While starting an online business is perhaps the easiest way you can get into business, it’s definitely not the easiest way to start a profitable business. If you have the right set of skills or you know the right people with the required set of skills, you can have an entire e-commerce site up within a matter of weeks or even a couple of days. Whether it’s going to be a profitable e-commerce website is another story altogether.
Beyond the “Franchise”
Erecting a website which is earmarked to operate as an online business is not unlike buying a franchise, except since “buying a franchise” in this particular manner can be done so quickly and easily, naturally just setting it up won’t automatically equate to wealth-building profits. It is what you do after the core structure of your online business has been erected which defines success and separates successful online businesses from online business failures. It must be said that there are definitely way more online business failures than there are successes, so you shouldn’t be under any illusions about your chances.
With the right amount of dedication, focus and knowledge, however, any online venture or online business you launch could be a resounding success. But keep in mind that there’s way more to online business than just setting up an e-commerce store and selling physical or digital goods. You need to understand that there is something called online reputation that is vital to making your business successful. Let’s say that you are doing fine offering what you have got. You might be earning handsomely. You find out one fine day that there is a negative picture of your product circulating on the internet. Perhaps someone morphed the image of your product claiming that it is of poor quality and making it viral on the Internet. How do you think would this single image be impacting your business? Well, for starters, it would tarnish the reputation of your business. After which, you will start losing your customers. Hence, you need to remove that image, possibly with the help of a google image removal expert. The best part of seeking help from a professional is that they can manage your online reputation, which is necessary to grow your brand.
So, if you think that it’s easier to sell digital goods because as soon as buyers have completed their payment, they can just download their digital goods, then you might be mistaken. There’s more to it than that and making a success out of it entails an understanding of online reputation and what people do on the Web.
What People Do Online
So what is it that people do online and how does one find ways of monetising those actions? “Everything” is not a good answer because that’s where the essence of monetising people’s online actions gets lost. People search for information online — information regarding products or services they very well may want to purchase, or just information for entertainment or for academic purposes. Now there are a lot of opportunities for monetisation between the simple action of someone typing a phrase into their favourite search engine and then clicking through the search results brought up by the search engine. Webmasters (website owners) want visitors, hits, clicks, impressions (web traffic), etc. They want legally obtained stock images. They want content. They want domain names, back-links, collaborations, sales and many other things they’re willing to pay good money for and with the millions of websites and website owners in existence, merely isolating a small section of that market could have you operating your own very profitable online business.
You’ll have to do some searching and experimenting with the various implied business models though and once you’ve found one that proves to be working, the costs associated with its up-scaling can be easily covered with some next day cash from a lender which isn’t as rigid as something like a big banking institution, in terms of their strictest of lending criteria which often border on being unrealistic.
