With the economy on the ropes and set to stay there for the foreseeable future, now is a wonderful time to consider moving your assets and your attention to the online marketplace. Here, you can establish independence by making your own business, your own website, and trading under your own name. By concentrating on your own digital-only business – free, of course, from costly overheads – you’ll be able to build an asset portfolio and reinvest your profits in your digital offerings. Read on to learn how to invest in a digital-only business of your own.
Concept Development
You need to start your journey with a concept and work from there. Remember that, in the online world, you don’t need to offer anything remarkably different in order to sell: you just need to outcompete your competition on certain metrics, like traffic, click-throughs, sales, and conversions. If you’re able to do this, you’ll be able to lead your market, whatever you’ve chosen to sell online.
Nonetheless, you need to find something that truly inspires you in order for you to get fully behind your project and fully invested in your digital-only business. Some individuals choose to sell advice and knowledge online – in blogs and paid-for content. Others learn how to sell t-shirts online, tapping into a love of fashion. Both of these options require websites, which is your second important tip.
Setting Up Your Website
A website is actually fairly easy to build. With modern website-builders available for free, and excellent template options available at a nominal price, you’ll be able to make a platform that’s sleek, modern, and well-constructed simply by using one of these online editors. For serious businesses, though, you’re going to want to add more than a touch of individuality to your site – and, often, that’ll mean designing it yourself.
You have the choice of bringing in a freelance web designer at this point, although it might be more cost-effective and enriching to learn how to code and create a website yourself, by taking an online course in the subject matter. On the other hand, you can also use tools like TemplateTester. Either way, angle your website towards what you’re selling. If you’re selling advice, pepper your home page with exciting posts. If you’re selling t-shirts, make sure your products are bright, exciting, and presented on every page of your site.
Making Sales
The wonderful thing about your digital-only business is that it’ll make you money internationally, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. This is especially true of those businesses that are selling goods that are desirable all over the world. Bearing in mind that digital-only businesses need not be based in any one country, it’s your responsibility to ensure:
- There’s cheap shipping to worldwide locations available from your homepage and checkout
- That you can accept payments in different currencies
- That you can accept different digital forms of payment
- That your website is coded so that it can easily be translated into other languages
With these steps taken care of, you can sell your advice or your t-shirts to an international group of consumers, without stressing about the currency or the cost of shipping.
There you have it: three key things to consider about your digital-only, online-based business.