First 4 Steps To An Online Business

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Recently, a woman expressed a concern to me that she had “nothing going” and needed to rely on another person. She felt insecure to the extent she was dependent and asked me what I thought she could do.

The resources for a brick and mortar business just were not available and she knew enough about the online world to think she could get “something going” online. Undecided about specific niches in her broad general areas of interest, she “got going” by creating an online persona.

Her first 4 Steps were:

1. Purchase a domain name and blog hosting and set up an email address for the persona
2. Use the persona email address to obtain a Google user-name and password for the persona
3. Use the Google account to create a YouTube account for the persona
4. Create a Twitter account for the persona

This seems like the essential groundwork required to begin vblogging or video blogging. The technical requirements appear minimal, especially regarding media production with the technology getting simpler every year.

Producing a stream of content remains one absolute requirement. This one requirement shows up everywhere online.

Do not blog if you are not a writer.

Do not vblog if you are not a videographer.

If you can get past the 2 month hump, then you have the 6 month hump and the 2 year hump. You get past the humps by being productive.

The possibility of Jumping The Shark looms as a constant threat.

Being productive may include any activity that produces more value than went into it. Some people, for example, make money online by selling artisan food products.

The next step involves understanding and working with Key Words. Since I feel the topic of Key Words deserves its own article, I’ll leave that for later.

Significantly,  we currently see 4 dominant methods to enjoy Internet Traffic.

1. Pay for advertising using AdWords, Pay-Per-Click advertising, banners or any other method that involves you paying for traffic before you sell anything.
2. Affiliates and Joint Venture Partners send you their traffic and their payment comes from a percentage of the purchasing customers they send.
3. Organic Search Engine Traffic, notably from Google these days.
4. Leveraging Social Media and Social Bookmarking sites.

In my mind, their relative desirability ranks in reverse order to my listing. One could start with Method 4 and never need to try anything else.

If you do your part with being productive, Method 3 should take off before Method 4 peaks. These two methods will give you the proof needed to interest useful Affiliates and Joint Venture Partners.

Until you can prove your production sells, useful Affiliates and Joint Venture Partners will not be interested. Once you prove you have a winner, Method 2 can increase your income dramatically.

If your product successfully sells online, then Affiliates and Joint Venture Partners will be interested. Paying for advertising may never become necessary.

With the above 4 Steps in place, you will be in the position to publish content online. Your content will create a following.

Once you have a following you will be ready for the next steps and that will take another post.

In the mean time
check out my article about:

• Mike Masnick
• Seth Godwin
• Trevor Reznik

and the articles by Yaro Starak

Leave your questions in the comments and I will answer them there or in a new post.