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Five Simple Steps to Creating a Profitable Website

In order to demonstrate how easy it is to start an online business, let me go through the steps of creating a profitable website. A business plan for a online business, if you will. After all, a successful website is actually nothing more than a vibrant community, as you will see shortly.

The first step to build stunning and profitable websites online is choosing the right niche. Whether you are targeting mountain biking enthusiasts or those who sell infomercial products online, you need to clearly define who you will be selling to. You need to find a group of people who have a need and are willing to pay to have that need met. This is business 101. And the cool thing is that the internet is tailor-made for niches.

For example, it would be very hard for me to open a store that sold nothing but Swiss watches in a small town. There are just not enough customers to come through the door on a daily basis that would be looking for that particular product. But, if I could somehow advertise my Swiss watches to Swiss watch fans all around the country…or the world, then I may be on to something. And if I really have a passion for Swiss watches and I enjoy talking about Swiss watches and writing about Swiss watches and I dream about Swiss watches...well, you get the picture, then that passion will come through to my customers.

So, the first step is to make money online everyday is to identify a niche that has high demand. But I also want to avoid a niche that has a lot of competition. Selling IPODS on the internet is a terrible idea. Even though there is a huge demand for IPODS, there are probably two million websites trying to sell the exact same thing. Do you want to be number two million and one? No, you want to do your research and find out which niches and products have a large demand and a relatively small number of competing websites. This is the key to how to make sales online.

The next step to set up your online home business is to choose a product that your niche needs AND is willing to pay for. We all need oxygen, but very few of us are willing to pay for it because it is in abundant supply. It is the same with music. Only the big internet companies make money selling music because they can sell it in great volume and more importantly, they sell advertising space for their popular music download sites. But you are not a big internet company, so you want to find a product that your niche needs, but will not be able to find at millions of other websites. Now, here is where you need to start making decisions. Here is where you might want to create your own online sales action planner.

Do you want to sell buy a product, store in it your garage, attract customers to your website and then ship it to them when they buy?

Or do you want to attract customers to your website and then direct them to someone else’s website, collecting a commission when they buy from that other person’s website? (There is plenty of affiliate marketing information online)

Or do you want to create your own products, whether they are downloadable or actual products that you ship to your customers?

Depending on which scenario appeals to you, you need to find that product that meets the need of your niche. Actually, a profitable website may have all of the above.

And how do you know what your niche needs?

You ask them.

There are many free survey companies out there that allow you to send a survey to a specific group of people and ask them questions like:

"What is your single greatest question when buying a new (blank)?"

"If we could show you how to (blank), how interested would you be in our upcoming ebook?" (not interested, somewhat interested, interested, very interested)

"If you could save (blank) by purchasing our new ebook, what would you consider a good investment for this ebook?" (give 4 ranges of prices)

Amazing. We have just determined what our niche wants, how badly they want it and how much they are willing to pay for it! If you send a survey with ten questions to one hundred people and offer them a freebie to entice them to respond, you will have a very good idea of what to sell to your niche.

Another way to find out what your niche wants is to see what your niche is searching for in the search engines. There are various companies that track which search terms people use, how many people use them in a given time period and how many competing pages there are for each search term. This is a virtual gold mine. What if you were opening a restaurant and before you even opened the doors, you knew how many customers you would have next week, what they would want to order and how much they would be willing to spend? You would almost be guaranteed success. Well, you can have all that and more if you know how to research search terms on the internet. Keyword research should be an integral part of every small business marketing online plan.

Building Community

Now that you have located a profitable niche that has needs and is willing to pay to have them met, and you know what those needs are, and what products will fulfill those needs, then the third step is to begin building a community. Notice that I haven’t said anything about building a website yet! We are going to need a website eventually, but first we need a way to communicate with our visitors after they leave our website. Face it. Not many people buy something on their first visit to a website. Do you?

We need to communicate with our visitors through email so that we can continue to dialog with them about their unique needs (which we know from our survey and our keyword research). We need to give them lots of great tips and knowledge so they begin to trust us…that we really know what we are talking about. We need to share stories about our shared need (you are a part of the niche, after all) and tell them that we understand…and that we even have the solution to their need. And this is where we build an online community for our businesses. Community through email loops, blogs, newsletters, Yahoo groups and writing articles. Finding those people in our niche, so that we can attract them to our site and offer them the solution to their needs. And building community is the key to residual income with our online business.

Now if all this sounds a little daunting...well, it is. It takes a lot of work to build community, but that is what business is all about. And this is no more true than in a small family business. You can not compete with Walmart. So dispel that myth right away. But you can be a small speed boat that runs circles around the battleship. A speed boat that can find under-developed niches, ascertain what they need and then fulfill that need while feeding your family and teaching your children entrepreneurial skills at the same time.

Now the fourth step is easy. All you do is create a simple website (there are plenty of free online tutorials on how to design a web site), place a product or two on that website, collect the money through a shopping cart and deliver the product through one of the means described above. You have already done the hard part by finding the niche, ascertaining what they need, finding the product that meets that need and beginning to build a online community for your small businesses that is aware of what you have to offer.

Now all you have to do in the fifth step is create more awareness of your site through your community, optimizing your web pages to rank well in the search engines and writing articles relevant to your niche for the internet article directories. That’s really all there is to learn to start an online business. And if you love the same things that your niche loves, it almost like getting paid to have fun!