How to get started with an online business this year

Chip Hinde

2 years ago

Share on Social Media

Do you want to get started with an online business this year? It is not hard to do; especially if you are looking at the world of online and affiliate marketing. Keep reading for these quick start tips.

Find a niche

Once you’ve decided to start an online business, it’s also time to define your focus. It’s impossible to be everything to everyone, so you have to be specific in identifying your target market. Your niche can evolve over time as your business grows and expands, but you should have a general idea of what your specialty will be before you start.

As with any goal-setting exercise, it’s important not to compare yourself with others—especially other entrepreneurs who are just starting their own businesses. You may see articles or profiles about successful businessmen who started their first ventures as teenagers or college students… but that doesn’t mean that you need to do the same thing at the same age (or even ever). While striving for excellence is an important part of being entrepreneurial, being realistic about both opportunity costs and chance of success is even more essential.

Research your audience

Research your audience.

Before you can solve someone’s problem, you need to know who they are and what their problem is. You can do this by researching your audience on the following platforms:

Social media – What are they sharing? Who are they talking to? What are their interests?
Forums – What questions are people asking about your topic? What answers have already been given that you could improve upon (or debunk)?
Content sharing sites – Articles, videos, podcasts, etc. that address topics related to yours.
Amazon reviews – Find reviews of similar products and see what people like and dislike. Are there any features or benefits that were left out of a product’s description that you could include in yours?

Create your logo. Grab a free tool like Canva and create a logo for your site, something that will represent you online
Create some social media posts. You’ll be able to use the same tool or another free tool like Adobe Spark to create social media posts.
Create images with text. If you want to boost your website’s SEO then creating images with text is super important!

Get organic traffic through SEO or paid ads

The first step in any online business is to have a website, and that means you have to set up an online shop.

SEO stands for search engine optimization, which refers to the process of making sure your site gets noticed. There are lots of tools and tips out there, but one way of doing this is to work with a company called Technorati Analytics. This company searches through all the websites in the world and analyzes how they rank on Google—the search engine that dominates traffic from all other engines like Yahoo! or Bing. The data is then shown to you with graphs like these:

The blue bar (called organic traffic) represents all the visitors that come directly from Google without any paid advertising. Here’s what it looks like for our blog:

And here’s what it looks like for our SEO campaign:

The green bars represent us getting attention from paid advertisements through various sources such as Google Adsense (which shows ads on your site) or Facebook Ads or even our own paid traffic campaigns using Google Adwords. As you can see, when our SEO campaign went live, we saw a 120% increase in traffic within two weeks. That was an incredible boost!

Use email marketing to sell products and make affiliate income

To make money with an online business, you can do a lot worse than email marketing. “Why?” you may wonder.

For one, it’s very personal.

It’s not like social media where there are endless distractions and it’s hard to get someone’s attention for more than a few seconds. With email and affiliate marketing, you have direct access to your customer’s inbox and can build a long-term relationship with them by sending regular emails.

Also, almost everyone has an email address these days. If you want to reach as many people as possible through the internet (and who doesn’t?), then having an email list is a must. Yes, some people won’t check their emails or will unsubscribe from your list—but if your message is interesting and delivers value that they didn’t previously have, then most people will be happy to stay on board.

So how do you get started?

Monetize with affiliate offers

There’s a lot of money in affiliate marketing.

But, creating an income with affiliate marketing is not easy.

There are many stages to getting started with affiliate offers: finding the right offers, choosing which ones to promote, finding keywords to target, creating content that’ll rank for those keywords (and build links back to your site), tracking how well that content is performing, and scaling up successful content.

When you get started it’s good to make small goals and slowly build toward the big one of making money from an online business

When you get started it’s good to make small goals and slowly build toward the big one of making money from an online business. Start with one blog post, one email, one product, one affiliate offer.

Build on small wins and keep moving forward. Don’t get stuck trying to make a perfect product or piece of content right out the gate. Focus on getting something out there that you can improve on later.