How to start small online business

Whatever kind of business it is that you want to start online, do you believe in it? Does it fit in your strength and personality?
Simply put, you are the vision and owner of your business. So, make sure your objectives and plans align with the above three aspects (strength, personality and belief)

Personality

If you are extrovert in nature and have good communication skills, social media influence is the way to go.
Also, if you like being on a camera; then starting a YouTube channel is the way to go.
For instance, you can start a vlog channel on YouTube where you share your daily life with the entire global audience. You may choose a niche on where to specify your target or go general. Say, posting tutorials on makeup and fashion; or farming products, or food recipes, or gaming, family channel, or comedy etc
If you are more reserved to private life with less public interaction (as an introvert), offering services that require less public interaction with the creator could work for you. For example – coding, creating websites, reviewing products and sharing their in-depth pros and cons.

Your vision

We are all different. What works for one might not work for the other. The biggest problem comes when you try to fit into what others are doing, yet it’s not your area. You need to have a vision of what you want for your life. For clarity, why do you want to build a business, or, what are you trying to accomplish with this online business?
Is your vision to make an impact and transform a good course, or are you trying to lend help and serve a given set of people or are you just in it for money?

Active vs Passive

Active income is the most common way in business today, but it requires more personal time. You need to create more content and be dedicated to the service/product all the time. But if you enjoy that, then go ahead (you don’t want to create a successful business and later hate it.)
Passively, you can have multiple sources that, each generate less but adequate income. This area is better for those with diverse experience in a couple of fields that they can equally get involved in.

Types/Models of Online Businesses

i. Affiliate Marketing

As an affiliate marketer, you are promoting and selling other people’s products and services online for a commission pay in return. In other words, you are a middle man between a product and a sale.
How it works:
You endorse someone’s products to your audience and upon clicking the product link, for every item they buy, you get a commission.
The main skill for you to master as an affiliate marketer is how to get quality traffic, then direct it to your affiliate links. This is achieved in two main ways: ability to get attention and ability to build trust and relationship with the audience.
The greatest mistake that affiliates do is prioritizing making money than serving and meeting the people’s needs with value.
Platforms that can be used for affiliate marketing include blogs, social media channels such as Instagram, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.
Golden Tip: Money is a byproduct of value addition. Also, don’t look at the one-time front sale instead focus on long term, when you have those clients that trust have have a relationship with you, you’ll be in business for many years.
Some of the Pros for the Affiliate Marketing:
⦁ Easy to start and great way to learn about the market or your audience
⦁ Mitigate your risk and see how people interact with your product. Also it will help you be patient while building trustworthy relationship for long term business

ii. Ads revenue

This works through advertising platforms search as Google’s Pay Per Click, Twitter For Business, YouTube Monetization etc. It’s success is based on traffic flow as well as the viewership and content.For instance; if you are having say 100 or 1000 visitors a day on your blog or website or social media channel – there’s no way you will get a better income from that. But the good thing, with time, and great content you can grow your following, and online traffic as well.
Don’t count on the ads revenue as your priority source of income. You’ll find yourself always seeking for the next gig or brand endorsement instead of diversified investment with better foundation.

iii. eCommerce

Likes of Amazon, eBay, Ali Express, Walmart etc are some of the biggest eCommerce companies in the world. With hundreds of millions of customers that trust the platform and connects the global to improved market access.
Golden Tip: Amazon is also a products’ search engine; meaning, If you can learn how to rank and optimize keywords, using their sponsored ads , you can run pay-per-click advertising on amazon too.
It might be tempting to sell random products on Amazon, but instead focus on building a brand for your target niche – that happens to sell on Amazon.
Remember, you are using Amazon, to build a brand for your customers but the Amazon platform views you as a vendor and not a partner. So, redirecting your traffic to your own eCommerce site with discounts and special offers might work better for you while reducing your dependency on Amazon on the long term.
The downside of eCommerce business is that you need an inventory and re-stocking, hence more capital needed when starting out the business.
Nowadays, there are so many online tools for creating an online eCommerce website compared to a while back when this was limited. You can either use sites such as wix.com or shopify to create an online store using their templates or woo-commerce platform for integration to your custom-built website.

Bottomline

Starting and running an online Business is so much easier now than back in the days. All you need to start is to find a model that works for you and explore it further before starting out.