How to start an internet business Guide



  How to start an internet business Guide

  1.Create a good business plan

  2.Get a original idea

  3.Conduct Competitive Analysis

  4.Choose a good business name

  5.Get a Memorable Domain name

  6.Build up Professional website

  7.Ongoing SEO Strategy

  1.Create a good business plan

  I strongly suggest that would-be entrepreneurs do a business plan As a result of completing the plan you will be much better prepared and know whether or not your business idea is feasible. Try the following article for a short-cut. However, I caution you on following a short-cut unless you have substantial experience or knowledge about your area. Proceed with caution without a business plan!

  How is your business unique, and why will your goods or services appeal to customers? What are the primary differences between your company and your competitors? What are the driving factors to choose your business over another?

  In other words, what is the underlying reason a customer would do business with your company?

  1)Define Your Business and Vision

  Defining your vision is important. It will become the driving force of your business. Here are questions that will help you clarify your vision:

  Who is the customer?

  What business are you in?

  What do you sell (product/service)?

  What is your plan for growth?

  What is your primary competitive advantage?

  2)Write Down Your Goals

  Create a list of goals with a brief description of action items. If your business is a start up, you will want to put more effort into your short-term goals. Often a new business concept must go through a period of research and development before the outcome can be accurately predicted for longer time frames.

  Create two sets of goals:

  Short term: range from six to 12 months.

  Long term: can be two to five years.

  Explain, as specifically as possible, what you want to achieve. Start with your personal goals. Then list your business goals. Answer these questions:

  As the owner of this business, what do you want to achieve?

  How large or small do you want this business to be?

  Do you want to include family in your business?

  Staff: do you desire to provide employment, or perhaps, you have a strong opinion on not wanting to manage people.

  Is there some cause that you want the business to address?

  Describe the quality, quantity and/or service and customer satisfaction levels.

  How would you describe your primary competitive advantage?

  How do you see the business making a difference in the lives of your customers?

  3)Understand Your Customer

  It is not realistic to expect you can meet the needs of everyone, no business can. Choose your target market carefully. Overlook this area, and I guarantee you will be disappointed with the performance of your business. Get this right and you will be more than pleased with the results.

  Needs: what unmet needs do your prospective customers have? How does your business meet those needs? It is usually something the customer does not have or a need that is not currently being met. Identify those unmet needs.

  Wants: think of this as your customer’s desire or wish. It can also be a deficiency.

  Problems: remember people buy things to solve a specific problem. What problems does your product or service solve?

  Perceptions: what are the negative and positive perceptions that customers have about you, your profession and its products or services? Identify both the negative and positive consequences. You will be able to use what you learn when you start marketing and promoting your business.

  4)Learn From Your Competition

  You can learn a lot about your business and customers by looking at how your competitors do business. Here are some questions to help you learn from your competition and focus on your customer:

  What do you know about your target market?

  What competitors do you have?

  How are competitors approaching the market?

  What are the competitor’s weaknesses and strengths?

  How can you improve upon the competition’s approach?

  What are the lifestyles, demographics and psychographics of your ideal customer?

  5)Financial Matters

  How will you make money? What is your break-even point? How much profit potential does your business have? Take the time to invest in preparing financial projections.

  These projections should take into account the collection period for your accounts receivables (outstanding customer accounts) as well as the payment terms for your suppliers. For example, you may pay your bills in 30 days, but have to wait 45-60 days to get paid from your customers.

  A cash flow projection will show you how much working capital you will need during those “gaps” in your cash position.

  I recommend thinking about these six key areas:

  Start up Investment

  Assumptions

  Running Monthly Overhead

  Streamlined

  Cumulative Cash

  Break-even

  Get an original idea.

  Create an idea or product that you believe can be successful. This is easier said than done. Coming up with a viable product or idea is sometimes harder than constructing a business plan. Having a good business plan is important for every entrepreneur, but what if you do not have an idea upon which to build a plan?

  There are many different ways to accomplish this task. Play a game, read a book, paint a picture, play a sport, etc. The point is, do something that gets you thinking and then focus that energy into creating an idea/concept/product. Expose yourself to many different environments that are outside of your comfortable zone. Get more engaged with your hobbies. Expertise will help get closer to a viable business idea. Do not try to force an idea to occur because this will usually result in bad ideas! Take your time, focus y

  Know your limits. Determining these factors will help you focus your thought process. For example, if you are interested in computers, but have no education or experience with computers outside of internet surfing or word processing, it will be difficult to create a marketable idea for computer software components. Keep your thought process reasonable. In other words, do not let your imagination run wild. When you become good at creating ideas, then you can let your imagination do some work, but not at first. our thought, and create the right product for you.

  Seize upon any inspiration. Sometimes, ideas will pop up at the oddest times. Get a small notebook to carry around with you and write ideas in. This way you can look at your notebook and later begin to develop your idea. Ask yourself, what types of businesses would you use? What are some common issues that your associated complain about that could be solved through a business.

  Identify a problem. Think about how you can make the world a better place with your invention or business idea. Your business should revolutionize the way we live life, even if it's just a small way. For example, if you are interested in cooking, maybe you have a problem with the way an oven can dry out a chicken when cooking. Now that you have identified a problem, brainstorm and think of as many solutions as possible. It does not matter how crazy the solution is, just think about them and write them down. After you have written down every possible solution, no matter how crazy, go through the list and find the solution that you feel you can best accomplish. Surprise! You have probably come up with an original idea. This does not mean that you should pitch this idea tomorrow. All this means is that you should develop your idea, mold
your idea, and perfect your idea into something you think people would buy if in the market. Also, this way of thinking will get your creative juices flowing. You may find yourself traveling a different path from your original field of interest. If this occurs, follow the thought until completion. You may be surprised where it leads!

  Study demographics to see which type of customers will appreciate your business idea the most. Businesses generally person appeal to a specific set of demographics before they viral. Decide if your idea has the potential to be viral among a small group of people. Think about your potential competition for the same demographics and how you can set yourself apart from them.

  Conduct Competitive Analysis

  Understanding the competition is a crucial business activity for any entrepreneur or business executive. Some companies hire professionals to track competitors and assess the competitive landscape on a regular basis. But it doesn't always have to be a complicated, time-consuming, and expensive process -- particularly given the new wealth of data that can be assembled using the Internet. By investing even a small amount of time, businesses of any size can develop a framework for making competitive assessments, gather intelligence on business rivals, and understand how to position their own brand, products, and company in the marketplace. Not only can you learn best practices from competitors, but you can also learn to avoid the mistakes they make.

  "Keeping track of who your competitors are, what people are saying about them, and what they are saying themselves can help you differentiate your business and stay ahead of trends that could impact your business," says Michele Levy, an independent brand strategy consultant. "Staying smart on the competitive landscape helps you make very practical decisions around product development, pricing, promotions, messaging, as well as where you fit in the brand landscape."

  This guide will help you understand how your business can benefit from competitive research, how to conduct competitive research, and which sources you will find most productive.

  Dig Deeper: The Changing Face of the Competition 

  Conducting Competitive Research: Understanding the Benefits

  Conducting a competitive assessment should be an ongoing process, one in which you continue to deepen your understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of your competitors. Every business should gather information about the competition and most already do -- even if they don't formalize it into a competitive research process. "Everyone really needs to do competitive research. The difference is scale," Levy says. "You really need to keep your eyes open regardless of how large you are or what you are selling."

  There are a series of business benefits you can gain by having insight into the competitive landscape, particularly if you track products, prices, staffing, research and development, and other aspects of the competition on an ongoing basis. "This is so a business can understand the external and internal environments they're operating in," says Ken Garrison, chief executive officer of the Society of Competitive Intelligence Professionals (SCIP). 

  The following are potential business benefits from conducting competitive research:

  Understanding the market.

  Better targeting customers.

  Forecasting the potential for the market.

  Figuring out how the economic climate impacts the market.

  Understanding what competitors are offering.

  Keeping tabs on competitors' prices.

  Determining offerings in ancillary markets.

  Finding new customers.

  The promise is that by gathering competitive research over time and in a systematic way you will be able to track trends and/or scenarios and be about to act on the research. "You want to take this research and do it in an organized and systematic way so that you can create an actionable strategy or actionable intelligence from it," Garrison says. "Most every company gathers competitive intelligence, even though they may not define it as such. We're all aware of the business environment we're selling into, how our operations are functioning, where we can sell in the future, our profitable areas."

  Dig Deeper: How to Profit from Market Research 

  Conducting Competitive Research: Getting Started

  The first decision you need to make about competitive research is whether to gather it in-house or go outside and hire a professional firm or consultant.

  The benefits of hiring a consultant include that they may have more expertise in intelligence gathering that you do. "They will do things that wouldn't occur to you," Garrison says. "They have probably done hundreds if not thousands of these analyses. They know how to do them in a systematic way. And they're probably also pretty good at getting senior management to tell them what it is they want to know and what is the scope." Conversely, the challenge of hiring an outside consultant is that sometimes it's difficult getting senior managers to clearly enunciate what they want to know and then listen to the results of the research.

  The benefits of conducting the research in-house include that you would understand the business and what competitive factors you want to track, Garrison says. You would also have a constant stream of data in the firm, and managers may listen more to an insider than an outsider. The challenge is that gathering competitive intelligence is a skill and you would either have to develop the talent on your own staff or hire it from somewhere else, he says. 

  A compromise might be to hire a professional to provide an initial competitive analysis and update it every six or 12 months, while you keep track of competitors on a day-to-day basis in-house, Levy says. "As a business owner your best bet is to do it yourself on an on-going basis by seeing what your competitors are doing, looking at their website, and getting in the habit of keeping those folks on your radar screen," Levy says. "Ideally, this will become an organized thing where you're on their mailing list, you're following them on Twitter, and you mystery shop them every six to 12 months."

  Conducting Competitive Research: Creating a Framework

  In general, the way to start gathering competitive research is to first set a framework for your competitive assessment. Levy suggests the best way to begin if you're doing this on your own is to start by opening up a new Excel worksheet and creating the following columns outlining your competitors:

  Name (and location if relevant)

  URL

  Elevator pitch (Brief answer to the question "Who is this company?")

  Mission (If it exists.)

  Products/services offered (with pricing)

  Strengths (What is the competitor good at?)

  Weaknesses (Where does the competitor fall short?)

  Key brand differentiators (What are the messaging, product/service offerings, etc., that set the competitor apart from their competition?)

  As you work through the competitive assessment, Levy says, you may find other aspects of your competition useful to track, but this is a good starting point. Garrison suggests that you may want to review the economic environment at a macro level. You may also want to look at the economy on a micro level, particularly if your firm competes in a certain geographic area that has a unique set of factors.

   

  Conducting Competitive Research: Selecting Targets

  It's helpful to think of your competition in terms of options that your customers have -- where else they can go to purchase the products and services you hope to sell them, Levy says. That can include direct competitors (those who sell the same thing you do) and indirect competitors (those who sell other products and services that meet the same need). "For example, Starbucks and Dunkin' Donuts are direct competitors, while the prepared foods section of the local supermarket could be an indirect competitor to them both -- especially if its coffee is good," Levy says.

  Often entrepreneurs claim that they have no competition, but everyone has competition. If your list of competitors seems long (and the prospect of tracking all of your competitors daunting), consider prioritizing your list into a couple of different categories. Levy recommends, for inst
ance, "key competitors to watch closely" versus "emerging competitors to keep an eye on." 

  Choose a good business name

  What’s a winning business name? A business name that draws business in itself.

  Creating a winning business name takes some thought but is one of the most important things you’ll do during the process of starting a business. Starting out with a weak business name is like trying to golf with only one club in your bag. You may sink some shots but it will be a whole lot harder.

  So how do you create a winning business name? Get your family, friends and/or colleagues together for a business name brainstorming session and work through these five rules for choosing a business name:

  1) A winning business name has to be memorable – but easy to spell.

  Obviously, your potential customers and clients need to be able to remember your business name. But they also need to be able to find it easily if they’re looking for it in a phone book, directory or online. So choosing a business name such as “Crychalwellyn” is a bad idea. Unique is good but difficult spellings are a bad idea.

  2) A winning business name needs a visual element.

  What popped into your head when you read “Crychalwellyn”? Anything? Most people don’t visualize anything when they read this business name that I invented. But generally we are hard-wired to “see” images when we read or hear language, and incorporating a visual element into your business name can be a powerful aid to customers’ memory (and a powerful advertising tool).

  So you want your business name to have a strong visual element to it. The catch is that...

  3) A winning business name has to have positive connotation.