I haven’t entered in many blog post contests recently and thought to change that when I saw I had the opportunity to write a post about startup tips while entering into a blog marketing contest for BloggersCompete.com at the same time.
So here are my Online Entrepreneur Startup Tips
Decide What You Want To Do
Simple right? I mean you want to make money online, what is there to decide? The problem is there are so many avenues to attempt to earn money online, especially in the startup space that you literally can fail if you don’t take the time to learn how it works and setup some basic strategies.
First is that you have to decide whether you want to sell other peoples products / services, or create a product or service you want to sell and offer. If you have no product or service in mind that you want to directly offer, don’t worry you can start out by being an affiliate for other products in a general area of interest and when you finally create your own product or service offering you can switch to it later.
Do You Want To Make Money
Do you want to write paid reviews (much harder to make money at than you think) or do you want to try to earn passively from AdSense, Kontera, PayPerView / PayPerClick hits? There are many sites and entrepreneurs who earn good livings off of AdSense, Infolinks and other click based systems. It is much tougher than it used to be but the potential to earn is still there. Many who succeed in this area create more than one and in some cases dozens of smaller sites all designed to capture different search traffic and capitalize off of the clicks.
Do you want to sell specific products like eBooks, Gadgets, Jewelry or do you want to build a kind of online Store like am Amazon aStore? Again there is a ton of competition but if you market it right and learn about niches that you could target and really gain the lead in you have potential to make good earnings.
Do The Research
Once you focus generally on what type of venture you want to start up you have to go about doing the research on whether there is room for your site and attempts. Use services like Google Keywords Tool to analyze global and local searches to see if enough searches are done about your product/service that you will get organic traffic. Find some competitors and view their page source codes looking at their Title, META Description, META Keywords and how they formulate their content/site design. Find things that could use improving and improve upon it.
When affiliate marketing the same product as other people you need to make sure your site is faster, easier, is more compelling and ranks better than your competitors. The same holds true with your own product/service except you aren’t selling the exact same thing because it is your offering not somebody else’s you are reselling.
Invest The Time
Business aren’t built overnight and though online startups are much faster to bring on board than a brick and mortar business many fail to realize that dropping a fish in the ocean is a lot harder than having a physical store front that people have to drive or walk past everyday and can’t “not see”. It takes constant dedication and interaction with social media, SEO optimization and if you have a little initial investment and have a product/service of your own you could experiment with AdWords, or other ad services to try and get a head start. Just make sure you have a fully tested and working process before you pay to advertise it or you could end up frustrating your customers.
These are just some of the start up tips I have learned and follow myself when bringing a new venture online in my blogging or affiliate marketing niches and on a final note BloggersCompete is an interesting new service which allows bloggers to sponsor contests from a centralized point and build organic backlinks and traffic through creation of those contests. I think the concept has merit and may tap into something that hasn’t really been done well yet for bloggers looking for a way to not only run their own contests, but have their contests reach an audience to gain more participation. Obviously this is for blog contests where the contestants write posts and include some instructions from the advertiser and win a cash prize but I can see other prize offerings being there in the future.
-Justin Germino
