Online businesses have tremendous appeal to people worn down by the 9-to-5 grind. They also attract those who need more time or schedule flexibility.
Moreover, many people dream of working for themselves or seeing a passion project brought to life.
The good news is that starting an online business doesn’t have to be a dream. A sharp entrepreneur can get a business started without quitting her or his day job.
This article shows how to launch an online business. We’ll cover managing it alongside your full-time job constraints.
Let’s dive in!
What Are the Most Successful Online Businesses?
There is no preset formula for creating a successful online business. However, great online small businesses tend to share a handful of common traits.
Most successful online businesses rely on the business owner’s skills rather than inventory. They focus on the owner’s expertise instead of physical products.
For example, many profitable online businesses focus on owner skills. These include SEO, web design, technical writing, and similar expertise.
Many successful online businesses start simple. Initially, they’re just a business owner with a well-honed skill and a laptop or smartphone. There are ways to expand these businesses later, which will increase expenditures.
In some cases, potential online business owners will have a specific product or product line that they wish to sell. It’s not uncommon for online businesses to import and sell goods from Asia in North America, or vice versa, and clever small business owners are skilled at identifying various market opportunities related to consumer goods.
But in many other cases, owners launch great online businesses with only their expertise and minimal equipment.
Below are some other commonalities that successful small online businesses share:
1. They Fill a Need Within a Market
The most successful businesses – online or otherwise – work by identifying demand for a good or service within a given market. They then fulfill that demand to the best of their ability.
Here are several ways to break this up and clarify it:
What separates successful online businesses from failures is focus. Some owners become fixated on a particular product or service, regardless of market demand.
Business owners then use overly aggressive sales techniques. They try to force the market to accept their product or service. This approach is debatable in effectiveness. More importantly, selling a product or service can become very costly.
Meanwhile, the clever and often more successful owners read a given market and then tailor their offered products or services to match the demand.
Not only does this cut back on the cost of selling a particular product or service, but owners are often able to build their business more rapidly via gross profit.
2. They Use Pay-Per-Click Advertising
While online businesses ultimately want to generate organic traffic to their websites, though of course using effective SEO and backlinks techniques, using Pay-Per-Click Advertising in the early days of a business can be a very effective way to drive traffic to a site while great backlinks and keywords help it climb Google rankings.
Firstly, PPC ads appear on search pages right away, and secondly, PPC ads allow you to explore different keywords, prices, headlines, and even different selling styles.
You get instant traffic from PPC ads. You can also use them to find the best and highest converting keywords. Then allocate those keywords throughout your site in both copy and code. This will impact your organic search rankings.
How to Start an Online Business from Home
Most people find starting an online business daunting. They assume it will incur huge initial costs.
While this can happen in some situations, it’s not typical. Most people can start successful online businesses from home.
What most people don’t realize is simple. You can start an online business for free or very inexpensively from your home workspace.
Other Suggestions on How to Start an Online Business
One of the benefits of working a regular job while you build or select an online business is that you can be a bit discriminating in your choices.
You’re not yet relying on an online business as your primary income source. This means you don’t have to jump at the first opportunity.
That said, a potential entrepreneur can find great online business opportunities in a number of different places. Below are a few of the more common approaches people take when attempting to start an online business:
3. Consider Selling on eBay or Amazon
Some may not consider eBay or Amazon sales legitimate online businesses. However, top sellers on both sites often handle thousands of transactions monthly. Many successful online businesses operate on eBay, Amazon, or both platforms.
Running an online business on eBay or Amazon has two main downsides. First, the business relies on products rather than services. Second, both platforms charge considerable seller fees.
eBay, for example, charges a final value fee of 8-10% on most sales. This can cut into profit margins significantly.
That said, eBay and Amazon both offer global exposure and plug-and-play selling formats, greatly reducing many of the time-consuming drawbacks associated with running an online business.
In many cases, an eBay or Amazon seller account won’t be enough to satisfy the entrepreneurial spirit of many small-business owners. However, these platforms serve as good options if your primary goal is generating revenue and escaping the 40-hour work week.
A few of the best items to sell on eBay include low-weight, high-margin items such as video games and personalized jewelry. An online business owner’s expertise will greatly come into play, but these are just examples of products that a potential owner may want to consider selling.
4. Trade Domain Names
If you have any familiarity with stock trading, then you know about the concepts of active trading and penny-stock trading. Website domain trading works very similarly – investors and speculators buy up potentially intriguing domain names and attempt to flip them for a quick, tidy profit.”
Many small business owners know that a great domain name can be the difference between heavy web traffic and a fight to drive traffic to a given site.
Domain names for sale online can have a great deal of value, and people looking for a secondary source of income could do worse than to further investigate domain name trading.
If you can obtain a strong domain name at a minimal cost, there’s a good chance you will later sell the name to an eager buyer at a significant profit.
While this type of online business could take some time to build, in other cases, an investor could happen upon a great domain name and turn a sizable profit almost immediately.
5. Buy Expired Domains
Another commonly used (but lucrative) tactic is to buy expired domains, particularly if the domain name includes a strong keyword or would seem to have major appeal for a particular business or industry.
Every day, several thousand domain names expire. This can happen for a large number of reasons, such as owner negligence or the prior owner transitioning away from a given project or space.
While expired domain names don’t have much value to most people, they can have incredible value to a select audience. For example, if a domain such as “discountlaptops.com” were to expire, you can bet that there would be a swarm of potential investors looking to pounce on it.
If you are looking to get an online business up and running, and you understand some of the less appreciated ways to drive traffic to a given site – such as great backlinks and strong SEO – then you may have a distinct advantage in the expired domains market.
There are several websites dedicated to rounding up domain names for sale, and if you are interested in generating some largely passive income – or doing some light investing – then you may find that scouting domain names is a good way to help build an online business.
If the idea of buying and trading domain names appeals to you, check out some of the sites that host domain name trading, and see if this is an online business idea that you are possibly interested in pursuing more.
6. Locate an Online Business for Sale
If you are working a day job with an eye on launching an online business, why not consider cutting out the middle part of the project and just purchasing a pre-existing online business?
People who have an interest in operating their own small business online but want to skip the tedious steps of building a customer base and driving traffic to a website can opt to buy an online business that’s already operational.
Unless a person has a particular passion project or a great idea for an online business, purchasing a small online business can often be the most profitable and time-effective way to go.
In a similar fashion to domain names, there is a litany of websites dedicated to the sale and exchange of small online businesses. Potential business owners can check out some of the online businesses currently available and decide if this is an avenue they wish to pursue.
Starting an Online Business Is Simpler Than You Think
When a lot of people think about starting an online business, they assume that the process has to be drawn out and that there has to be a significant pain period before the business owner can realize a profit. Thankfully, nothing could be further from the truth.
To recap, a few great ideas for starting a successful online business include:
- Buying and trading expired domains
- Creating a seller store on Amazon on eBay
- Purchasing a pre-existing online business
While in some cases it will take an online business a bit of time to become profitable, in many other instances, a business owner working a day job can begin to reap benefits from an online business venture almost immediately. Contact us for more.
Are you planning to start an online business?
Tell us what you plan to do in the comments below!