If you have decided you would like to start an online business to work from home, to expand your brick-and-mortar business, or to become a digital nomad, you aren’t alone. In 2021, about 69% of American entrepreneurs will choose to start their businesses from home, and in 2020, over half of existing businesses increased their online presence in some way.
Some Notes on Working From Home
If you are starting an online business at home, It’s a good idea to have an office area in your home to allow you to separate your time, allowing you to concentrate on work time instead of home time. Even if you feel like you are able to focus on work at home with all of the distractions that can pop up, you might underestimate how difficult that can be if you have never worked from home as a full-time job.
Set yourself up with a dedicated workspace that has a comfortable work chair and enough desk space to handle everything you need to do during a workday. If you’re starting an online business, clearly you will have a computer — and you might want to get a good pair of blue light glasses that will help prevent you from losing much-needed sleep at night.
Blue light from screens can seriously throw off sleep-wake cycles, and now that your income will rely heavily upon your interaction with a computer, you might find that you’re tempted to be up half of the night working online. Blue light blocking glasses will help you get to sleep at a normal time, and prevent insomnia from creeping into your life.
Getting a decent printer for any invoices or other actual paperwork that your business might generate is also a good idea. Having a backup laptop or computer available for your use is also something that you might consider. Having your computer crash in the middle of the night when you have a lot of business to take care of can be devastating to a new business, especially if you don’t have the cash or credit to get your computer working, or to buy a new one.
Basic Steps to Take to Begin an Online Business
- When searching for the kind of business you want to start, search for a need that seems to be underserved or needs to be filled. Don’t make the mistake of starting a business based upon a product or service you have chosen before finding out if there is a market for that product or service. Attempt to find a problem that few or no people have tried to solve. The only way to figure this out is by doing research, poking around in forums, and doing a lot of thinking about what you can provide that not a lot of other people can also provide.
- As you create your website to sell your product or service, make sure to emphasize all of the ways that your product or service can help people, make their lives better, and how your product or service stands out as an answer to the problem of what the customer needs.
- Make your website very to the point, and make sure you have a simple design that catches the attention of your customer base, quickly establishing your selling points to the customers that you are trying to persuade.
- Study all of the ways your website can exploit search engines to draw as many people to your site as possible. This is an art all of its own, and there are lots of ways to accomplish this. If you need to outsource to have an attention-grabbing website that will sway search engines in your direction, it is a justifiable expense — especially if you are not knowledgeable in website design or how to attract customers through keywords, pay per click ads, and other tools to drive traffic to your new site.
- Provide some kind of unique content on your site for free to the public that shows your expertise or unique qualities about what it is you are selling. You might make a video, write an article, or create a vector image that you can distribute through various avenues, which will bring people to your site. Making this item shareable on social networking is essential to help distribute it to what will hopefully become your customer base later.
- Use email marketing to build a base to market to. Creating an opt-in list of people interested in your site will help you market your product or service to targeted audiences.
- Once you have established a list of customers who have purchased from you, they are much more likely than the general public to buy again from you. Offer them enticements to buy from you again, like sales that are targeted toward former customers, and try to sell products or services that complement items that they have already purchased from your site.
The Benefits of Outsourcing
If you are a one-person company, like many online businesses are, you may start to see all of the benefits of outsourcing certain things that you are unable to provide yourself due to time or financial restrictions. Online Marketing Services like MuteSix provide expert marketing for online companies, so if marketing is a weak point, or you can’t seem to get a foothold through techniques you have tried, it might be one useful way to use outsourcing to build up your company.
If you would like to offer an 24-hour services like a help desk, there are lots of useful companies that can outsource those services to you.
If you would like to find a crypto payment processor for your website, CoinPayments is an ideal service to outsource if you have little or no knowledge about how to accomplish this yourself.
Services like Loom offer unique video recording services to allow you to operate a hybrid workspace on a limited budget.
Different ways that outsourcing can help your company grow:
- Data Entry — accurate data conversion, data extraction, data conversion, data indexing, and analytics
- Web Design — bring in customers with video content, animations, cutting edge web design, and high-quality artwork
- Accounting Services — expert financial services, accounting is kept up to date and accurate with reliable bookkeeping, invoices, tax processing, and cash processing services
- Customer Service — offer your customers inbound, outbound, telecommunications, email marketing, text, and chat support
- Research and Analysis — obtain comprehensive research reports, PPT creation support, and more
- Software Development — enjoy the benefits of custom desktop design, as well as tech-forward selling points like mobile apps and other software applications that are custom developed for your business.
Growing Gracefully
You might run into problems with cash flow if you run into orders that you are not equipped to fulfill at your current size. If you have great opportunities that require immediate capital to achieve, you might need to find a service that offers small business loan rates, freeing up cash for you to expand your business or hire help without sacrificing quality and fast service to your current business obligations in order to fulfill the expectations of a lucrative new account.
You might also need to make hard decisions to finance advertising at lucrative times, and other expenses that will allow your business to grow and blossom.
