Have you ever thought of launching your own online business? If so, you come to the right place because we will show you how to start your own business. There are many business models that you can fulfill online. For example, you can start your E-commerce, subscription boxes, SaaS and many more businesses. There are a bunch of opportunities online you just need to stop wasting your time and start working on your idea.

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Today, I am going to share with you a guide on how you can start your online business. You can begin your business career by following this little How to article.

Choose the Model of Your Business

First of all, you need some kind of rough idea of your business. You need to decide if you want to build e-commerce, dropshipping, SaaS or craft market business. Probably the easiest way would be to start dropshipping with Shopify and Oberlo but everything depends on you.

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When you clarified your idea and understand what kind of business you want to do, you need to build a website.

Choosing a Content Management System

There are a bunch of content management systems to choose from. A content management system is a software from which you will build and administrate your business website. The most popular and easiest to use is WordPress. This CMS is used by over 30% of the web so you can be sure that it would be a right choice. Also, you can create your website from scratch if you have any programming experience. It is fully your choice.

Picking the Correct Hosting

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Hosting is a really crucial part of your website. When you are picking hosting to look how much visitors they can handle, provided web space, and check their other provided services. If you chose to use WordPress, you might try to use SiteGround’s hosting because it has a special plan for WordPress sites. Also, you can buy domain name straight from them.

Creating a Website

At first it might seem hard to create a website on your own, however, if you chose to go with WordPress CMS it is a pretty straightforward job. You can use intuitive drag & drop builder to build your website, install essential plugins for your website and hire assistants to maintain as well as optimize your website.

First of all, when you have your website on your hosting you need to customize your website to fit your needs and you probably will need a shopping cart plugin. The company behind tipsandtricks-hq.com has a plugin which is simple but it is all you might need. It allows you to create cart in your website and add “Add to Cart” button anywhere on your website. Also, Shopping cart plugin automatically places orders and process payments through PayPal.

You might want to feature your products on your website’s landing page and for that, you will need a slider. There are many available sliders for WordPress sites but I believe that Smart Slider 3 is one of the best free wordpress slider available right now. This slider does not require any code, is responsive through all platforms and has all the other slider features that one might want.

Maintaining and Optimizing Website

It might be really frustrating to maintain your website. The maintenance might take a lot of time what you could be spending expanding and developing your own business. Also, it is important that your website would be optimized for mobile, tablet devices and for all the browsers. Optimizing can be pretty hard for a new person on website building.

To maintain or optimize your website you can hire some person from the side. You can find people that perform such tasks on Fiverr or Upwork. However, they might ruin your website and do a bad job in general. So I recommend choosing already tested variant WPbuffs.com, as the common idiom says that it is better to be safe than sorry . WP Buffs maintain your website, edits it, updates plugins and themes, monitors your website 24/7 and optimizes the website for mobiles and tablets.

Do not Forget Marketing

If you want to sell something, you need to advertise your business. Firstly, keep your current customers notify about your business and you can do that by using Maxtraffic.com web push notifications. Probably the best and most accurate marketing to gain new users these days is social media marketing. You must create your business Twitter, Facebook and Instagram account. Without them you will not succeed, I can guarantee.

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Nonetheless, do not upload random stuff there, upload only the posts that are relevant to your business niche. Also, to make good content you need good quality pictures or templates and you should try to use crello.com which is a free powerful graphics editing software.

Aim High with Customer Support

Customer support is an essential part of every successful business. You should keep in mind that good words spread quick but bad words spread even quicker. You must try to create a positive relationship with your customer and expect that it will create a positive feedback loop which will lead to a bigger customer base. Probably word-of-mouth marketing is the most effective marketing of all.

There are several tools that can help you to create a great customer service experience. First of all, create a feedback or contact form on your website and you can use this WordPress form plugin.

A good move would be to create a knowledge base with the most asked questions. It would decrease the amount of time you spent on dealing with the customer support and both sides would be happy. I recommend using HelpJet which allows easy creation of knowledge base.

Last but not least, would be to start using CRM which stands for Customer Relationship Manager. There are tools that help you to collect and operate the data associated with your business relationships. It allows keeping customer information, contacts, accounts, leads and sales in one centralized place. You should check this Most Affordable CRM to get a better understanding of its importance.

Conclusion

These are the main steps that you must take to establish your online business. If you do not manage to create a successful online business or just cannot yet make a living out of it, you certainly learned some amazing skills for resume that you could write down and use it to get a corporate job. So what are you waiting now? Go and start your own online business!