How to Start a Home Internet Business

Some great ideas for starting an internet business.

Steps
1. Create a home office. This is not as difficult as one would think. Every home office's needs are different, but there are some fundamental staples that all require.

• You will want to have a clean, noise-free environment that has good lighting and is free from distractions. This will help keep you more focused and productive. You will need a desk and chair. The size of your desk will depend on what its function is. You will want a place to store all your information about your customers such as a computer and/or a filing cabinet.
• Communications: You will also want a phone, printer/fax/scanner/copier, Internet connection, and any other communication tools you might need at hand.
• Meeting and storage space: If, like most home-based businesses, yours will focus on services or affiliate products, there will be no need for storage. However, if you are planning to sell your own products and ship them yourself, then make sure you have room to store them all. If you plan on doing meetings outside of your home, there will be no need for a conference room either. If you are going to be seeing clients in your home, and don’t have a conference room, then be sure to keep your place clean and neat at all times. If you have family members, especially small children, let them know that they are only to interrupt you in an emergency. Establish rules, such as "do not disturb Mummy when she's on the phone", and "do not come into the office without knocking". Do not talk to or yell at the children, the spouse or the dog while on a business call. First impressions say a lot.

2. Put together a business wardrobe. You need not be a fashion plate or break the bank, but you must have neat, clean attire appropriate to your industry. Make sure you attend to personal grooming before getting dressed for appointments.


3. Be sure you have researched the tax laws and requirements of your country and your local jurisdiction. Set up a bookkeeping system, and be prepared to hire an accountant if necessary.


4. Make or order business cards and stationery.
5. Create a website.

• Keep things simple. You don’t need to have tons of graphics and bright colors plastered all over. A clean, simple design is the best and attracts the most people. Too many things going on throughout a site can be overwhelming to the viewer and drive them away, rather than getting them to stay and come back. Stay away from playing annoying music of any kind on your site. This a sure-fire way to drive away business. You also want to stay away from things that require time to load. This slows down the viewer’s access to immediate information. Studies have shown that people won't hang around waiting for a site to load: they move on (think of your own reaction to a slow-loading site). Just because you can put it on a site, it does not mean you have to or should. You want your site to have good value for your visitors, and be worth the time they spend reading or looking at it.
• Include good content. This will make the viewer linger and become more interested in what you have. There are tons of ways to accomplish this and you will need to use and decide what works for you. Pick a few tools of the trade, use them/apply them to your site and, most importantly, monitor the response and traffic. If you notice that some are not producing results, remove them and try something else. You will have to be diligent but remember that simple is better. You don’t want to implement every tool at once, it can make your viewers feel uncomfortable, so use a few and ditch the rest. Here are just a few possibilities.

6. Start an e-mail list. They're great to allow customers to talk about your products and services. Yahoo! groups offer this service free. Members can post comments and questions to you or each other and an e-mail is generated to all users. The group can be private, subject to approval, or public. You will want to see daily traffic and post frequently in the beginning to get things going. Eventually your customers will start talking to each other. These lists are a great tool and keep people active and coming back.


7. Create some polls for viewers so they can vote on a specific issue related to the site’s content. You want to keep people interactive so they don’t get bored. Writing a poll from scratch can be tricky but there are great templates available today that can be of help. You would fill in the blanks and then copy and paste the code to your site.


8. Create a weblog or "blog". This is like an online journal that is frequently updated. You will add some good links into it to advertise your business, of course. It is also a form of communication that allows people to stay updated on what is going on with your business and what they can expect in the future. Today, blogs have taken on a life of their own and are sweeping through cyber-land.


9. Create a valuable product line that you have exclusively. This is extremely important as it defines what makes you unique. It is not enough to be 'unique' with something that you created; the product must contain value so that consumers or your clients are happy to use it.


Tips

• Computers, printers, and software are more inexpensive these days. You can also find great plans for telephone and internet services today that are very reasonable. These services will allow you to make long distance phone calls for free. If you shop around wisely, you can find some really good deals on computers and office supplies and furniture.
• Computer: you can expect to pay anywhere from $500 to $1000 for a computer that has all the latest features. You will want to make sure that it has at least a Pentium 4 processor speed and 60 GB hard drive (you can easily go up to 250 GB with hardly any significant difference in price). You will also want a 17" monitor to make your life easier especially if you need to be on the computer often. Make sure that you have at least 750 MB to 1 GB of memory at least and a CD read and write drive (or a DVD reader/writer if it fits in your budget). A CD reader/writer is pretty standard for most computers today, but you will always want to double check. Floppy drives are totally out!
• Multifunctional Machine: you will want to invest in a fax, printer, copier, and scanning machine. Many places sell them for great prices. You are looking at about $100 and up. Make sure that if you do a lot of printing you check out the price of the ink cartridge refills. If they are very expensive you might want to consider paying a bit more for another machine/brand to be able to get the more inexpensive refills.
• Office Furniture: This can vary tremendously. If you want it to be nice but affordable, try office supply stores. They have package deals that are relatively inexpensive and easy to assemble. Get a good chair though. Never skimp on something you will be sitting on for hours.
• Select a market or niche you are interested in to develop it into an Internet business.
• Treat an Internet business like a real business. It really pays off.
• Stay focused and develop the Internet business bit by bit.
• For better penetration, use ads to targeted groups. Take advantage of free online classified ads as well.
• Write articles and submit to major article directories, with a link to your website.
• Visit related forums and leave helpful/useful comments. That will show you as an 'expert', and some forums allow you to give a link to your website (but do check their policy first - avoid getting into trouble with the web-master!).
• Do a lot of linking; link your pages to the major directories and search engines - this will pay off in the medium and long term.
• Use a reputed auto-responder to generate your own opt-in lists and email campaigns. Good ones have a lot of helpful features, and can be quite inexpensive - less than $20 per month.
• Think out how your customers can pay you. Avoid asking for your clients' credit card details - that might put off many people. Instead, use a secure service, so that your commissions/payments are not stolen, and people can pay you with confidence.
• Focus on one marketing strategy or product/website at a time, until you are good at it; then change to the next one.
• Use a reliable hosting service for your web-site - it won't be too expensive.
• Spend more time promoting your page than building it up; a good web page is useless if no one knows about it.
• Think about structuring your business from the financial aspect to minimize your tax liabilities.

Warnings

• Do not send unsolicited sales email to those who do not ask for it; this is considered spam, and you could be banned by your auto-responder service. Avoid sending email to so-called 'safe lists' that send to millions of email accounts.
• Do not be stingy about advertisements. Use of ads is recommended, especially during the start-up phase of your business. Do not spend more than you can afford - keep an eye on your budget, and look for ways to get free traffic. Avoid spammy "Free For All" ads or you will be penalized in the search engines rankings.
• Do not join too many affiliate programs early on; start slow and concentrate on building each program singly.
• Avoid using 'ready-made' articles for your content. Make changes, add your own ideas, make them unique. Combine ideas from different articles to produce a new one of your own. Search engines do not give a high rank to identical content if it is found on many web-sites.
• Do not be easily scammed; research each program and potential returns first before committing.
• Some internet marketers can be very 'pushy'. Don't be fooled.
• Don't buy too many study materials, ebooks and courses at the start. Read and study what you buy before investing in something else. There is a lot of free training available anyway, and you should do a 'search' for reviews of the teacher/course.
• Avoid subscribing to too many 'free' newsletters. You will waste too much time reading them, and suffer from 'information over-load'.
• Do not burst your advertising budget. Continuous flow of advertising is better than a one-off full blown ad campaign.
• Do not "prospect" everyone you meet.