Tips For Starting An Online Business

Here are some startup suggestions for new marketers. You may be familiar with some of them and some may be new. The aim is for you to be able to learn something from these tips.

The first thing is an overall game plan and breaking it into days. Breaking down things into smaller fragments and goals makes it easier to tackle the job. First, you need to identify which route you wish to go. Do you want to create an ebook, build software, affiliate marketing, flipping websites or something else?

Once these are defined and the goal written out, then start working on the project. For example, if you do decide to go the way of creating software, you have to ensure that you have all the tools that are required to create one. Before creating this software, you need to do a bit of research if there is a requirement in the first place. The best thing to do is see if similar software exists and if it does, look at the features. The clever way to go about it is to check your competition and offer something better that what they are offering.

Next step after checking your competition would be to check the market and the need for this software. This can be done through the relevant internet marketing forums where people usually use something like this. Find out from people what they think and what are the features they are looking for. This way, you would get plenty of feedback. Create a list of features and keep adding to them.

Once you are through with researching and your feature list is ready, time to now decide on what the features are that you are actually going to include in the software and what you are not going to include. Check the time factor too; deciding how much time it is gong to take for you to create this software. This is important, as your advertising campaign needs to be coordinated based on the time of completion.

The next thing is how you are going to market your product. Building a list of potential buyers makes a lot of sense and it helps in the future too. This list should be ready even before the software is ready. For this, you will need an autoresponder service like Aweber or GetResponse, which are reputable.

Once your software is ready, give out the beta version in the forums that you are already a member of and offer a free version for people to try it out, limiting it to about ten people.

While this testing is going on, you can start working on the sales page, which is most crucial. This is what is going to be on your website once you are done. It is important to write your own sales copy. You know what you are offering people and there may be things you want to include or removed based on the feedback. You can ensure your sales copy does the job it is supposed to.

The title needs to be an attention grabber. Have an introduction and summary of the key features and benefits. Also try and get some testimonials from the Beta testers. This is one of the reasons you submitted your software for testing. Check out other sales letters for ideas. At the end of the sales letter, sign your name.

Once you get the feedback from the forums and your software is tweaked to finally take shape, now its time to register with an affiliate program like Clickbank or PayDotCom or anything else. The idea is to have several affiliates promoting your software and you offer commission percentage. Make it attractive to sell by giving affiliates at least 60%. This will attract people and believe me this will earn you thousands of dollars in the long run.

Next email all your friends and people you know with the link to your sales page. The affiliate program you created takes over from there. If using Clickbank, your product will not be listed in their market place unless there is one sale and you can make that first sale for things to start moving.

Next thing is to concentrate on the opt-in form on your sales page and capture visitors. People may not buy on their first visit, keep sending reminders at regular intervals and in no time, you will have a huge list of people you can market all your future products to.

Hope this outline gets you started and acts as a springboard for your own ideas. I just used ‘software’ as an example and this plan can be applied to any product, even an ebook.