Planning an e-business by Oliver Cage

Earning money on the Internet is not very hard. The start is simple, but to earn thousands of dollars on a monthly basis is the real issue here. I've seen hundreds of books sold on the Internet claiming that the book writer got rich very fast. It's not true, and even if it were, every internet user would be driving now a Ferrari and enjoying their vacantion on the French Riviera. And if they are making so much money daily, as they claim, why to spend time trying to sell you a book? Why to increase their number of competitors for $30? Doesn't look silly? Don't believe everything you hear and always make sure your source is reliable. Now, before you do anything, you have to remember that you can consider you have a business when you and your partners gain something from the process. You cannot call it a business until this happens. If only you gain something, the other people involved may loose money. This will make them avoid doing business with you, or become so poor that they won't afford to do any deal with you. This is a very important fact and you should always keep it in mind. The next thing you should do, is plan your business. Make sure you write somewhere everything you think about this, making plans in your mind is not reliable. One important thing you should keep in mind is after planning to start doing it. It's very important to not end up with a piece of paper in your pockets and no money in your bank account.

Planning an e-business

The first step in starting an e-business is planning. Do not avoid this. Based on how well the plans are made, your business will be successful or not. This is an important step. It's like the root of a tree, if the root is weak, then the tree will fall down in time. So be careful with this step.

There are a 3 things you can do when running an e-business:

Sell products
Sell e-services
Advertise other sites

Selling products is pretty self-explainatory. You already have a shop (or not), and you want to increase sales using your web presence. This is a good ideea when you have products sell. I know many people that run on-line stores. This is very cheap for them (which by the way, makes products to be cheaper and to sell more). They don't have to pay bills for renting space in a good public place to get more customers, and also they don't need a store. All they have is a simple room, where they store the products, and the Internet connection. When a order is posted, they simple charge money and deliver the product to the customer's house.

Selling e-services is a bit more complex. In this situation you need a very good technical background. Your business will be based on your servers (even rented ones) that run a software for your customers. For example, paid e-mail accounts. You create your service by having an e-mail server and people pay monthly fee for holding their mails.

Advertise other sites - This means you own a site, and you post other people's banners on it. For more of this e-business type please see Selling advertising space article.

Ofcourse, you can combine 2 by 2 the choices you have, or even to all 3 of them. It depends on what you want to do.

If you don't have any products to sell, any services to offer, and the ideea of selling advertise space doesn't look to good to you, you still have one thing left: make e-books and sell them. For sure you have the knowledge and experience that accumulated over time. Start writing it using a computer editor (like Adobe Acrobat Writer, or Quark eXpress, or even Microsoft Word). You won't have troubles publishing, because you will publish it yourself on the Internet. You probably ask yourself who is going to buy your book. In our society, even the technology is having a huge progress, it's still not enough. People need to read good books, or to document themselves about anything. If you know something, it will be a good way to share with others, and also to earn money that you worth. This is your chance, and you don't have to waste it. Knowledge and Informations are priceless.

After you decided what you will sell, you will need to study the competition. If there is no competition on the e-market , your chances of a good e-business will be small. When there is competition, this means that people are interested in the things you plan to do. If competition is hard, means there are lots of money involved. If there isn't competition at all, this means nobody is interested on your product. Only if your product is revolutionary, you will have a chance, but is very hard to create something revolutionary. So be very careful about this, you don't want to start an e-business that is already a failure. The competition is ahead in the "earning money race", but this doesn't means you will have to avoid looking at their sites. Learn from the competition, see how they handle things (if you afford, you can try to be their customer from some time just to see how they work). Look at their products and think how can improve them. Avoid using the strategy "Let's make it cheap", first of all try to improve the products they are offering to the same price - ofcourse you will need to make sure the people that visit your site will know your product is better (see the Designing for content-view guide). Starting a prices-war is not the best ideea, because on this case the only part who will gain will be the buyers which will get products at a low-cost (and usually this kind of wars makes the prices to be too small to gain something as seller - imagine this: you sell cheap, then the competition sells cheaper, and so on). Basicaly, the competition is a big source of information, offering you lots of hints about the business you are about to start. Do not do something exactly like the competition. They are probably old and well-known on the market, and you will need to work very hard to get to the point they are with exactly the same thing they have. This means to waste a lot of time, unless you try to improve the products/services they offer.

At this time, the competition will give you the chance of seeing what prices are currently on the market for the products you are selling. Also if you need to do shipments to your future-customers, take look at the prices you (or your customer) will need to pay - it doesn't worth to sell something that costs lower than the shipment. If you are going to sell products, you will need to get paid somehow. You will need to find some methods to receive money from your customers. The payments people will do , have to be very safe. You don't want to leave the door open for the bad guys that live from credit-card fraud. So, the best way is to use a payment gateway. More about this in the E-payment methods article. On the payment gateways you should check the fees they apply. After choosing the payment method, and with all the costs involved in this business in front of you, you can do the final math and estimate how much profit do you get from a single product sold. Do some math, and see what are the expenses that you will have, how much time will it take for you to gain back the money you've spent. After you establish this, you will be able to decide if your e-business will worth the investment you are about to make.

Since now you know very well what you want done, and you have some hints from the competition, you will have to choose a name for your business. If your business will work fine, in time you will use it as a brand name (see also the About brands article). The name of your business should be word (or phrase) very easy to remember and it should be included in your domain name (this will help to increase your ranking in the search engines). Ofcourse, if you sell shoes, your probably want to have a domain name called shoes.com, but probably this is already taken. So the best thing to do, is to check if the domain name is available. Any registrar (a registrar is an authority that register and keep records about domains) have a form in the main page, that allows you to search for domains to see if there are free (for example http://www.godaddy.com) . Another option is to watch for the domains that expire soon and to buy them for you. This will be very useful because if you get lucky , you may gain some visitors that was customers on the old site (see the http://www.deleteddomains.com site).

Another important step is to make a small marketing plan, to see how you can promote your site, and to bring visitors. You also may consider to have affiliates, that can sell your products for a small fee. Since your business will be based on the website you will own, you need to have as many visitors possible. To see some techniques about how to increase your sales see the Increase your sales article. If you cannot create yourself a marketing plan, you simple can leave this behind for now, you will be able to promote yourself using search engines and paid advertising (see the SEO & Advertising articles). But don't forget about this. Marketing your site is very important because this will increase your sales, and also make your business to be continous, thus receiveing payments every day.

The final point on your plan should be who is going to create your site. This is the point where you should decide if you will do yourself the site, or you will pay a web designer/programmer to do it. Before taking this decision, you should think of the features your site must have (like users, affiliates, newsletters and many more). Also, you should consider that since will be the business owner, you should take care of the business itself and not the website. But, to get cheaper you may be able to setup your site , based on your knowledge. If you plan to build yourself the website , you should see the Web design articles and also the E-biz website & hosting article.

Oliver Cage is a contributor for http://ikoupon.com