Starting an Online Business For Dummies E-Book

Greg Holden

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Wissenschaft und neue Technologien
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 740

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

Mind your business with this updated edition of the bestselling online business how-to guide Have a computer, an Internet connection, and a dream? Then, you're already on your way to starting your very own online business. This fun and friendly guide can help you turn your big idea into big bucks whether you're expanding your real-world storefront online or creating your own virtual startup. Starting an Online Business For Dummies, 7th Edition will show you how to identify a market need, choose a web hosting service, implement security and privacy measures, open up shop, and start promoting to the world. * Covers the latest trends and techniques for online discoverability - from social media marketing to search engine rankings, online couponing to optimization for mobile devices, and beyond * Highlights business issues that are of particular concern to online entrepreneurs * Walks you through the best practices of successful online businesses, including customer service, marketing, analytics, and website optimization tools * Provides advice on choosing an e-commerce platform, protecting your domain name, securing trademarks, working with vendors and distributors, and keeping your customer's personal data safe There's no time like now to start a new endeavor and no guide like Starting an Online Business For Dummies, 7th Edition to get your online business going.

Leseprobe

Starting an Online Business For Dummies®, 7th Edition

Published by: John Wiley & Sons, Inc. 111 River Street Hoboken, NJ 07030-5774 www.wiley.com

Copyright © 2013 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey

Published simultaneously in Canada

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Library of Congress Control Number: 2013936848

ISBN 978-1-118-60778-7 (pbk); ISBN 978-1-118-65194-0 (ebk); ISBN 978-1-118-65201-5 (ebk)

Manufactured in the United States of America

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Starting an Online Business For Dummies®, 7th Edition

Visit www.dummies.com/cheatsheet/startinganonlinebusiness to view this book's cheat sheet.

Table of Contents

Introduction

You Can Do It!

Jump In, the Water’s Fine

Where This Book Is Coming From

How to Use This Book

What This Book Assumes about You

What’s Where in This Book

Part I: Launching Your Online Business

Part II: Creating a Business Website

Part III: Social Networking and Marketing

Part IV: Expanding Beyond Your Website

Part V: Keeping Your Business Legal and Fiscally Responsible

Part VI: The Part of Tens

Conventions Used in This Book

Icons Used in This Book

Beyond the Book

We’re In It Together

Part I: Launching Your Online Business

Chapter 1: New Tools and Strategies for Your Online Business

E-Commerce Is Goin’ Mobile

Designing for the small screen

Facilitating purchases and searches

Businesses Processes Are Becoming Social

Choosing merchandise with customers’ help

Bringing end-users into the development process

Venture Capital Is Social, Too

Triangulating for Business Success

Creating a home page that’s a “home base”

Connecting with customers via social marketing

Facebooking your business

Tweeting for fun and profit

Blogging to build your business

Sharing your work with Flickr

Diversifying sales with multiple storefronts

Partnering with a service provider

Chapter 2: Opening Your Online Business

Step 1: Identify a Need

Getting to know the marketplace

“Cee-ing” what’s out there

Figuring out how to do it better

Step 2: Determine What You Have to Offer

Step 3: Come Up with a Cyberbusiness Plan

Step 4: Assemble Your Hardware and Software

Finding a host for your website

Assembling the equipment you need

Choosing business software

Step 5: Find People to Help You

Hiring technical experts

Gathering your team members

Step 6: Construct a Website

Making your site content-rich

Establishing a graphic identity

Step 7: Set Up a System for Processing Sales

Providing a means for secure transactions

Becoming a credit card merchant

Keeping your books straight

Step 8: Provide Personal Service

Selling by sharing your expertise

Making your site a go-to resource

Becoming a super e-mailer

Step 9: Alert the Media and Everyone Else

Listing your site with Internet search services

Reaching the entire Internet

Step 10: Review, Revise, and Improve

Taking stock

Updating your data

Chapter 3: Choosing and Equipping Your New E-Business

Mapping Out Your Online Business

Looking around

Making your mark

Evaluating commercial websites

Taste-Testing Flavors of Online Businesses

Selling consumer products

Offering your professional services

Selling your expertise

Finding opportunities with technology or computer resources

Being a starving artist without the starving

Easyware (Not Hardware) for Your Business

The right computer for your online business

Storage space

Image capture devices

Getting Online: Connection Options

Cable modem

DSL

Smartphone

Software Solutions for Online Business

Web page editor

Taking e-mail a step higher

Image editors

Internet phone software

Back-up software

Chapter 4: Selecting Your E-Commerce Host and Design Tools

Getting the Most from Your Storefront Host

Web hosts come in many flavors

Domain-name registration

Marketing utilities

Catalog creators

Database connectivity

Finding a Web Server to Call Home

Using a marketplace to build your webstore

Moving into an online mall

Turning to your ISP for web hosting

Going for the works with a web hosting service

Fun with Tools: Choosing a Web Page Editor

For the novice: Use your existing programs

For intermediate needs: User-friendly web editors

For advanced commerce sites: Programs that do it all

Part II: Creating a Business Website

Chapter 5: Organizing Your Business Presence and Attracting Customers

Feng Shui-ing Your Website

Creating Content That Attracts Customers

Following the KISS principle: Keep it simple, sir (or sister)

Striking the right tone with your text

Making your site easy to navigate

Pointing the way with headings

Becoming an expert list maker

Leading your readers on with links

Enhancing your text with vwell-placed images

Making your site searchable

Nip and Tuck: Establishing a Visual Identity

Choosing wallpaper that won’t make you a wallflower

Using web typefaces like a pro

Using clip art is free and fun

A picture is worth a thousand words

Creating a logo

Inviting Comments from Customers

Getting positive e-mail feedback

Web page forms that aren’t offputting

Blogs that promote discussion

Chit-chat that counts

Moving from Website to Web Presence

Extreme Web Pages: Advanced Layouts

Setting the tables for your customers

Breaking the grid with layers

Achieving consistency with Cascading Style Sheets

Chapter 6: Making Shopping Easy on Your E-Commerce Site

Giving Online Shoppers What They Need

Showing what you’ve got

Earning trust to gain a sale

Pointing the way with links and graphics

Giving the essentials

Managing Goods and Services

Handling returns

Adding shipping rates

Maintaining inventory

Keeping Your Website in Top Shape

Using software to keep score

Coping when your service goes out to lunch

Outsourcing your business needs

Keeping Your Business Safe

Separating the personal and the professional

Heading off disasters

Installing firewalls and other safeguards

Providing security with public keys

Chapter 7: Accepting Payments

Sealing the Deal: The Options

Enabling Credit Card Purchases

New payment systems provide more options

Setting up a merchant account

Finding a secure server

Verifying credit card data

Processing the orders

Choosing an Online Payment System

Shopping cart software

PayPal payments

PayPal’s personal payment services

Google Checkout

Micropayments

Other payment options

Fulfilling Your Online Orders

Providing links to shipping services

Presenting shipping options clearly

Joining the International Trade Brigade

Keeping up with international trade issues

Researching specific trade laws

Exploring free trade zones

Shipping Overseas Goods

Getting Paid in International Trade

Chapter 8: Communicating with Customers and Building Loyalty

Keeping Your Customers in the Loop

Providing FAQs

Writing an online newsletter

Mixing bricks and clicks

Creating an RSS feed

Helping Customers Reach You

Going upscale with your e-mail

Creating forms that aren’t formidable

Making Customers Feel They Belong

Putting the “person” into personal service

Overcoming business barriers

Enhancing your site with a discussion area

Moving to customer service 2.0

Chapter 9: Sourcing Worldwide for Your Business

Knowing What Sells Well Online

Finding Products Yourself

Cleaning out your closets

Outsourcing your sourcing

Garage sales and flea markets

Secondhand stores

Working with Wholesale Suppliers

Finding wholesalers

Approaching wholesalers

Turning to the Far East: Alibaba, brokers, and more

Working the Trade Shows

Part III: Social Networking and Marketing

Chapter 10: Advertising and Publicity: The Basics

Coming Up with a Marketing Strategy

Choosing a brand that speaks for you

Being selective about your audience

Publicizing Your Online Business Free

A newsletter for next to nothing

Participating in mailing lists and newsgroups

A contest in which everyone’s a winner

Waving a banner ad

Using Guerrilla Marketing Strategies

Pop-up (and under, and over) ads

Adding life to your ads

Minding Your Ps and Qs (Puns and Quips)

Speaking their language

Using the right salutations

Making your site multilingual

Using the right terms

Chapter 11: Search Engine Optimization

Understanding How Search Engines Find You

Keywords are key

Links help searchers connect to you

Don’t forget the human touch

Taking the initiative: Paying for ads

Knowing who supplies the search results

Going Gaga over Google

Googling yourself

Playing Google’s game to reach #1

Getting started with Google AdWords

Leaving a Trail of Crumbs

Adding keywords to your HTML

. . . and don’t forget about Bing

Registering your site with Google

Getting listed on Yahoo!

Getting listed with other search services

Adding keywords to key pages

Making your pages easy to index

Maximizing links

Monitoring Traffic: The Science of Web Analytics

Software to improve SEO

Do-it-yourself options

Chapter 12: Location, Location, Location Marketing

Listing Yourself in All the Right Places

Inviting Yelpers

Claiming your page on Google Places for Business

Yahoo! You’re on Yahoo! Local

Reaching locals with Bing’s help

Reaching your neighbors on Patch

Marketing Yourself with Check-Ins and Offers

Tracking nearby shoppers with Foursquare

Checking in with customers at Facebook Places

Offering “punch-card” check-ins with Bing

Connecting with Locals with Interactive Content

Keep your customers coming back

Make your offers well known

Make your offers tiered

Chapter 13: Social Marketing: Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, and Blogs

Developing a Business Presence on Facebook

Attracting “likers” to your Facebook page

Getting your customers excited

Creating a Facebook “kiosk”

Sharing Your Images with Pinterest

Building a Fan Base with Twitter

Setting up a Twitter presence

Using Your Blog for Profit . . . and Fun

Choosing a host with the most for your posts

Adding ads to your blog

Asking for donations

Achieving other business benefits

Part IV: Expanding Beyond Your Website

Chapter 14: Selling on Amazon.com and eBay

Becoming an Amazon.com Seller

Becoming an Amazon.com Associate

Joining the marketplace

Taking out a Professional Subscription

Pricing your merchandise

Running a Webstore

Shipping with Fulfillment By Amazon

Playing Amazon’s game to win

Understanding eBay Auctions

Building a Good Reputation

Getting good feedback

Developing a schedule

Creating an About Me page

Creating Sales Descriptions That Sell

Focusing on the details

Including clear images

Being flexible with payment options

Providing Good Customer Service

Setting terms of sale

Packing and shipping safely

Moving from Auctioneer to eBay Businessperson

Opening an eBay Store

Striving for PowerSeller status

Chapter 15: Moving to Specialty Marketplaces

Researching the Right Sales Venues

How much does it cost?

How many customers does it attract?

Scanning EcommerceBytes’ Seller Survey

Branching Out to Other Marketplaces

Selling the smart way: Craigslist

Making your own product line: Etsy.com

Going beyond listing fees: OnlineAuction.com

Avoiding hosting fees: eCRATER

Reversing the sales process: iOffer

Evaluating your items: WorthPoint/GoAntiques

Chatting it up: Bonanza

Hosting your store for free: Highwire

Finding the features you need: ArtFire

Joining Robin Hood: Webstore.com

Taking a personal approach: Wensy.com

Selling your creative work: CafePress

Connecting All Your Outlets

Chapter 16: Managing and Growing Your Online Business

Choosing Channel Management Software

Spreading the Word with Google

Getting yourself listed in the Google Directory

Optimizing your site for better search results

Adding Google Apps to Your Business

Becoming master of a domain

Verifying ownership

Creating user accounts

Part V: Keeping Your Business Legal and Fiscally Responsible

Chapter 17: Keeping It All Legal

Understanding Trade Names and Trademarks

Determining whether a trademark is up for grabs

Protecting your trade name

Making sure your domain name stays yours

Counting on copyright

Making copyright work for you

Licensing and Other Restrictions

Heeding local regulations

Knowing what restrictions may affect your trade

Avoiding Conflicts with Your Customers

Deciding on a Legal Form for Your Business

Sole proprietorship

Partnership

Advantages of a statutory business entity

Chapter 18: Online Business Accounting Tools

ABCs: Accounting Basics for Commerce

Choosing an accounting method

Knowing what records to keep

Understanding the Ps and Qs of P&Ls

Accounting Software for Your Business

Easy-to-use, full-featured software: OWL Simple Business Accounting

Keeping it simple: QuickBooks Simple Start

Accounting from anywhere: There’s an app for that

The Taxman Cometh: Concerns for Small Business

Should you charge sales tax?

Federal and state taxes

Deducing your business deductions

Part VI: The Part of Tens

Chapter 19: Ten Ways to Reach Mobile Shoppers

Make Your Online Store Mobile-Friendly

Keep Your Presentation Ultra-Simple

Enable Mobile Device Payments

Create an App

Offer a Coupon Deal They Can’t Refuse

Consider a Mobile-Only Shopping Cart Provider

Go Beyond “Mobile” to Include “Social”

Keep Your Mobile Site Cross-Platform

Focus on Shoppers Who Are Likely Buyers

Contact Customers in Your Area with a Geofence

Chapter 20: Ten Ways to Develop a Platform

Following Wilco’s Example

Creating a Logo

Listing on EveryPlaceISell

Being a Social Marketing Maven

Developing an E-Mail Campaign

Posting on Your Blog

Giving Something Back to Your Supporters

Popping Up on Other People’s Websites

Publishing Your Own Newsletter

Keeping Your Content Fresh and Up to Date

About the Author

Cheat Sheet

Introduction

You’ve been thinking about starting your own business for a while now. You’ve heard about the woman whose Julie/Julia Project blog was turned into a book and a popular movie. You’ve heard about young entrepreneurs who’ve made billions creating popular websites such as Facebook. But you’ve been slow to jump on the bandwagon. You’re a busy person, after all. You have a full-time job, whether it’s running your home or working outside your home. Or perhaps you’ve been laid off or are going through some other life-changing event and are ready to take off in a new direction, but the economic upheavals of recent years leave you understandably reluctant to make a big career change.

Well, I have news for you: Now is the perfect time to turn your dream into reality by starting your own online business. More individuals than ever before — regular folks just like you — are making money and enriching their lives by operating businesses online. The clock and your location are no longer limiting factors. Small business owners can now work any time of the night or day in their spare bedrooms, local libraries, or neighborhood coffee shops.

If you like the idea of being in business for yourself but don’t have a particular product or service in mind, relax and keep yourself open to inspiration. Many different kinds of commercial enterprises can hit it big on the Internet. Among the entrepreneurs I interviewed for this book are a woman who sells her own insect repellent, a husband and wife who sell items from their native Europe, a woman who provides office services for the medical community, a housewife who sells sweetener and coffee on eBay, a sculptor and painter, a young man who started selling electronics online at age 16, and several folks who create web pages for other businesses. With the help of this book, you can start a new endeavor and be in charge of your own cyberbusiness, too.

You Can Do It!

What’s that? You say you wouldn’t know a merchant account, a profit and loss statement, or a clickthrough advertising rate if it came up to you on the street and introduced itself? Don’t worry: The Internet (and this book) levels the playing field so that a novice has just as good a chance at succeeding as MBAs who love to throw around business terms at cocktail parties.

The Internet is a pervasive and everyday part of the business landscape these days. Whether you’ve been in business for 20 years or 20 minutes, the keys to success are the same:

Having a good idea: If you have something to sell that people have an appetite for, and if your competition is slim, you have a strong chance of being successful.

Working hard: When you’re your own boss, you can make yourself work harder than any of your former bosses ever could. If you put in the effort and persist through the inevitable ups and downs, you’ll be a winner.

Believing in yourself: One of the most surprising and useful things I discovered from the online businesspeople I interviewed was that if you believe that you’ll succeed, you probably will. Believe in yourself and proceed as though you’ll be successful. Together with your good ideas and hard work, your confidence will pay off.

If you’re the cautious type who wants to test the waters before you launch your new business on the Internet, let this book lead you gently up the learning curve. After you’re online, you can master techniques to improve your presence. This book includes helpful hints for doing market research and reworking your website to achieve success.

Jump In, the Water’s Fine

When I first started revising this new edition in early 2013, I was not surprised to find that many businesses had rebounded five years after the serious economic crash. I was surprised to find that so many new ways of doing business had either appeared or become commonplace (mobile shopping and Facebook stores, for example). It turns out that any time is a good time to start an online business as long as you have a good idea and a smart business plan.

New resources, many of which didn’t exist when I wrote the previous edition, present entrepreneurs with opportunities to market themselves and their products and services. Tablets make selling easier than ever, and smartphones make mobile shopping an everyday occurrence. Standards such as Pinterest, Fulfillment By Amazon, and Square Payments were either just emerging or hadn’t yet come to fruition only a few years ago. Well-known marketplaces such as eBay give businesspeople a solid foundation on which to start a new business. Other well-known web-based service providers such as Yahoo!, PayPal, and Amazon.com give you a way to reach millions of potential customers. Bloggers are an everyday part of the cyberspace landscape, and some are making a regular source of income from their online diaries. Google and Yahoo! are making it easier than ever to gain advertising revenue.

As the web becomes more of a way of life and broadband Internet connections become widespread around the world, doing business online isn’t considered unusual anymore. Still, you may have reasonable concerns about the future of e-commerce and for the entrepreneurs this book seeks to help — individuals who are starting their first businesses on the web. Your fears will quickly evaporate when you read this book’s case studies of my friends and colleagues who conduct business online. They’re either thriving or at least keeping their heads above water, and they enthusiastically encourage others to jump right in.

Where This Book Is Coming From

Online business isn’t just for large corporations, or even just for small businesses that already have a storefront in the real world and simply want to supplement their marketability with a website.

The Internet is a perfect venue for individuals who are comfortable using computers, and who want to start their own business and believe that cyberspace is the place to do it. You don’t need much money to get started. If you already have a computer as well as an Internet connection and can create your own web pages (something this book helps you with), making the move to your own business website may cost only $100 or less. After you’re online, the overhead is pretty reasonable, too: You may pay only $10 to $75 per month to a web hosting service to keep your site online — or pay nothing, if you sign up with one of the specialty marketplaces that give you a platform for creating web pages and selling products, and charge a fee only if you make a sale.

With each month that goes by, the number of Internet users increases exponentially. The growth is greatest outside the United States. To be precise, in summer 2012, Internet World Stats released data indicating that the number of Internet users worldwide was nearing 2.5 billion — double the number of users five years before. Asia had by far the largest number of users, with more than 1 billion individuals online, a full 44 percent of the world’s total. Amazingly, that still means only 27.5 percent of the Asian population has Internet access at home, setting the stage for continued growth in that continent. We have long since reached that critical mass where most people are using the Internet regularly for everyday shopping and other financial activities. The Internet is already becoming a powerhouse for small businesses.

How to Use This Book

Want to focus on what’s new and different in e-commerce? Jump right in to Chapter 1. Looking for an overview of the whole process of going online and being inspired by one man’s online business success story? Zip ahead to Chapter 2. Want to find out how to accept credit card payments? Flip ahead to Chapter 7. Feel free to skip back and forth to chapters that interest you. I’ve made this book into an easy-to-use reference tool that you’ll be comfortable with, no matter what your level of experience with computers and networking. You don’t have to scour each chapter methodically from beginning to end to find what you want. The Internet doesn’t work that way, and neither does this book!

If you’re just starting out and need to do some essential business planning, see Chapter 2. If you want to prepare a shopping list of business equipment, see Chapter 3. Chapters 4–9 are all about the essential aspects of creating and operating a successful online business, from organizing and marketing your website to providing effective online customer service and sourcing merchandise to sell. Chapters 10–13 examine the many ways to market your business cost effectively online. Chapters 14–16 explore a variety of marketplaces and services you can exploit, including eBay, Amazon.com, Google, and Facebook. Later chapters get into legal issues and accounting. The fun thing about being online is that it’s easy to continually improve and redo your presentation. So start where it suits you and come back later for more.

What This Book Assumes about You

This book assumes that you’ve never been in business before but that you’re interested in setting up your own commercial site on the Internet. I also assume that you’re familiar with the Internet, have been surfing for a while, and may even have put out some information of your own in a home page.

This book also assumes that you have or are ready to get the following:

Some sort of computing device, either handheld or desktop, and a way to get online: Don’t worry; Chapters 3 and 4 explain exactly what hardware and software you need.

Instructions on how to think like a businessperson: I spend a lot of time in this book encouraging you to set goals, devise strategies to meet those goals, and do the sort of planning that successful businesspeople need to do.

Just enough technical know-how: You don’t have to do it all yourself. Plenty of entrepreneurs decide to partner with someone or hire an expert to perform design or technical work. This book can help you understand your options and gives you a basic vocabulary so that you can work productively with any consultants you may hire.

What’s Where in This Book

This book is divided into six parts. Each part contains chapters that discuss stages in the process of starting an online business: launching your business, and combining a website, social marketing, and multiple storefronts to reach customers from three different angles.

Part I: Launching Your Online Business

In Part I, I describe what you need to do and how you need to think so that you can start your online business. The first chapter summarizes what’s new in e-commerce, so you can get up to speed right away. Chapter 2 describes several Internet success stories, including a programmer who turned his career around and a mapmaker turned entrepreneur. In subsequent chapters I describe how other entrepreneurs started their online businesses. I also describe the software you need to create web pages and perform essential business tasks, along with any computer upgrades that help your business run more smoothly. You also discover how to choose a web host and find exciting new ways to make money online.

Part II: Creating a Business Website

Even if you only sell on eBay or make money by placing affiliate ads, at some point you need to create a website — a series of interconnected web pages that everyone in cyberspace can view with a web browser. A website is a home base where people can find you and see what you have to offer. This part explains how to create a compelling website that attracts paying customers around the world and keeps them coming back to make more purchases. This part also includes options for attracting and keeping customers, making your site organized and easy to navigate, sourcing inventory, and updating and improving your online business.

Part III: Social Networking and Marketing

Some of the most exciting options for starting a business online are building a name for yourself and attracting customers to your products and services through word-of-mouth advertising, social networking, and other advertising strategies. In this part, you find out all about those options and discover the ins and outs of advertising online. You improve your visibility by keeping up with your customers through e-mail and newsletters, and optimizing your catalog listings and website for search engines such as Google and Bing. You also see how to spread the word on Facebook, Twitter, and your own blog, and find out how to reach customers in your local area. Many of these sites enable budding businesspeople to conduct a cost-effective and highly targeted form of online advertising called search engine optimization (SEO), which I describe in detail in Chapter 11.

Part IV: Expanding Beyond Your Website

You can generate sales revenue without setting up your own website from scratch. Rather than go it alone, you can sign up with one of the many well-established business marketplaces on the web that enable individuals just like you to create storefronts or sell individual items. In this part, you find out about creating websites or storefronts on Amazon and eBay, among other venues. You also learn about the third part of triangulation: reaching customers through one or more specialty marketplaces. Finally, you learn how to manage a business with multiple channels through special software and tools provided by Google.

Part V: Keeping Your Business Legal and Fiscally Responsible

This part delves into some essential activities for any online business. Find out about general security methods designed to make commerce more secure on the Internet. I also discuss copyrights, trademarks, and other legal concerns for anyone wanting to start a company in the increasingly competitive atmosphere of the Internet. Finally, you get an overview of basic accounting practices for online businesses and suggestions for accounting tools that you can use to keep track of your e-commerce activities.

Part VI: The Part of Tens

Filled with tips, cautions, suggestions, and examples, the Part of Tens presents many tidbits of information you can use to plan and create your own business presence on the Internet, including ten e-commerce marketplaces worth exploring.

Conventions Used in This Book

In this book, I format important bits of information in special ways to make sure you notice them right away:

In This Chapter lists: Chapters start with a list of the topics I cover in that chapter. This list is like a miniature table of contents.

Numbered lists: When you see a numbered list, follow the steps in that order to accomplish a given task.

Bulleted lists: Bulleted lists (like this one) indicate things you can do in any order, or they list related bits of information.

Web addresses: When I describe activities or sites of interest on the World Wide Web, I include the address, or Uniform Resource Locator (URL), in a special typeface, like this: http://www.wiley.com. Because the newer versions of popular web browsers don't require you to enter the entire URL, this book uses shortened addresses. For example, if you want to connect to the Wiley Publishing site, simply enter the following in your browser's Go To or Address box: www.wiley.com.

Don't be surprised if your browser can't find an Internet address you type or if a web page shown in this book no longer looks the same. Although the sites were current when the book was written, web addresses (and sites themselves) can be pretty fickle. Try looking for a missing site by using an Internet search engine. Or try shortening the address by deleting everything after the .com (or .org or .edu).

Icons Used in This Book

Starting an Online Business For Dummies, 7th Edition, uses special graphical elements — icons — to get your attention. Here’s what they look like and what they mean:

This icon points out some technical details that may be of interest to you. A thorough understanding, however, isn’t a prerequisite to grasping the underlying concept. Non-techies are welcome to skip items marked by this icon.

This icon calls your attention to interviews I conducted with online entrepreneurs who provided tips and instructions for running an online business.

This icon flags practical advice about particular software programs or issues of importance to businesses. Look to these tips for help with finding resources quickly, making sales, or improving the quality of your online business site. This icon also alerts you to software programs and other resources that I consider to be especially good, particularly for the novice user.

This icon points out potential pitfalls that can develop into more-major problems if you’re not careful.

This icon alerts you to facts and figures that are important to keep in mind when you run your online business.

This icon alerts you to find related information elsewhere in the book or in another book.

Beyond the Book

This edition of Starting an Online Business For Dummies isn’t just what you see within the book you’re holding. Here’s a glimpse at this book’s companion content, which you can reference online at any time:

Cheat Sheet: Go to www.dummies.com/cheatsheet/startinganonlinebusiness, and you'll find lists, charts, and summaries that serve as an easy-to-use reference when you don't have the book at hand. You'll find a chart matching specific business goals with the three components of online business triangulation (website, social marketing, and storefronts); a second chart that matches the many types of website/storefront hosts you can choose with the types of merchandise you want to sell; a checklist to help you boost your search engine placement; and a sample calendar you can modify to help you fit all your e-commerce tasks into a weekly schedule.

Extras: On several of the pages that open each of this book's Parts, you'll find links to web extras — articles that expand on some of the concepts discussed in that part. The web extra for Part II summarizes some essential tasks you need to perform to get your new business off the ground. In the web extra for Part III, you get three social marketing tips. In Part IV's web extra, you discover more about expanding your business beyond your website. You'll find the web extras at www.dummies.com/extras/startinganonlinebusiness.

We’re In It Together

Improving communication is the whole point of this book. My goal is to help you express yourself in the dynamic medium of the Internet and to remind you that you're not alone. I'm a businessperson myself, so I hope you'll let me know what you think about this book by contacting me directly if you have questions or comments. Visit my personal web page at www.gregholden.com or e-mail me at [email protected].

Part I

Launching Your Online Business

Learn how e-commerce has changed over time and discover the latest e-business trends at www.dummies.com/extras/startinganonlinebusiness.

In this part . . .

Be inspired by stories of successful online businesspeople and how they are connecting with customers and followers.

Follow ten essential steps for opening your own online business.

Plan out your e-business and get the essential software and hardware you need to get started.

Find hosting services for your domain name and website.

Learn about shopping cart and Web editing software you need to build your online presence.

Chapter 1

New Tools and Strategies for Your Online Business

In This Chapter

Reaching potential customers on mobile devices

Opening your business to customer input and participation

Taking advantage of new funding opportunities

Creating a website “home base” that you can expand

Marketing your products and services with social media

Expanding your e-commerce operation by opening multiple storefronts

New technologies and ways of shopping and selling are always popping up in the world of online commerce. One of the biggest new developments is the proliferation of devices like the ones in your own pocket or on your work table. Buyers — the people you want to connect with online — are finding new ways to shop and make purchases. Consumers can shop wherever they are in the world. They’re surfing with small screens, using mobile apps, and taking charge of the e-commerce experience more than ever before.

At the same time, those who seek to start or grow an online business have new opportunities to help them along. They can get help from the same engaged customers with whom they engage on social marketing sites like Facebook and Twitter. They can find the funding they need by turning to new resources like Kickstarter. And they can follow the example of the many ambitious small business owners who are triangulating their business processes — using websites, social media, and storefronts to connect with customers from many different angles.

Keeping up with all the new trends in online commerce is getting harder because it’s a constantly moving target. This chapter gives you an overview of some of the many new and exciting ways to conduct e-commerce. If you’ve heard about e-commerce before and weren’t attracted by the thought of creating a website and sales catalog, take a look at these innovative options for generating revenue.

E-Commerce Is Goin’ Mobile

As I was working on this chapter, I covered eBay’s Analyst Day event, in which eBay describes the trends it is seeing in e-commerce and made projections about future growth. CEO John Donahoe focused his opening remarks on the rise of mobile commerce.

Consumers now shop with smartphones in hand in brick-and-mortar stores. They compare prices and research the products they see in front of them. They don’t always follow through and make purchases with their mobile devices. But more and more shoppers throughout the world are going through the purchase process on the small screen. But you can increase the chances that they will, as described in the sections that follow.

eBay reported $13 billion in sales volume in 2012; that represents 13.5 percent of its entire volume of $175 billion. The company projects that its mobile commerce figures will grow 20 percent annually through 2015. Find out more at www.ebayinc.com/investor_relations/analyst_day_2013.

Designing for the small screen

The first way to attract mobile shoppers is to make sure your website or online store loads quickly and is easy to navigate. For big companies that have their own IT and web design staff, that means adapting the site they’ve designed to appear on a big desktop monitor so that it works on a 5-inch or smaller smartphone screen.

If you don't have a designer on staff, you can get your own mobile site by signing up with a hosting service that provides you one for free. You can also turn to a company like Mobify (www.mobify.com), which specializes in creating mobile sites for online sellers. Three versions of one home page are shown in the image on Mobify's home page, shown in Figure 1-1.

See Chapter 19 for ten ways to reach mobile shoppers.

Figure 1-1: Make sure your website or store is adapted for mobile users.

Selling mobile, selling local: Two examples

There are many ways to sell online, but some of the newest involve mobile technology and reaching local customers online. Here are just two examples of entrepreneurs who are taking advantage of these approaches.

Lisa Bettany, a professional photographer (not a programmer), spent a year and a half creating an app for the iPhone called Camera+. She was pretty much destitute while she was doing this. She hired a programmer to help make her idea a reality. Since it was released, she has generated $4 million by selling 4 million of her apps in iTunes and other locations. You can find more about Lisa at www.MostlyLisa.com.

What if you aren't technologically savvy, but you have a great deal of knowledge, even passion, for a particular subject? Dean Pettit was a worker for NASA in Florida when he was laid off. He loves the outdoors, especially the area called the Space Coast. He created a aggregation website called Space Coast Outdoors (www.spacecoastoutdoors.net), which collects information about a single topic in one place so it's easy to find. It's the kind of aggregation of information that has worked since Yahoo! started back in the 1990s.

You’re probably wondering how this kind of site makes money when all you’re providing is information. You build as much traffic as you can, and when you get to a certain number of visitors, you can start to sell ads.

Dean Pettit isn’t getting rich from his site, at least not yet. But the extra spending money helps while he’s between day jobs, and he’s hoping to build enough monthly income so eventually he won’t need a day job.

Facilitating purchases and searches

You need to list yourself where mobile shoppers hang out. Make sure you're on the local directory Google Places for Business (www.google.com/business/placesforbusiness) and places like the review site Yelp (www.yelp.com), for example. List your products on venues like eBay Local Shopping (www.ebay.com/local). People love to look up reviews on their mobile devices, so make sure you're there.

Mobile commerce is also about making it easy for shoppers to tap the Buy button on their touch screens. Here again, the choice of service provider is critical. Some specifically focus on making shopping and purchasing as easy as possible for mobile buyers.

Find out more about organizing both desktop and mobile websites in Chapter 5.

Businesses Processes Are Becoming Social

Those who believe in political or human rights know the power a group of people can have. In the online business world, some forward-looking companies have enlisted the participation of the “crowd.”

I’m not talking about using social marketing sites like Facebook to build brand loyalty and boost sales. (That subject is discussed in Chapter 13, by the way.) Rather, these innovative companies are letting customers participate in the process of manufacturing and designing products.

Choosing merchandise with customers’ help

At the women's vintage and retro clothing site ModCloth (www.modcloth.com), enthusiastic buyers use their smartphones and an internal app developed by the company to provide real-time feedback on how much they like sweaters, other clothing, and accessories that have just been made. The site invites users to "be the buyer," as shown in Figure 1-2.

Figure 1-2: ModCloth makes buying decisions based on user ratings.

ModCloth can gauge the sentiment of its customer base within minutes and use that information to do strategic purchasing. If the clothing vendor is in its facility while the feedback is being registered, ModCloth can tell the vendor immediately whether it wants an item, and whether it wants to purchase 50, 100, or 500 of that item.

Instead of making such decisions by intuition or by the gut feeling of a few sample shoppers, ModCloth can back up such decisions with user data. The community has even suggested new dress designs and new colors for sweaters, for example.

The coupon and deal company RetailMeNot (www.retailmenot.com) was developed in part on recommendations from community members who suggested deals, coupons, and other ways to save money on shopping.

Bringing end-users into the development process

At Quirky (www.quirky.com), the user community participates in many critical aspects of creating new products for sale. Customers submit ideas for products; they vote on and rate one another's products, as shown in Figure 1-3; they name items; they even photograph products. The company can get merchandise online that much quicker because of the use of crowdsourcing.

Figure 1-3: Quirky brings crowdsourcing into product development.

Bringing the "crowd" into your operations is among the latest and most exciting developments as I write this edition of Starting an Online Business For Dummies. It goes beyond selling merchandise. Author Hugh Howey (www.hughhowey.com) brings his audience into the process of writing his highly popular series of novels. He expanded his bestselling Wool from a story to a novel because readers urged him for more. He wrote the novel as a serial, releasing a bit at a time, and responding to feedback as he went along. He encourages others to write "fan fiction" based on his work.

Howey himself participates in a huge reader community he has created on his website. On his home page (which doubles as his blog, as shown in Figure 1-4), he posts progress bars showing how far along he is with writing his books.

Figure 1-4: This author involves his readers in his writing process.

Howey has created his own platform — the ultimate goal for authors and businesspeople alike, and a subject explored in Chapter 20.

Venture Capital Is Social, Too

You've probably already heard one of the success stories coming out of a crowd-funding website called Kickstarter (www.kickstarter.com). According to Business Insider (www.businessinsider.com/kickstarter-success-stories-2013-1), in 2012 about 18,000 projects were funded on this site by people who contributed $320 million. Here are some examples:

Pebble, a watch that uses Bluetooth to connect to a smartphone, received $10.3 million (its developers originally sought $100,000).

Singer Amanda Palmer raised more than $1.1 million to fund her new album, art book, and tour after breaking from her record label.

Two MIT Media Lab researchers raised $2.9 million to create an “affordable, professional 3-D printer.”

As venture capitalist Josh Goldman of Northwest Venture Partners said in an interview on EcommerceBytes in 2012 (www.ecommercebytes.com/cab/abn/y12/m08/i27/s01), venture capital is more readily available now than it was five or ten years ago for those with good ideas and a well-developed plans for an online businesses. Goldman suggested sites like AngelList (https://angel.co) for matching investors whose area of focus meshes with what you want to do.

Small, mom-and-pop businesses can secure venture capital just like high-tech startups. Capital Access Network (CAN) targets small- and medium-size businesses for funding. Most grants are for $500 to $1,000, although they can go up to $250,000.

Indiegogo (www.indiegogo.com) also provides funding to individuals and businesses in search of funds. Kabbage (www.kabbage.com) specializes in providing loans and cash advances to small online business owners. Typically, the financing costs between 2 and 7 percent of the loan amount, according to the company.

Triangulating for Business Success

One trend I’ve been following in recent years is the rise of online businesses that sell through three venues:

A websiteas your “home base”

A presence on social media sites, most notably Facebook and Twitter, to connect with potential customers and keep up with your fans, friends, and buyers

One or more online storefronts on sites like eBay, Amazon, Bonanza, eCRATER, or Etsy

Together, these three components of an online business combine to drive traffic to one another and to drive customers to your website. The fact is, a single store or standalone website is not enough. I’ve been covering e-commerce since the 1990s, and when I started out, someone with a great idea or a terrific product could make a killing with one website. It’s not quite as easy these days. There is so much competition, and so many people have become so sophisticated about marketing, that the most successful entrepreneurs are triangulating these three components.

Maintaining a presence in all these sites is a lot of work, to be sure, but the rewards include a better search engine placement and increased sales. The following sections explore this trend and how you can take advantage of it.

Creating a home page that’s a “home base”

There are more ways than ever before to pop up online, especially when you consider resources like Twitter, YouTube, and the photo-sharing site Pinterest. But the thing that ties all these together is still a website.

If there's a trend pertaining to websites in 2013, it's the merger of websites with blogs. For many people, their website is their blog. That's the case with my own website (www.gregholden.com). It's run on the blogging site WordPress, which enables anyone to not only create a blog, but also design web pages and post photos and other contents. Business sites that sell products are a natural fit with blogs, too.

Creating a blog to support your business is a powerful way of reaching potential customers and strengthening connections with current ones. The word-of-mouth marketing that results from successful blog publishing is effective while also being cost-effective: Advertising costs are miniscule compared to a traditional marketing effort.

What’s the first step in creating a blog? I usually advocate thinking before clicking. Think about the kind of blog you want to create. An article titled “Create a Blog to Boost Your Business” in Entrepreneur magazine describes several different types of blogs created by Denali Flavors to promote its Moose Tracks line of ice cream flavors. Each blog took a different approach to promoting the same product:

Entertainment: The blog Moosetopia is (or was; it was discontinued but is still online) written by the Moose Tracks Moose, the product mascot.

Useful advice: The blog Free Money Finance provides something that everyone needs — advice on how to handle their money. The connection to the product is a “sponsored by” Moose Tracks ice cream logo to the right of the blog, as shown in Figure 1-5.

Public relations: Another blog, Team Moose Tracks, concerns efforts of the company’s cycling team to raise money for an orphanage in Latvia. It reflects positively on the company and the brand.

Behind the scenes: A fourth blog, Denali Flavors, takes a look at what goes on in the company.

The article (www.entrepreneur.com/article/80100-2) reports that site visits went up 25.7 percent after the blogs went online; the company spent less than $700 on all four blogs, too. You can take any or all of these approaches in your own blog, depending on the product you're trying to sell and your available resources. If you're selling a "fun" product, you might decide to take the entertainment approach; if you work for a big company, you might take the behind-the-scenes approach.

Figure 1-5: This is just one of several blogs created by the people who make Moose Tracks ice cream.

After you have a general idea of the approach you want to take, it’s time to get started. The first step is to choose your blog host. You don’t necessarily have to pay to do this; most of the best-known blog hosts offer hosting for free. They include

Blogger (www.blogger.com) doesn't have as many features as other blog utilities, but it's free.

WordPress (www.wordpress.com) is software you download and install to create and manage your blog. WordPress offers free hosting for blogs and is very popular; find out more in the latest edition of WordPress For Dummies, by Lisa Sabin-Wilson.

TypePad (www.typepad.com) has lots of features, but it costs anywhere from $8.95 to $29.95 per month. The Unlimited plan, at $14.95 per month, should be sufficient for most online business owners.

Take some time to look at other business blogs and examine how they use type and color. Often, for a purely personal blog, it doesn’t matter whether it’s carefully designed. But for a blog that has a business purpose, you need to make it look professional.

Next, determine who will do the blogging. You may not want to do it all yourself. If you can gather two or three contributors, you increase the chances that you can post entries on a daily basis, which is important for blogs. That way, if someone needs time off, you’ll have backup contributors available.

When you configure your blog, no matter which host you choose, the main features tend to be more or less the same. Figure 1-6 shows the Clean Air Gardening Blog, one of the many blogs created by expert marketer Lars Hundley, whom I profile in the sidebar "Blogs plant seeds, gardening business blooms," later in this chapter. The blog includes some Google AdSense ads to drum up extra revenue; a link for visitors to post comments; categories that organize past blog posts; a chronological archive of posts; and links to other relevant sites, including Hundley's main Clean Air Gardening website (www.cleanairgardening.com).

For detailed instructions on how to create a business blog, turn to Buzz Marketing with Blogs For Dummies, by Susannah Gardner.

Perhaps the most difficult aspect of blogging isn’t actually creating the blog, but maintaining it. Developing a schedule in which you publish regular blog posts is important. It’s also important to measure how many visits your blog and your business website get so that you can measure results. Be sure to do a benchmark test — a test done before a process or procedure that gives you baseline data — so that you can judge results afterward. Adjust your site as needed to attract more visitors, but remember to stay on topic so that you don’t drive away the audience you already have.

A business website needs to have the elements described in Chapter 5; an overview follows.

Figure 1-6: Make your blog attractive, well organized, and interactive.

Domain name

You need a domain name: something short and catchy that you can register with a domain name registrar, one of the companies that keeps track of such things, like GoDaddy (www.godaddy.com). Your name can suggest what you sell, but it doesn't have to. It can be a word that doesn't necessarily mean anything, like Skype, the videoconferencing service, or Timbuk2 (www.timbuk2.com), the shoulder-bag company that took off because of the Internet. One of the biggest sellers on eBay used to be called Inflatable Madness, for example. The name is so nutty that you tend to remember it.

Logo

When you’re surfing a succession of web pages that seem to flash by on your monitor like stores passing through a car window, you need a landmark or indicator that lets you know what’s there for you. On the street, you scan signs. On the Internet, you look at logos.

A logo gives visitors an indication, in a single glance, of what your business is all about. It’s an essential part of your online identity and something you can carry through to your Facebook page and other sites where you have a presence. Ultimately, they’ll help you to build a platform, a subject covered in Chapter 20. You’ll find out more about logos in Chapter 5.

Hosting service

In exchange for a monthly or yearly fee, a website host gives you space on a web server, a computer that is always connected to the Internet and is reliable and fast. You share the server with other businesses (although you can pay more and get your own server if you want a really fast connection). You upload (or move) your photos and web page files from your computer to the server, and you are given an address or URL so everyone can find them.

Beyond that, a host can do a lot more. It’s helpful to break hosting services into two general types: a general website host and an e-commerce host, sometimes called a shopping cart service.

Shopping cart

At the core of the store is a shopping cart: a utility that makes it easy for you to create individual product listings that include photos, descriptions, and a button labeled Buy Now or Add to Cart. A shopping cart also gives you:

A secure server

A payment method

Search engine optimization (SEO), a way of improving your placement in search engine results, as well as your marketing

Consultation on your store/business

A shopping cart generally costs more than a general website host. Volusion (www.volusion.com), for example, offers five different hosting packages ranging from $49 to $149 per month. But the consultation, customer support, and marketing assistance offered by shopping cart packages makes them well worth the expense, especially when you're just starting out.

Design

You don’t always need to hire a designer, especially if you sell on Amazon.com, where design hardly matters and you place only brief product listings. Some e-commerce hosting services provide templates that you can adapt to your own site. (A template is a predesigned web page that you can fill with your own words and images. You don’t have to do any design.) Since you’re just starting out and are on a shoestring, sign up with a host and use its templates to get your site started. Once you get some income flowing, you might want to hire someone to create a distinctive design and help you with more advanced store features.

Promotions

Whether you’re selling products on a blog or promoting your services, your goal is to entice visitors to click your website, explore it, stay for as long as possible, and come back on a regular basis. You want your website or your store to have a “stickiness” factor. Promotions can go a long way toward making your site sticky. These include

Coupons

Sales

Free shipping

Deals for returning customers

Free shipping is a big deal on the web. Studies have shown that people are more likely to click the Add to Cart or Buy button if they don’t have to pay for shipping — even if the price is higher because you, the seller, have built the shipping cost into the price. This is controversial. On eBay, sellers get a higher seller rating if they offer free shipping. But with the higher price, you become less competitive compared to other sellers who might be offering similar items. You might consider doing an experiment and offering some items with free shipping as a promotion, and see what happens.

How do you create these kinds of promotions? That’s where the choice of shopping cart service becomes critical; it can help you with creating and distributing such deals.

Once you have a website in place, you can branch out to link it to other promotional sites, videos, or photo collections, just as entrepreneur Lars Hundley does in the nearby sidebar. Or you might open storefronts and social media sites as described in the sections that follow.

Connecting with customers via social marketing

When I wrote the first edition of this book back in 1998, you could advertise your online business in a few ways: through a website, through postings on online discussion boards, through placing banner ads, and by exchanging links to other sites. Now you can do viral marketing (word-of-mouth advertising) on social networking sites.

Blogs plant seeds, gardening business blooms

Lars Hundley is an expert with blogs, photo-sharing, and social networking sites to market his products. His Dallas, Texas–based business, Clean Air Gardening (www.cleanairgardening.com), posted sales of $1.2 million in 2012, down from $1.5 million in 2006. A site related to the main one, the yo-yo site Yoyoplay.com, posted sales of $750,000 and $500,000 in sales came from listings on Amazon.com. "Amazon and its shipping prices on oversized items like composters and rain barrels are killing us!" commented Hundley. But he continues to market multiple websites enthusiastically with the optimism of the successful entrepreneur.

Products occasionally receive the attention of traditional media. A few years ago, for example, Clear Air Gardening was mentioned in The New York Times as well as on Good Morning America.

Hundley uses a variety of blogs and online video sites to promote his Clean Air Gardening online business:

Practical Environmentalist (www.practicalenvironmentalist.com): This blog isn't branded for Clean Air Gardening or directly linked to the company, but it is intended to attract the same kind of environmentally aware person who is its typical customer. This blog is more a free service than it is a hard-selling kind of blog.

Reel Mowers (www.reelmowers.org): This blog bills itself as the ultimate guide to reel push lawn mowers.

Compost guide (www.compostguide.com): This blog promotes several different companies. It's designed to generate a lot of composting-related educational information as well as keyword-rich pages and product promotion pages that give Air Gardening a growing body of search engine–friendly composting content over time.

Flash-based video on Clean Air Gardening: Flash-based video helps sell products. Hundley films the videos with his Canon PowerShot S1 digital camera, which also shoots video. Then he edits them with his Mac mini and converts them to Flash so that people can watch them with their web browser directly on the page. One example is at www.cleanairgardening.com/patdesaustum.html.

Videos on YouTube.com: Hundley uploads videos so that he doesn't have to pay for the bandwidth. Then he embeds the YouTube video on his product page. That also allows people to find the products on the YouTube site and click through to Clean Air Gardening. "When we add a video to a web page, we can increase our conversion rate for that product by up to 20 percent," comments Hundley. Find the company's videos at www.youtube.com/cleanairgardening.

Product and testimonial photos at Flickr: Hundley puts his customer testimonial photos on Flickr and links to them from his testimonials page on his website. People can access these photos directly on Flickr (www.flickr.com/photos/cleanairgardening). They can then use a link to return to the Clean Air Gardening page.

“If you’re thinking about starting your own Internet business, just do it!”, says Hundley. “Start a small site and do it in your spare time to test the waters. I kept my day job for the first year when I started this business, until it started to take off and make money. Now, 11 years later, it is a multimillion-dollar-a-year company with 14 employees and a large, 14,000-square-foot warehouse and office. You can do it too, if you try!”

Social networking sites are the modern-day equivalent of the town square. When you go to a social networking site, you strike up a personal relationship with a merchant; after you do, you’re that much more likely to buy something from that person. Social networking sites give potential customers another place where they can find you and get to know you. The best-known sites are

Twitter (www.twitter.com)

Facebook (www.facebook.com)

MySpace (www.myspace.com)

Pinterest (www.pinterest.com)