flowing in. The marketing now needs to be more focussed, more relentless on a consistent daily basics. Use totally free marketing methods like SEO (search engine optimization), video marketing, social marketing and forum marketing, oh, and of course article marketing too. And you should consider also other methods, paid methods that require you to pay upfront sometimes, but you can see results that much faster. PPC “pay-per-click”, paid advertising etc. To end this article, the last online business basics tactic is building an email list. Doing email marketing is very profitable and effective. Just think how wonderful it is to be able to contact prospects even if they never return to your website. When you get them on your list, you will be able to market to them over and over again. For this purpose there are many autoresponders you can look for, so doing a bit of research to choose one that suits your aims is a good idea. Yes, start building your list right away and you will be able to sell to each subscriber many times over, thus increasing the profits you will make online. G Calvo This is what you can do right now. Go and click http://www.GermanCalvo.com, and you can download a totally FREE internet marketing library or choose the IM topic that you like, to boost your profits doing business online, this in addition to the reading of the article above: “Online Business Basics Revealed”
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Online business, marketing, online marketing, affiliate marketing, SEO, affiliates, PayPal, email marketing, free marketing, email list,
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