Being an entrepreneur sounds scary, and people don’t even know where to begin with an online business. Luckily, there are clear and repeatable steps to getting to an online business, and with the right work, anyone can do it. In this guide, we will go through the steps needed to get you from an idea to a fully functioning online business.
Step 1: Define Your Niche
Starting an online business, the very first thing you need to do is define your niche. A niche simply means what part of the market you are going to cater to, what part of the market are you going to target? You need to pick an area that you are not only passionate about, but also has a sizable customer base.
A few questions to ponder are:
- What do you have a passion for?
- What are some of your skills that others might find useful?
- Are there any products or services in this area that people want or need?
Another very important part of determining your niche is making sure it is not too broad. For example, you can think about the niche of “fitness”. This is SUPER broad. But if you put in a little more thought, you can think of something like, “fitness for busy professionals”. This is a lot more specific and can appeal to a more targeted and specific audience. The more you can dial this in, the more that you can market to a specific group of people.
Step 2: Chose a Business Model
After picking your niche, you get to choose your business model based on your skills and preferences. Let us take a look at a few models you can prefer.
| Business Model | Description | Start-Up Costs | Potential Earnings |
| E-commerce | Selling physical or digital products on stores like Shopify. | Medium to High | Depends on products |
| Affiliate Marketing | Marketing and selling other people’s products for a commission. | Low | 100 to 500+ monthly |
| Online Courses or Coaching | Teaching others a skill like business or fitness. | Medium | 50 to 500+ per course |
| Freelance Services | Providing services like writing, designing, or consulting. | Low | 20 to 100+ every hour |
| Subscription Services | Providing products or content on a recurrent subscription model. | Medium to High | Consistent income |
Depending on your business model, you can have more control over how you want to design your business, your target market, and how you want to approach your business marketing. Choose one that best fits your interests!
In order to finalize this section, we need guidance on creating an online business profile. Based on our previous conversation, we assume potential users will select certain combinations of businesses. However, we need to consider the target niche, meaning we will need to build an online presence for each target niche. Therefore, we intend to make a Static Block for this section. Illustration Instructions Block. Note these are draft images for a simple plot illustration with structural descriptions and notes. These should be tailored with sample notes for a basic form of a person writing notes. Sample Placeholder Images. The sketch should not be completed in its entirety in this note section, as this is a draft illustration of an image for instruction purposes. There are certain layout specifications we will need to work on on our side, with a reset of layout specifications to be completed. To keep, we will set a target draft date to just keep a hold on. For each target niche for which we will need to build a business presence, we will create a description with an online and offline business presence assessment with screen notes of a target business description that has different target business screens for the description to be created. We will create a description for each.
The targeted niches will be constructed based on the active user spreadsheets we generated previously. We do have the ability to create a description for targeted niche users. However, due to the inability of creating business accounts, we will keep it simple and descriptive with sample screenshots to look like screenshots of active accounts. We will also use these business target niches for a brief description of social media summaries to finish the groundwork. We will finish this part with a simple template on the email drafts we created. The final lines will be the active screenshots of the social niche users along with our previously active spreadsheets. This section will end our basic notes and summaries.
Next up is building what you’ll be selling. As an example, depending on your business model, you may need to buy some inventory, design some digital products (like an e-book or an online course), or you might offer some personal services (like web design or writing).
Here are some ideas or tips on what to offer:
- E-commerce: Find a supplier, make some products yourself, or look into dropshipping.
- Affiliate Marketing: Pick out some items and their affiliate programs that your audience and niche would benefit from.
- Online Courses: Outline your modules and content if you’re making a course. Use Teachable and Udemy to help you.
- Freelance Services: Clearly define your offers such as writing, graphics, design, or marketing that you are able to do.
The most important tip is to try and make something that helps your audience solve their pain points.
Step 5: Publicize Your Online Business
It’s time to concentrate on publicizing your business now that it’s up and running. Good and effective advertisement is important to make and retain sales and serve your target customers. Here are a few pointers.
- Content Marketing: You could start a podcast, a YouTube channel, or a blog to share information, stories, or advice that focus on your target niche. You will gain their trust and improve your search engine ranking, driving traffic to your site.
- Paid Advertising: Google Ads and Facebook Ads let you pay to drive traffic and target your advertising to specific demographics.
- Search Engine Optimization: Make and maintain your site more visible/assets to the internet search engine’s index or list of documents to become more visible or accessible.
- Influencer Marketing: Promote to the audience of the niche experts or leaders.
- Referral Programs: New consumers are rewarded by you and their referrals.
Step 6: Measure and Scale Your Business
In this stage, the business starts to grow and you have to track certain metrics to know if you are headed in the right direction. These metrics to track include the following:
- Website Traffic: Site visitors, how many are clicking on in your page? You can use something like Google Analytics to track this.
- Conversion Rate: Of the visitors gained, how many are turning into customers? This shows how effective your page and marketing campaigns are.
- Revenue Growth: Revenue range, make sure to monitor that over a certain period of time to know if your business is scaling You do not just want a constant income you want to have an income that increases.
Achieving your business goals and goals is then the time to scale and grow your business. Lost of scaling can be easily done by providing more products, entering new markets, or hiring someone to do your lower priority jobs.
Conclusion
Starting from scratch is the hardest part of building an online business, and it can be stressful. But as long you foster an online presence, promote the products you develop, and create a niche in the market for your business, it can be successful. Don’t forget that the hardest part comes first, be persistent and the results will follow.
