5 Biggest Mistakes You Should Avoid When Starting Online Business
ByYou start online business to succeed, not to fail. But these 5 mistakes can bring down any good intention, and suck your time and energy like a vacuum cleaner.
Mistake 1. Not having well-developed online business plan. Have you thought about a value your business brings to visitors? What is your main goal with the online business? Outline as much as you can what your business is about, how you help people, what products will be promoted… and go for it! Many times online entrepreneurs do quite opposite – they rush to launch a blog and then try to fit a business model into it, or… even worth, don’t have any business model in mind.
Mistake 2. Not doing market research. Do you know your competition? How they got into position where they are now? What products they make or promote? Take your main keyword, e.g. “dog training” and search in Google to see who will come on first 3 pages of search results. Visit sites, take a note of PR, evaluate back links and you should get a good initial idea of your competition. Do you know what people are interested in? There is no need to guess – go check Squidoo Top 100 list, or what’s on first page of Digg, or explore Yahoo Answers – any of these sites will sparkle a lot of ideas for you.
Mistake 3. Going after a single, hot product. Products come and go, and what’s hot now can be gone from market in 6 months (and usually is). Start with choosing MARKET first, narrow down a market as much as you can (find niche or micro-niche) and then work to find the best products for the niche. There are thousands of products available on variety of affiliate networks and you’ll never run out of choices. Try to find five to ten affiliate products that you want to promote, and you’ll be in a good shape. If you done extensive market research, you may find gaps in product offerings and start thinking about developing your own product. Tip: finance product development with revenue you are getting from your affiliate site.
Mistake 4. Choosing market not related to your interests and passion. It might be very tempting to start online business with what can bring you money fast, such as golf how-to books. But, do you know anything about golf? Can you bond with your customers? If you just re-hashing golf information – you’ll not go too far. On the other hand, when you start with something you like – you’ll enjoy it and create value for prospects and customers. Bottom line: you should start your first online business about something you know and like. Knowledge accumulated during your first online business, can be applied later to any market and then sky is a limit.
Mistake 5. Not knowing your business tools. Do you take a time to really see if you are using all features of the tool you bought for the business? In my experience with other online business owners, they just skim over the most obvious usage of the tool. Good tools have multitude of features, and it can be overwhelming to learn them all, however do spend a time to learn a tool, and make sure to make notes as you go alone (it’s easy to forget what was learned as time passed by).
Already went through start-up stages of online business? Want to add to the list of mistakes? Share with readers what you would do differently based on your experience…
2 Comments
August 26th, 2008 at 6:29 pm
Really interesting post. I definitely agree with #1. You should always know what direction you’re headed in.
I think another mistake would be not establishing your brand. When you start an online business, you want a unique look, feel, and style to really get people to remember you from the start.
Corey Freemans last blog post..Blog Engage - Social Networking for Bloggers
August 26th, 2008 at 10:18 pm
Corey, thank you for sharing branding tip - it’s a good one. Definitely, online biz owner should think about establishing brand. This can be as simple as a blog/site look and feel that is memorable and stands out of the crowd.