Make Money Online With Your Offline Business

Make Money Online 
Double your profits by putting your offline business online.  Read here for free information on putting your business online

Put Your Business Online

You have your own offline business and you would like to expand. Going online has many advantages and disadvantages:

What are the Pros and Cons?

Pros

• You don't have to get new premises.
• It gives you access to a world-wide market, rather than just anyone within the vicinity of the off-line business.
• Lower costs.
• 24/7 opening.  If you business is offline, you can usually only operate for 8 of those 24 hours, and 5 of those 7 days.
• You can sell your products and/or services through affiliates.
• You can sell affiliate or drop shipping goods as well as your own range if you want to.

Cons

• You have to learn a whole new way of marketing.
• You have to learn about a whole load of online technical matters you have never had to deal with before.

 Who Might Want to Take Their Own Online Business? 

Those who might want to take their own online business include business owners who:

• Want to expand, but don't have enough capital to do it offline.
• Want to experiment with different products, services and ways of doing business.
• Want to reach a much more varied customer base.
• Increase the return from their current investment in time, effort and learning.

 What you have to Consider

There are several things you have to consider:

• Will the online business be a copy of the offline business or something different?
• Is there a market for it online?
• Can your suppliers cope with any potential increase in demand?
• How will the actual process operate?
• What sort of payment system and/or shopping cart and will you put on your site?
• How will you put your site together and get it online? DIY or GSI (Get Someone In)?
• How will you bring your customers to the site (marketing)?
• What price are similar products / services are being sold for online?
• Can you sell enough to achieve your required income?
• Is the quality of your products / services high enough?

 Work Out How the Process Will Operate (The Business Model)

When starting your own business, you will need to work out exactly what has to happen between your customer ordering your goods and your customer receiving your goods. Unhappy customers are dangerous weapons, and you don't want any of them pointed at you!

Below is a very simple example of a work-flow process. Start with your customer's actions and walk through everything that has to happen in order for the customer to receive their goods quickly and in good condition.

  Work out How You Will Bring Your Customers to the Site and Keep them Coming Back

Online marketing will be where you have to put the most effort for your internet business.

Considerations:

Some of the things you will have to manage to make sure your online business is successful are:

• Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) or getting customers to your site for nothing.
• E-mail marketing.
• Audio / video Seminars.
• Sales (squeeze) pages.
• Using Social Media including blogs.
• Building links.

 These are just a few of the areas you will have to work on when building your online business. Even if you can afford to outsource from the beginning, it is vital you have helped to design the marketing plan and are able to detail it to others who may be working with you.

Set Up the Website and/or Blog
You may be able to outsource the design of your website and/or blog. However, if you are not don't worry. Many Internet Service Providers supply a range of free website templates with a range of fairly simple editing tools if you buy their internet services.

It is also possible to get a free website and even free hosting. Watch out for a surfeit of adverts though!

Remember, if you don't like the sound of this, you can get information about three other ways of setting up your business online cheaply in other blogs:

     Affiliate Marketing                      Drop Shipping                                       Putting Your Business Online

 And through My Business Coach Online

Get our free 5 part introduction to becoming an affiliate.


 If you are not sure which type of online business is for you, it does not matter – you can use them all. Consider some of these examples: 

• How about putting your own existing offline business online, and adding a range from a drop shipping warehouse?
• You could have a drop shipping site with some links to affiliate goods.
• You could have your own online business with a range of drop shipping goods and a few affiliate items as well
• You could put all four approaches on one site.

The point about this is that you are here to enjoy yourself and to make money online. You should try different approaches to make sure that you are not missing the thing that would push your site into the stratosphere.

Ideas for Businesses to Set Up in Successful Industries

Generate Ideas for Successful Online Businesses

Set up in industries guaranteed to be successful in the future.  That is one way of future-proofing your small online business.  But how can you do that?

I have mentioned before that passion is vital when you set out to make money online.  But passion must be tempered with judgement. In this case judgement means being really careful about choosing  what you sell and who you try to sell it to. You want to be in a market that is going to grow and succeed in the coming years so that you can grow and succeed with it.

Hot Industries for the Future

So what industries will be hot in the future? Below is a list of areas the talking heads online generally seem to agree will be successful for a long time to come.

• Health 
• Employment Services
• IT (including hardware, software, design, manufacture, repair, installation, outsourcing, games, etc
• Financial Advice
• Management, scientific and technical consulting services
• Child day care service
• Skilled technical services

How can you use this list to better position your online business? Well these are the industries, but ask yourself, who are the buyers? Who are the people out there doing the buying and what do they want?

Consider Baby Boomers

A garden snake digesting a hedgehog is a metaphor that has been used to describe baby boomers. The lump the hedghog made in the snake as it was gradually digested was compared to the lump the boomers created in the economy.  Boomers are the generation born between 1950 and 65.  Because the generation was very large, its progress has created a 'bump'   in national economies all the way through.  

It is not going to stop anytime soon. Baby boomers are expected to live longer on average than anyone before them. And as they enter into the winter phase of their lives, that should be very interesting to anyone involved in business marketing (and everyone running an on line business is involved in Business Marketing!)

Turn a Problem into an Opportunity

Boomers living longer means more of them will have more needs that you can provide the answers to.

• Health Services: Health care, flue jabs, nursing, cosmetic procedures (in the US boomers soaked up 8.9 million cosmetic surgery procedures from a total of 12.1 million), supply of drugs and aids, alternative therapies. Consider how you can offer specialist advice, sourcing, management etc of all these areas. 
• Employment Services: Employment agency for health workers in hospitals, cosmetic procedure clinics, primary health providers, and homes for the elderly. 
• Training Services: For all the people that go through that employment agency 
• IT: Provision of goods and services, advice, training, assistance etc relating to IT. 
• Financial Advice: These boomers have lived through great times, but they have also lived through some very hard times. Many of them do not have enough saved to see them through to the final years. These guys need very specialised advice, but will only take it from someone they really trust – and how many trustworthy financial adviser could you name today?
• Management, scientific and technical consulting services All the services being set up for boomers will need the services of consultants. – be the 'go to' guy in your niche and the work will come in.
• Child day care service: Many boomers are already providing this service for their grandkids. There must be an opportunity here for training them to set up a child-care business, in offering them help in caring for the kids, in offering a care-service for the days they can't manage it, in helping them deal with the massive difference in the way they brought their children up and the way they are expected to treat their grandchildren now.
• Skilled technical services: All of us need good skilled technical services from time to time, but for the elderly it is vital as they can so easily be targeted by criminals. Can you set up an agency, can you provide information; act as a whistle blowing page to warn others about heartless traders in their area.

 Compare Industry to Market and Find Your Niche

This is just a tiny number of suggestions about how you could apply one market (baby boomers) to the hot industries of the future. Try it with other generations (generation X for example) and see if you can find a connection to your passion and the beginnings of a niche you could make your own.

Get Step by Step Instructions to Find your Passion

Send for our free introductory course to Affiliate Marketing for step by step instuctions and if you want to explore more about niches and how to find yours, read this blog.