No matter how great your products, services, or websites are, you’re not likely to succeed in online business without using at least basic marketing tactics. Marketing is about making customers, clients, or visitors aware of your online business, and how to convince them to buy or keep coming back.

Here are five cheap and free Internet marketing tips for promoting an online business:

1. Offer something for free – No matter what type of online business, customers and visitors love to receive something for nothing. Create an e-book, short report, white paper, software application, collection of articles, or something similar that can be given away for free. If you create it yourself, it’s an easy free marketing tactic. Hiring a writer or developer can still be a cheap marketing tactic. Also use free giveaways as an incentive for visitors to sign up for your email newsletter.

2. Offer an email newsletter – Having an opt-in email newsletter is a simple Internet marketing tip that can be run for free if handling mailings independently, or inexpensively even if you use an email management service to track campaign results. The key to successful email marketing is to focus on the reader or customer rather than only yourself. Offer an incentive (like a free e-book) for signing up, and continue to offer information in newsletters that would interest readers and keep them coming back.

3. Offer an incentive for repeat business – One-time visitors, clients, and customers are nice, but it’s even better if they keep providing repeat business. A cheap marketing tip for an online business is to offer a small discount on a future order, advanced notice of a new product or service launch, or a restricted area of the website only viewable to repeat visitors (such as running a forum where certain resources are only available to registered members, or members with a certain number of posts). (more…)

While choosing a business name is important for any small business startup, online businesses also need to choose a domain name to correspond with a business name. Before thinking about an actual domain name, it’s important to choose an effective business name. A high quality business name will be:

1. Marketable and able to adapt to various branding efforts easily.

2. Easy to remember, at least with your target market.

3. Representative of the image your online business is trying to portray.

4. Not infringing on the trademark of any other company or website. (more…)

Once you’ve chosen an online business opportunity, have done some basic business planning, and have chosen a business name and domain name, you’ll need to choose a Web hosting company to host your website online. There are a variety of Web hosting options available, from free Web hosting to shared Web hosting (where more than one customer’s websites are hosted on the server) to dedicated servers which only host your company’s site(s). When choosing a Web host, and considering these hosting options, there are a few questions to ask yourself to make the process easier:

1. Do you care if your Web hosting company places advertisements on the website? If having an ad-free site or full control over ads is important, then a free Web host probably isn’t the best option.

2. Do you expect to be using heavy amounts of bandwidth, such as by hosting a lot of audio and video files? If so, consider a dedicated server when choosing a Web host, or at least a Web host offering plenty of bandwidth.

3. Do you need to be able to host more than one website on the same Web hosting account? If so, look for Web hosts offering unlimited add-on domains. If you also need sub domains, look for Web hosts offering the ability to set up unlimited sub domains as well. (more…)

If you want to start your own online business, the first thing to do is choose a small business idea or online business opportunity. When choosing a business idea, there are several things to consider, including:

1. Your interests and passions - An online business opportunity, like any small business startup, can take time to become profitable. If you want to succeed in online business, generally choose a business idea that will keep you interested, even while income may be low initially.

2. Your abilities - Pursuing an online business opportunity can be hard work. Evaluate your abilities as an online business owner, and decide if the time commitment, record-keeping, marketing efforts, and other administrative tasks required of each business opportunity being considered will realistically be doable. If not, be prepared to delegate tasks to employees or independent contractors, or consider other online business opportunities that fit well within your abilities and constraints.

3. Market Need / Competition - Before jumping into any online business opportunity or small business idea, it’s important to determine that an actual “need” for your product, service, or information exists with your target market. If the market is saturated with too much competition, or there simply isn’t a demand, consider another online business opportunity or be able to offer a unique selling proposition and marketing angle. Also consider looking at a narrower niche within each business idea to find a need not yet being filled.

4. Cost to Operate - You should have at least a general sense of a business startup budget before choosing an online business opportunity to pursue. Weed out business ideas early if it would be impossible, or extremely difficult, to manage that particular online business with the predetermined budget. (more…)

If your online business model is centered around selling products or services online, chances are that you’re going to receive customer service and support requests. Good customer service and online technical support can convince customers to stay with an online business, or to keep coming back. At the same time, bad customer service or online tech support for an online business can cost the business customers and money.

There are a few things to consider or ask yourself before choosing customer service and tech support options for your online business:

1. Do you plan to offer all customer service and / or technical support yourself?

2. What kind of customer service and tech support would you like to make available to customers (email, live chat, phone support, etc.)? What is the competition offering? Is there an industry support standard for the type of online business that you run?

3. Would you like to be able to offer support 24/7, or only during normal business hours?

4. Do you want to provide automated customer service help in some way to cut down on manual requests? Do you plan to provide self-help resources online for common tech support issues or customer service questions? (more…)

Whether you’re selling a product or service online or running a content-based website and want to be able to accept donations, learning how to accept payments online with PayPal, a popular online payment processing provider, is a good idea.

There are several reasons to accept payments online with PayPal:

1. Startup and regular fees are low for the merchant (you). There are no monthly fees, setup fees, or cancellation fees to use PayPal’s basic options, and fees are taken directly out of incoming payments. The only monthly fee is for users of the Website Payments Pro package (when comparing the three most common PayPal payment solutions for merchants).

2. Accepting payments online with PayPal allows you to accept payments not only from a visitor’s PayPal account, but also through credit cards and e-checks, without needed to set up a separate merchant account to process credit cards.

3. Users don’t have to be a member of PayPal to be able to make a payment online with PayPal through their credit card.

4. PayPal can be very easy to set up on your website, and offers PayPal buttons for single items, or a PayPal shopping cart option.

5. PayPal offers secure online payment processing. (more…)

Whether you choose to design a website from scratch or use a free Web template to design a website for your online business, there are many things to consider and ask yourself from the start:

1. Is an e-commerce solution / shopping cart needed on your website?

2. Does it need to allow enough room to easily display articles?

3. Do you need to plan for on-site advertising space in the website design?

4. Does the website design need to be interactive for site visitors?

5. Do you want to run your website through a content management system (CMS)?

6. Does the website need to include an audio or video player?

7. Would your target market appreciate a flashy design, or something simple? (more…)

Every website has Web copy, Web content, or both. That Web copy and content can help you to earn money on its own, or can help you earn more money than you’re currently making online. First, it’s important to understand the difference between Web content and Web copy.

Web content – Web content by its nature either informs or entertains. Web content consists of most articles on a website. Other forms of content include photos, videos, and audio files. Web content often is what an online business uses to attract visitors to the site, even if indirectly.

Web copy – Web copy generally refers to text on a website that is either trying to get a response out of the reader or visitor, or that works to forward the company’s message in some way. Copy may encourage readers to buy something, to sign up for something (such as an email newsletter), or even to click on a specific link on your website. Copy also includes things such as a company / site slogan, and internal / company pages on a website (about us, contact, media kit contents, etc.), which goes towards portraying an image that you want to convey to visitors. (more…)

When starting an online business, it’s essential to conduct market research prior to a website’s launch. The Web offers many opportunities for conducting inexpensive or free online market research, which you can do independently. Online market research makes competitive analysis and marketing plan development a cost-effective reality for online business owners. Market research is important for several reasons:

1. To determine an actual need for the products, services, or information you plan to provide through your online business.

2. To determine whether the market is already saturated with too much competition in the niche.

3. To determine the strengths and weaknesses of your competitors as compared to your own online business.

4. To gain a better understanding of your target market, their needs, and how to effectively market to them.

5. To discover potential problems or flaws with your website, products, or services of prior to a public release. (more…)

Writing an Internet business plan for a website or online business is very similar to how to write a business plan for a traditional small business. An Internet business plan should include all basic business plan elements, and the primary differences between an Internet business plan and a traditional business plan will be in the details. Here are the primary components of an Internet business plan:

1. Executive Summary – Just like with traditional business plans, Internet business plans need an executive summary. The executive summary is usually the first section of an Internet business plan, although it should be the last section written. An executive summary simply serves as an overview or summary of everything else in the Internet business plan, and would include a very general company description, the company / site mission, and a summary of projected financials.

2. Website / Business Summary – The business summary or website summary of an Internet business plan will offer the reader a glimpse of who company is and what they do. It should describe the website or online business in detail, as well as some general information about the market or niche (for example, if running a niche social networking website, it should explain social networking). Answer the basic questions here of who?, what?, when?, where?, and why? – mention who owns or manages the website or online business, what the site is about or trying to offer, when the site was launched, where the site is located, and why the site or online business was launched in the first place. When updating an Internet business plan beyond the startup phase, this is also the section of the business plan which should contain past results and developments of the website or online business. (more…)