Category: Starting a Company

Making Money Without Products

Have you ever thought about building a business online, but you did not know what product or service you wanted to sell.  Well, one option that is open to you is to promote products for someone else.  In this type of online enterprise the object is to drive traffic to somewhere else or attract traffic to your web site that will in turn sell products that exist elsewhere.  

In order to understand this a little more clearly, let’s look at the different types of online revenue generation that exist.

Online Advertising

In the simplest type of model, you can generate online revenue by displaying advertisements from other companies.  The original model for businesses advertising online was to display banner ads.  Banner ads were purchased in units of 1,000 page views known as CPMs (cents per thousand).  This was fine in the early days of the Internet, but over time many online viewers have come to ignore those winking and blinking banners.  Banners in many respects have become just an online nuisance.

As a counter to the lack of conversions from banner advertising, a small company called Looksmart institued a pay-per-click (PPC) model where sellers bid for search engine placement based on the amount that they would pay "per click".  It was a known fact that the higher a link existed in the link, the more likely a visitor would be to "click" on the link.  Therefore, to get a more favorable (i.e. higher) listing, the more the advertizer would pay for the placement.

It was around this time when a new type of search engine appeared on the Internet.  Their model was built for speed and was set up to counter the disrespect of the online banner advertisement, and Google developed the innocuous text links that are ever prevalent on their search engine.  They brought pay per click advertising to a new level and brought about the whole concept of niche marketing and advertising.  When a search engine gives the person searching what they are looking for, the advertiser can optimize his conversions by buying traffic where his prospective customers are looking.  It’s a win-win for everyone involved as products, services, and customers are gathering in the same place.

Affiliate Marketing

Another way to generate revenue from an online business is through affiliate marketing.  In this type of business, the object is to drive traffic to another site which is selling a product or service.  The affiliate marketer is paid when a sale is made.  This is known as payment on a cost per acquisition (CPA) basis.  This is the most prevalent model operating on the Internet today.  This is good for both the affiliate and the ultimate seller as the seller only pays the affiliate on the products which are sold which eliminates a sales force and basically pays for sales on a commission basis.  The affiliate, on the other hand, can generate revenue from numerous places with ever having to worry about buying products, product inventory, or fulfillment. 

What Others Are Saying

Online advertising stabilizes

More than Google’s results, Yahoo’s may be indicative of the broader trend in fef online advertising, since Yahoo is a leader in the display ads that most Web sites depend on for revenue. Overall online ad revenue is expected to fall 2.9% […].

B2B Ad Network

For a publisher, Bizo creates new revenue opportunities and more efficient monetization of online audiences. — For business audiences, Bizo decreases the volume of irrelevant advertising across the web. […]  

Online Ad Revenue Drops

Online advertising revenue in the United States dropped 5.3 percent to $10.9 billion in the first half of this year, according to the Interactive Advertising Bureau. Display advertising declined 1.1 percent. […]   

Checklist For Starting a New Business

Starting a new business in any field is always a challenging task. It requires detailed analysis and thorough understanding of the business domain along with many other things. Here is a concise checklist which one can refer to, while in the process of starting his or her own business.

checklist for starting a small business

In recent times, the number of new startups and emerging businesses has grown like never before. The worldwide economic slowdown, coupled with the increasing number of layoffs, has prompted people to think of various possibilities beyond jobs. In such uncertain times, it makes sense to be involved with something over which one has maximum control. Naturally, small businesses and startup ventures are on the rise as more and more people delve into entrepreneurship.

However, starting a new business venture is no child’s play. There are a lot many factors, that an aspiring businessman must take into consideration, during the initial phase. The following checklist provides certain guidelines which would be helpful to those coming up with various small businesses of their own.

Checklist for Starting a Small Business

Ask yourself why: This is the first question you should tackle before doing any other thing. Ask yourself, "what is the precise reason that you want to start your own business?" Be honest with your answer as it will invariably affect the eventual success or failure of your business.

Choose a good business name: Choose a good and apt name for your business and register it with the concerned authorities. Pick a name which compliments your attitude and clearly projects your line of business. You don’t want a business name that leads prospective customers into thinking of you as an ambulance services provider, if tourism is what you’re actually in.

Understand your business domain: Identify and understand your business domain area thoroughly. It is always important to know well in advance what is it that you will be doing, and what is it that you will NOT be doing.

Identify your strengths: Identify your strengths and also your weaknesses. Understand your niche areas and design your work process accordingly to utilize it to the maximum. Focus on your strengths and at the same time, figure out ways to tackle your weaknesses.

Comprehensive market research: It is imperative that you do extensive and thorough market research pertaining to your area of business. Identify your competitors and learn from their successes and failures.

Set realistic goals: Everybody wants their business to be successful. But then how do you define ‘a successful business’? Set goals for your business in terms of financial targets, sales targets, growth parameters, etc. Set both short-term as well as long-term goals, but make sure they’re realistic.

Prepare a detailed business model: Once you are clear with your goals, you must decide on how to go about achieving them. Prepare a proper business model or a business plan for this purpose. While preparing a business plan, one must take into consideration a number of factors such as the available resources, manpower skills, financial strength, etc. During this process, it is also advisable to take inputs from someone who is well-experienced in the same field. Hire a business consultant, if necessary.

Get your legal licenses and permits in order: Once you start a business venture, you are automatically responsible for all its legalities and licenses. Make sure that you obtain all the necessary licenses and legal permits from the concerned authorities. Tie up with a legal advisor or an attorney, if needed.

Develop an effective and efficient marketing strategy: During the initial phase, almost every business venture has to invest a considerable amount of time and money in marketing their services. Work out different types of marketing strategies and then pick the one that is the most effective, efficient and best-suited to your needs.

Have an RMMM plan in place: Always have an RMMM (Risk Mitigation, Monitoring and Management) plan in place for your business. It helps in identifying potential risks, dealing with existing ones and can thereby protect your business from a sudden disaster.

Use your finances wisely: Unless you happen to be a billionaire in the first place, it is absolutely crucial that you learn to manage your finances properly. Finance is to a business venture as oxygen is to man. Keep a detailed written record of your expenses, profits, bank transactions, loan statements, etc. Hire a financial consultant, if necessary.

Stay abreast of changing market trends: Market trends always keep changing and evolving over time. Change is inevitable. Make sure that you remain abreast of the changing trends in your line of business. It will enable you to adapt to new situations much quicker and will also help you stay ahead of your competitors.

Keeping this checklist in mind will surely assist you as you embark upon a new journey as a businessman. Work hard and keep the faith!

By Parashar Joshi

Small business startup checklist

Planning is essential to success, he adds, noting that poor planning is the most common reason for new business failures. “Take the planning part of starting a business seriously,” Thompson says. “Going through the planning process is just critical."

Starting an Online Business 

Something I’ve always wanted to do is to create a new information product especially for people who want very much to succeed with an online business but just don’t know where to start. While there is much information to … Now that you have gone through the checklist and have launched your site, your main focus should be on generating more traffic than you can handle. Trust me if you get more than you can handle, something tells me you will find a way to deal with it.

Corporate Records – What to Keep

This is a great article explaining what information you need to keep on a corporation.  Keep this in a handy spot so you can refer to it from time to time after your have started your online business.

Corporate Records – What to Keep
 by: Richard Chapo

Whether you’ve created a corporation or limited liability company, you must maintain records. Here’s a primer on the basic corporate records you need to maintain.

Corporate Records

When forming a corporation or limited liability company, you are creating an entity independent from yourself. In so doing, this independent entity must take actions for itself, not you. For instance, a corporation will have a corporate bank account through which all revenues and debt payments are handled. As a shareholder, even with a single shareholder entity, you will not pay person expenses out of the corporate bank account. This concept extends to record keeping.

For the purpose of this article, I am considering both corporation and limited liability company documents as ‘corporate records.’ Although the records of each entity have different names, they serve the same purpose. For instance, articles of incorporation for a corporation serve the same purpose as Articles of Organization. The following list applies to corporations, but you can apply the list to the limited liability equivalents.

Although each state has different records requirements, all require you to keep the following records.

1. Articles of Incorporation – The charter establishing the existence of the entity with the relevant Secretary of State.

2. Bylaws – The rules of the corporation. Essentially, the bylaws set out how the corporation will be administered from a procedural perspective, the rights of shareholders, how meetings will be called and so on.

3. Board Resolutions – These are resolutions passed by the Board of Directors from time to time, such as defining classes of corporate stock and approving particular courses of action for the business.

4. Minutes of Shareholder Meetings

5. Annual Meeting – Every state requires a corporation to have at least one meeting of the board of directors each year. Keep these in your corporate book.

6. Shareholder Communications – Copies of all communications to shareholders. Most states require you to hold these for three years, but you should keep these permanently to guard against future shareholder lawsuits.

7. Shareholders – A list of shareholders and the shares they own.

8. Annual Report – Most states require you to file an annual or bi-annual report with the Secretary of State. Keep copies of these in your corporate records. Most states provide a pre-printed form.

9. Balance Sheets – Shareholders have the right to inspect the finances of the corporation, although this right has limitations. You need to keep up to date balance sheets.

10. Tax Returns

So, how long should you keep these corporate records? Some attorneys will tell you three or five years. Personally, I believe you should keep them permanently. If a shareholder dispute occurs, you don’t want to testify you through away a document. If the business is eventually sold, the buyer is going to want to see all corporate records. Either way, you are better off holding on to all records.

About The Author

Richard A. Chapo is a San Diego business lawyer with http://www.sandiegobusinesslawfirm.com – a San Diego business law firm in San Diego, California.

Maverick Money Makers

Maverick Money Makers is one of many online clubs that teach you how to set up your own online business.  With the stock market dropping many baby boomers are losing their retirement and looking to the internet to compensate.

Home business, work at home, internet marketing, there are tones of ways to make money on line.  The reason I recommend using a “club” is they lay out all the things you could spend many years and dollars learning on your own.  Many of these people, like Mack Michaels of Maverick Money Makers, started years ago when the only way to learn was by trial and error.

An internet “club” is like an online classroom.  Every internet guru has their own method and they all work.  But which one is right for you?  There are several that teach list building.  With just one click you send you ads to thousands of people.  There are some that teach using adwords (if you are brand new you’ll learn that term soon enough).

We have all had our share of self help and motivates that only make their money from selling the concept.  It is not like that with online clubs.  Yes they make money from the club but they are also doing online what they are teaching you to do online.  They don’t charge to make money.  They do it to limit the number of people they teach at any one time.  Some close the club at a certain number and may not reopen it for a year.

The reason I picked Maverick Money Makers is that Mack teaches it all.  He teaches how if you have money to invest and how to do the same things with little or no money to invest.  He teaches you how to make money with no product and no website.  He teaches how to use adwords, how to use articles, how to get free ads.  I could go on and on.

So click here to check out Maverick Money Makers

Online Business – Business-in-a-Box

Are you interested in starting your own online business and generate income while working from home, but are not sure where to begin?  Or have you already tried a few home-based business opportunities but have yet to make any money.

Well, you are not alone.  I too have fallen for the online hype and wasted a lot of time and money trying to make a go of it online, but I did not know how to go about and did not have the experience or knowledge to put everything into practice to make it work.  Well, here are a few tips to starting your online home base business that can help you start making money. 

To have a successful online business, you need to own your own domain and have a web site where you can change the information on the site whenever it is necessary.  In many cases, you will ideally want to be able to offer a free newsletter that your visitors can subscribe to.  This means that you will want to have an autoresponder program installed with your web site that can send out a series of follow-up emails to your customer list. You will also need products to sell as well, and, if they are not digital products, then you would either need to have an affiliate relationship with a company who does fulfillment, or you will have to add functions to process the orders, keep inventory, and ship the goods to the customer – all of these add levels on complexity to your home based business.

However, before you go about developing this online business, you should understand that there is internet marketing that is required to go along with it.  Once you have a web site, you will need visitors to come to your site to generate sales and signups to your newsletter. Therefore, an ideal situation would be a business that offers full training and  a forum for support where you can go to discuss your business and get assistance in those areas where you need help.

future shock work at home wealthjetnumberoneopportunity

The answer to these questions can be solved through the use of a business-in-a-box.  This type of online business is a full turn-key solution that has a completed web site that has been hooked up to affiliates, has an autoresponder. ready to send out those newsletters to your subscribers. The web site should also be set up so you can change the colors and format, add banners and text links, and optimize the site for search engines.

You may be thinking that this is too complicated and too hard to understand.  However, that is advantage of working with a turn-key business solution that sets everything up for you and provides training and an active forum to get all of the support you need.

Now starting an online home based business does not mean that you’ll be generating an income right away.  Like any business, this takes time and dedication to get through all of the training and to learn everything you can about making the business work.  This is a step-by-step process that takes times but each piece of the puzzle helps to build your business.  The marketing and advertising of the web site is a consistent and ongoing process that will build momentum over time that will put you site in front of as many people as possible.

If you decide to start your own online company, get ready for an exciting ride.  You will experience frustration and setbacks, but, if you are determined and work diligently you will persevere and come out on top in the long run.  The learning curve may be steep in the early going, but as long as you do not give up, you will start making money online.

Niche Blueprint Reviewed – Is it all hype?

Tim Godfrey and Steve Clayton’s Niche Blueprint is designed so everyone can build a profitable online store easily. Installing and configuring E-commerce platforms using C-Panel hosting can be tricky and confusing for the newcomer. So newbie’s will be glad to here that Niche Blueprint is the most revolutionary and unique product to hit the internet in years and will make setting up an E Commerce business a breeze. The purpose of Niche Blueprint will also be to teach people the art of e-business with niche sites. Niche Blueprint is being promoted as a complete, Ecommerce, turnkey solution so you will be glad to discover that there isn’t any, in my opinion, essential element, crucial to your success, that isn’t included.

Niche Blueprint is a very comprehensive course that gives away all Tim and Steve’s exact strategies that earns them hundred’s of thousand of dollars per year through niche based e-commerce sites. Niche Blueprint will show you how to choose Sub-Niches and profit from them, because they have little or no competition. Some people are more inclined towards the high-end niche markets, where seasoned marketers have already setup large businesses. Niche marketing involves lesser competition as compared to the mainstream field. Niche markets evolve when the demand for a particular product or service is not fulfilled or new demands arise due to several changes.

Niche Blueprint is an ultra comprehensive course which will help you earn thousands of dollars per month through simple e-commerce sites, more Niche Blueprint information here.

Affiliate Marketing vs. Drop Shipping: Which Is Best For You?

With the pending release of Niche Blueprint by Tim Godfrey and Steve Clayton, there’s suddenly a lot of interest in the Drop Shipping model of setting up an online business. If you’re not familiar with Niche Blueprint you can find out what all the excitement is about by clicking here.

If you’ve looked into making money from home online you’re no doubt familiar with Affiliate Marketing. The attractions of affiliate marketing are: the ease with which you can start earning money quickly, and, the simplicity of the business model.

You can sign up for most affiliate programs, such as Clickbank, within a few minutes. Then, using Pay Per Click ads, you can drive traffic to the Vendor’s sales page and receive a commission for every purchaser who arrives at the sales page through your ad.

At the end of the month you receive your commission check. This is the simplest model, and you can make it more complex if you choose.

 For example, you can create a Review Website and recommend several products for affiliate commissions. You can optimize the website to rank high in the search engine results for specific keywords, and reduce or eliminate your Pay Per Click ads.

There are currently more than 100,000 affiliates who are registered with Clickbank, and more than 10,000 products available to promote. Many people make part time extra income as affiliates, and some make a terrific income using the affiliate model.

Tim Godfrey and Steve Clayton released Commission Blueprint last summer, and taught thousands of clients how to make full time incomes as affiliate marketers.

Now, these two successful partners are collaborating again on Niche Blueprint, an entirely new program that also shows you how to successfully make money from home with an online business. This time the business model is based on drop shipping.

Drop shipping has been used for quite a few years by small retailers. They display sample items, and then, when a customer makes a purchase, the wholesaler ships the product directly to the customer. Recently, this model has become more popular with online entrepreneurs who set up online retail sites, or even sell through eBay.

With drop shipping, as with affiliate marketing, you don’t have to handle any products. In both cases your business success rests on your efforts to market products.

With drop shipping however, you have more presence in the transaction, as a seller or retailer. You collect the money from the customer and, in turn, pay the wholesaler or manufacturer, often with a credit card.

The biggest risk in this is that the product will “back order”. In other words the wholesaler will not have the product available for immediate shipment. This leaves you, as the seller, responsible for handling the customer service challenge in such situations.

Obviously, your success as a merchant depends very much on the reliability of your “drop shippers.”

One of the advantages of the Niche Blueprint program is that it connects you with the most reliable wholesalers in the industry. This is a great advantage right out of the gate.

Now, add to that the thorough educational components, both video and manuals, and the website templates that come as part of the complete, Niche Blueprint, start-up package, and it’s easy to see that Niche Blueprint will pay for itself very quickly. Not only will you save weeks of valuable time getting your business running, you’ll start earning money much sooner from your own, online, drop-shipping site.

To find out about the entire Niche Blueprint complete business start-up package go to Niche Blueprint Reviews.

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The Online Company Team

About Us

How To Start An Online Company .com is all about creating an online company.  This site will cover all aspects of develping and online presence.

Here you will find helpful reviews, informative information and tips and much more. This site is in the format of a ‘weblog’ so that each time I post new information, it will come to the top of the front page. This means that you can check back here frequently to see new updates to the information found here.

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All the best,
The Online Company Team