A step-by-step guide to learn everything you need to know about successfully starting an online business from home to find the flexibility, and freedom you desire.
Follow these 10 steps to launching an online business from home
Now that you have some inspiration for an online business, here are 10 practical steps to help you build one:
- Find a business idea
- Find what to sell online
- Be legally compliant
- Conduct online market research
- Define your target audience
- Define your product management strategy
- Evaluate product viability
- Define your brand identity
- Define the marketing strategies to fuel business growth
- Launch your online store
Step 1. Find a business idea
All great home-based, online businesses start with an idea. This can be one of the most daunting parts of starting an online business: where do you even begin?
The following strategies will have you overflowing with business ideas in no time.
Ask yourself what skills do you have
The best place to start is by looking at your own skills, expertise, and knowledge. Generate ideas by asking yourself:
- What areas have I studied, whether at university, college, through an online course, at a workshop, etc.?
- What subjects have I taught to others before? For example, are you the go-to person in your current workplace when it comes to training new employees about certain systems, software, or skills?
- What topics have you researched the most, whether for work, education, or your own curiosity?
- What class did you perform the best in during school or college?
Step 2.Find what to sell online
Once you’ve brainstormed ideas for what type of business you can start, the next step is to work out what your business should sell online, which will be either product, services, or your know-how.
Whatever you are going to sell, it must have:
- Great market viability. A market that is “viable” is one that will continue being profitable for a long time, therefore helping your business to remain successful. Will there be a need for your product or service in many years to come?
- Competitive advantage. What does your product or service have that will allow you to outperform your competitors? What will you do better than them and how?
- Active target audience. Are there people currently searching for what your product or service offers? Does your product or service target a niche, yet large enough audience to generate plenty of sales?
- Fits within legal requirements. Do you have the licenses, permits, or certifications required to run your business and sell your product or service? This brings us to our next section…
Step 3. Be legally compliant
Before you launch your online business, you’ll need to make sure you’re legally compliant to avoid any fines or legal issues.
To obtain a business license, you’ll need:
- A detailed description of your business's activities
- A legal structure. Will you be operating as a sole proprietorship, limited liability company, or corporation?
- Any required inspections or permits, based on your region’s rules and regulations
- A sales tax license, if required, from your state agency
You’ll also need to maintain relevant licenses, permits, or certificates and prevent them from expiring.
Step 4.Conduct online market research
When you conduct online market research, you are simply gathering information about the market you will be entering, as well as your competitors and customers.This is an essential step in starting your online business, as it helps you to determine if there’s a healthy demand for what you plan to sell.
To begin conducting your online market research, you’ll want to use the following tactics and tools.
Analyze Google's SERPs (search engine results pages)
SERPs refers to search engine results pages, which are the pages displayed by search engines like Google when you type in a search term.
You can analyze the top-ranking websites to see what type of websites are on the first page of results. Are they:
- Informational blogs?
- E-commerce sites?
- Educational websites?
You can hire the help of a freelancer if you need more specialized knowledge for this task.
Research your competitors
Researching your competitors (those who offer a similar product or service to you) helps you to collect important information regarding their website and online business in general. By using a free tool such as SimilarWeb, you can easily see how much traffic the competitor website brings, what type of keywords they are ranking for, and more.
Here are some of the things you should understand about your competitors when doing this research:
- Products/services
- Customers
- Pricing
- How they carry out business
Perform a keyword research
Performing keyword research helps you understand the search volume and competition behind certain keywords.
There are many tools you can use when doing keyword research, among the most popular ones you have:
- SEMrush
- Moz keyword explorer
- Ahrefs
Since keyword research can be a time-consuming process and require special knowledge, you can always hire a keyword research specialist on Fiverr to do the job for you.
Step 5. Define your target audience
Your target audience is a group of individuals sharing similar characteristics or needs that your online business is aiming to serve. Therefore, they are most likely to purchase your products or services.
The easiest way to define your target audience is to segment them based on demographics. Going back to SimilarWeb, you can have a general overview of your competitor's target audience and start to gather information such as:
1. Age
- How old are they?
- What generation are they part of?
2. Gender
- Are they predominantly male or female?
3. Income
- How much money do they make per year?
- Within what income class do they belong?
4. Device Use
How do they consume content? Desktop, mobile, or tablet?
Step 6.Define your product management strategy
There are a lot of factors to consider and questions to ask yourself and your business partners if your business model is about selling physical items.
Managing your products entails thinking about aspects such as sourcing, storage, packaging, shipping, and returns. You'll need to develop a system that works for you and your team in order to keep track.
Source products to sell online
Your products are the foundation of your online business, so you’ll want to put a lot of thought into the way you source them. There are three main ways to source products:
- to make them yourself
- to work with a manufacturer or wholesaler
- to work with a dropshipper
Step 7. Evaluate product viability
We all know some products have greater potential to sell than others, but how can you determine if your own products will have that same success?
The best trending e-commerce products all have three important characteristics in common:
- Unique, authentic, and eye-catching. The product you’re selling should be one-of-a-kind so the demand for it is high. Ideally, customers shouldn’t be able to purchase your product anywhere else online.
- Difficult to find. When a product is unique, it is also usually more difficult to find. This increases customer demand for your product, yet means you have little to no competition when it comes to selling it, setting you up for success.
Lower pricing. The ideal product will be one that you can sell within a good profit margin, and this is where adopting a drop-shipping solution becomes challenging as you will have to increase your prices. Is it bad? That's not ideal but if you don't overdue you might actually increase the customer’s perceived value of the product
Step 8. Define your brand identity
1. Implement design and UI/UX
2. Choose the right e-commerce platform for your online business
3. Develop content guidelines
Step 9.Define the marketing strategies to fuel business growth
1. Define your acquisition funnel
2. Inbound marketing mediums/channels
Step 10. Launch your online store
1. The next steps after the sale
2. Measuring success
3. Focus on growth
Start your online business
Starting your own online business from home might not be a quick process, but it's certainly one of the most rewarding things you’ll ever do. Rather than navigating the world of online business on your own, we’ve developed this in-depth guide to provide you with a simple, step-by-step roadmap to launching a successful online venture – whether you sell products, services, or know-how.
There is nothing as satisfying as working for yourself and focusing on your own passions, and all it takes is finding the right online business idea, niche, and target audience to jump-start your entrepreneurial dream.
By following the process we outlined for finding or developing your products or services to sell, choosing the right e-commerce platform, defining your brand identity, and employing marketing strategies to fuel business growth, you’ll be on the road to online business success in no time.
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