Some Considerations for Building an Online Business

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What is the one common hurdle that often stops a would-be entrepreneur from starting up? Lack of funds and thus lack of resources. However, starting a business no longer has to be limited by your resources in the offline world nor by lack of funds. In fact, there are successful businesses that are entirely run online, and were started with minimal capital. You don’t even need to wait until you graduate from business school to start.

Of course, not all businesses can be run that way, but if yours can, you still need to draw targeted web traffic to your site. There are many ways to do that:

1. Traditional advertising. Buy print or other traditional media ads.
2. Online ad(vertorial)s.
   • Buy online banner ads. These can be costly, depending on site, and effectiveness varies.
   • Buy online text link ads. (Frowned upon some search engines such as Google.)
   • Buy online “reviews” of your site, products or services. While these might look like articles, they straddle the line between reviews and advertorials. It depends on whether you use a web service that allows you to indicate to potential reviewers whether or not the review should be “positive” in tone.
3. Build content. Write/buy and post fresh, relevant article content regularly and promote the articles at social media sites. You can package this either as a set of articles or as a blog, but it depends on tone of voice in the writing as well as frequency and expected interaction.
4. Build links. This, in a nutshell, includes commenting on related sites/ blogs and/or forums, guest posting on other sites in your niche, using social media sites and loosely-related services such as Twitter for promotion, buying listings in web directories, etc. Building links does not require that you also build content, but both activities together are usually more effective.

If you need/want to keep startup costs down and thus choose to go the bootstrapping route, you’ll have to do a lot of the work yourself. You need to decide on the following:

1. Readers. Who is your intended reader? Can you define them, build an audience portrait, for your continual reference?
2. Customers. Is your reader also your potential customer? If not, how do you plan to convert them, or to actually draw your potential customers?
3. Authority. Why will they come to your site? What is it that you are offering in terms of content that they cannot get elsewhere? Are you an authority on the topics covered in your content? If not, do you have a plan of action to become an authority?
4. Comments. Will you allow them to comment on your content? If so, will you be moderating comments? What will commenters be allowed to say or not say? Will you post a “code of conduct”, or do you feel that’ll seem to corporate?
5. Trackbacks. Will you allow trackbacks? (If you allow trackbacks on your blog and another blog/site links to one your pages, their link will show up on your page, usually after the article and just above or below the reader comments block.)
6. Conversations. Will you join in the online “conversation”, both on your site’s comments and if someone mentions your business or products on other sites, blogs and forums? Are you emotionally capable of being pragmatic and diplomatic when someone says something negative?
7. Commitment. Do you really have time to do all the writing, promoting, and interacting on your own? Can you define a schedule for yourself and actually stick to it?
8. Advertising. Will you run advertising anywhere on your site? This can be a tricky thing because depending on what it is you’re selling on your site, some readers might perceive ads as an additional cashgrab attempt.

If you’re still convinced that you can run your business online, or at least supplement your bricks-and-mortar business with an online presence, then here are some final considerations.

1. Niche resource. Can you turn your site into a niche resource that’ll draw a wide audience from which you’ll find potential customers?
2. Video tutorials. Could you put together video tutorials of some sort - either live-action or “screencasts”?
3. Viral videos. Do you know what a viral video is, and can you think “outside the box” enough to come up with a video that could go viral?
4. Blogging to build traffic. A blog can be a great way to build traffic to a site, but does a blog fit into your site as a whole? It depends on a number of factors including who you think your readership will be, and whether they’ll ever be customers. If they’ll never be customers, then you might need a different approach.
5. Subscription site. Charging for premium content is not unheard of and can be lucrative. But it’s not a suitable option for all types of online businesses. It’s tough to give a generic explanation here, so we’ll try to cover this in the future.
6. Social profiles and social media promotion. Do you really understand the enormous value of building social profiles and promoting content on social media sites? Do you know where to draw the line between and not come across as too commercial?

Be aware that this is only a superficial treatment of what it takes to build a successful business online. It takes more than the individual elements, plus a solid plan, products/ services that someone actually wants, synergy of effort, and persistence.