Building the Case for your Online Business
Let me guess why are you stumbled on this article. You are probably considering to startup a business. You already realized the advantages of owning a business and also the downside of doing it in-your-own. But no matter what, you are still determined to have one. You probably feel that you can do these kind of stuff. You do not only believe you can be successful, but you are convinced that this stuff could be the best chance for you to have financial freedom. That is why you are here, reading and doing some homework to get started.
Let us build the case for starting online business.
1. Minimum capital requirement. You already know that most of business startups requires huge amount of money as capital that results to difficulties in finding investors. The larger the capital the higher the risk for the investors to take. Running out of capitalist may result to natural death of the startup. But that is only true for the brick-and-mortar world of business.
Enter the internet technology married to commerce. The only overhead for an online business is the yearly payment for domain name and web hosting. Web hosting price now can be $5/month and domain name price is $15/year. How much you are spending a week for your favorite coffee? The good news is, web hosting business (another internet-born business) are all over the web. The competition are very tight, resulting to drop the web hosting prices and offer numerous add-ons and features for the clients. And that made you an instant winner in the process. For a cheap price you can have feature rich web hosting services. Even a dog has his own website! You can use your personal computer. You may not need a high-end computer. If your computer can create documents, can operate an HTML editor, can browse a website, that would be enough.
2. Building a website nowadays is easier than operating a high-tech toys. You can build web pages out of MSWord documents. Open-source software are sprouting like mushrooms. If you are totally clueless on HTML and other scripting language, hiring an expert on this field could be found within your block. A junior high school can do this stuff nowadays. Young generation are cool and creative and you can hire to do the scripting for you in very-very affordable price.
3. You will have direct access to global market. Gone are the days that a small business were bounded by a “liter of gas” radius. You can reach potential customer all over the world. From a couple of hundred customer to the several billion potential customer around the world with access to the internet.
You may research on the following open-source software. These are worth researching. Trust me.
Blog softwares:
WordPress, MovableType
Content Management Softwares
Drupal, Joomla, e107
4. When you say global market, that will also mean day and night. You will be doing business 24 hours a day, 7 times a week. Your website does not sleep, it will be always open to the customers even while you are sleeping. If you have the right software then online transactions are possible. Watching while the machine hum is not required. You can just view the transaction report at the time of your choosing.
5. One online business could lead to another potential income stream. It is now common that a website to have multiple system of income generation.
Please research on the following:
Google Adsense
AdBrite
Affiliate Programs
Banner Advertising Deals
Parallel Business referrals deals
Learn how your competitor are doing in their website. Copying business model is legal. Graphics and text article content is not.
6. Communication with customer could be easier and cheaper. All you to do is send email for reminding to come back to your site for more service or for more information. Professional newsletter is a good investment. You can talk more about your site, what you have added on the features and services, and what are your current promo available. You can send this email in a click and you just wait them to respond. More communication can happen without the physical contact with the customer, a big advantage for the introvert or beginners.
7. Online Transaction became more trustful. Millions of dollars are done in online transactions. The people are confident and trustful to online payment system. More people are buying different items from internet. Secure payments systems validated themselves from thousands of transactions they are doing everyday.
8. Internet connections are exponentially exploding around the world. There are more PC nowadays than Televisions. Also, the internet connection are catching up against the cable TV connections. The potential market is growing everyday.
9. Online help to do business online is growing. Online references are widely available in the internet. The information now can be access mostly for free. So it will be easier than before to try new things and do it all by yourself.
10. Flexible hours. If you do it part time, you can do it after your day job and during weekends at home. If you want to do it full time, then you are free to work whenever you want. You may choose to work at the middle of the day, or you may want to work at night till dawn. The length of working hours is also depends on you. Because you are your own boss and you are responsible to run your online business.
