Starting An Online Business While You Are Still With Your Day Job
The idea of starting an online business can be quite tantalizing. You get to work from the comfort of your own home, choose your own working hours to fit your lifestyle and can earn as much as you want. However, it comes with its challenges, which you’ll need to think about before you start out…
Have A Unique Selling Point
Before starting a business that solely has an online presence, you will need to think clearly about how your company will make income and profits. Three suggested ways to do this are:
Selling products produced by others - Most internet businesses operate as online versions of real stores where customers can buy products at reduced rates. If this is your chosen business model, you’ll need to work out whether you’re going to buy products wholesale and sell them on at a marked up price or act as a middleman between customers and producers, passing on orders and taking commission.
Offering a unique service or information - Another option for an online business is to offer a service to people, such as organizing package vacations, researching information for them or graphic design. Your service needs to be high quality to persuade people to pay for your time instead of doing it themselves. This may mean that you have to do some cheaper or free work to get a reputation.
Advertising - Running an advertising or an affiliate site can be a way to make money without too much effort. You’ll need to join up with another business and design your website to advertise their products and send potential customers to their website for sales and shipping. You make your money in commission.
Designing Your Website
Creating your website when starting an online business is the best way to go. This is the launching pad for your online business. If you spend any time looking at successful online start-ups, you won’t find many not having their own websites.
Unless you have a strong background in graphic and website design, part of your start-up capital should definitely be spent on hiring a web designer. While it is simple to put together a few pages, a web designer will be able to combine functionality and reciprocal links with sleek design.
Marketing Yourself
The hardest part about starting an online business will be creating market awareness of your product, which is not as simple as running an ad campaign in the local paper or on TV. You’ll need to find other websites that advertise or sell similar products and ask them to link to your site. They may request that you provide reciprocal links back to their pages, which will increase their market share at the same time. The best way to market is to build your reputation and aim for repeat business through good customer service and competitive pricing.
Understanding Taxes
Online businesses avoid the taxes associated with owning property, but you’ll still need to file taxes on your income. However, any expenses you incur can be counted as deductibles, such as your computer and internet connection. Expenses that are tax deductable differ from place to place. You, therefore need to check the legislation that governs where you stay.
Big Advantage of Starting An Online Business
The flexibility of starting the business means that you don’t necessarily have to quit your day job to make it a success. You can get a website built at weekends, and as long as your product is ready to ship in the near future, you can start to make your first sales around your regular working hours.