JDsBlog.com

In order for your online business to get off on the right foot, you need to start with the most important ingredient of all. You need a positive attitude.  Nothing is going to happen over-night, so don’t kid yourself into thinking you will wake up and be able to quit your 9-5! Your online business will be no different in starting off than that off an offline business. It will take hard work, effort and determination, but with the will to follow everything through, it will pay off in the end.

 At the beginning of your career as an Internet entrepreneur, I would recommend before you start, getting to grips with software such as Adobe Dreamweaver and learn yourself some HTML code. It’s all good having these brilliant ideas but you are nothing unless you can put them out there onto the web!

 The first thing you need to consider when starting up is, what exactly is your business going to do, and how it will earn money, then you need to scope out all the competition. Try to think of it as though your setting up a shop in your town centre - your not going to build “your trainer store” next to a JD-Outlet are you? 

I would recommend careful thought over what sort of site you are going to launch.  At the moment blogs are incredibly popular, they even have their own annual awards (the Bloggies), they are easy to set up and if you have the know-how on the content, you’ll be off to a flying start! If you haven’t got an idea that’s burning to get out there, you simply want to start an Internet business, I would take the time to sit down, think about what you are good at and what is missing from the net. Have a look around, what could you bring? If there is no new market you can think of, try and find one you would feel strong in, - improve it or slightly differentiate yourself – offer more, give a nicer user interface or offer what the competitors charge for, free.

 Once you have your idea on what your site will do, you need to look for some competitors. Obviously the first place to go is Google, Yahoo and all the other search sites. When searching with these engines, make sure to try as many different words and phrases you can think of to get the maximum different results popping up. Also try changing your spelling slightly to accommodate for English/American spelling differences.

Now, once you have found other companies that are already online, spend sometime to have a look around their site – what is it like, what sort of feel does it have? What do they offer? Can I beat them? – make sure to keep a note of EVERYTHING they have, this way you can make sure you build the perfect site to put up a fight! Now you have looked at the sites you have found on Google, you need to go a little further. Maybe order a product from the competitors site to test the quality or see what tricks they have, or if it’s more of a blog style site, read through their posts, talk with other users about how much they like the service and find out who is advertising on it. If possible, try and find out the fees that are paid to advertise on the site, this way, if you need to spend money it can help you generate a prediction cash-flow chart.

 Make sure that you remember Google is not the be-all and end-all of finding a site! There are millions of websites out there that are either not listed, or only appear 4000 pages down the line. Pick up your local business directory and see if there is any competitors who have a website, and try and find out how many people use it, how much it makes and how users feel about using it.

 When there is a competitor with a large Monopoly in the market, starting up is a very risky business and I would highly advise to steer clear. As an individual, it will be extremely hard for you to put up the fight necessary to bag yourself a profitable piece of the pie.

 Likewise to this, you need to scope out for the Oligopolies too. A market with, say, five key players will also be hard to penetrate, as well as nine times out of ten, more than one of them will be run by the same firm, so they will have more money to push you out. – A true story of mine, owning a creative media company, we were asked to create an online store that would sell golf equipment – we charged £6000 for the production and it ran for a mere 4 months before the opposition paid £15,000 for it and left it running. – BEWARE! (you may think this is a good thing but to think the site alone was generating £2000p/m ;))

Starting up for the first time will be hard. If I were to give you one piece of advice, (on top of the above) it would be to keep things local. Don’t set up your first site and think that it will be a worldwide phenomena. Set yourself up a nice cosy site for a select niche market for your local, well-known area. Earn a small amount of money from it, then expand, then as you grow larger, your revenue will follow, then expand – just as an offline business would.

   Some key things to keep in mind when starting off –

• Keep spending to a minimum! Use as many free resources as possible. Stay away from free site builders as they make you look unprofessional and people wont use you.
• Get yourself a good quality server. You want your site to be online and generating cash 24/7, you want it to be fast and you want it to be reliable.
• Be fast in setting up, but don’t rush. Yes you want to get yourself in business as quickly as possible, but you don’t want to make foolish mistakes and have your reputation stripped from you before you even get one!

  Useful Links:

 Free Website hosting with No-Ads, 30GB Bandwidth, 5GB capacity and a tiny one-time fee for MySQL and PHP, Webmail and much more!

 110mb Hosting Solutions

 Free server hosting for one year with FREE domain name – a tiny setup fee! 

One.com

 An inspiring business blog – obviously second to JD’s :

 BusinessWeek

  I hope you find it useful! Until next time…

Adam.