If you are an aspiring entrepreneur there are numerous online business opportunities readily available. It is much easier to make online business ideas a reality as compared to a ‘bricks and mortar’ offline businesses. Not only are the set up costs significantly lower but the internet makes it possible for you to easily expand your business beyond the constraints of your physical location.It does not matter about your age, education, technical skills or qualifications if you want to take advantage of the online business opportunities that are available. Anybody can start one. Your online earnings do not all have to come from just one source. In fact, it can be more advantageous when you have different online small business ideas so that you have a variety of income sources so that you can see what works best for you.1. Produce Your Own Information Product.People use the internet to find information and if you have valuable information about a particular subject, people will pay for it. One of the best online business ideas is to write and sell your own eBook. You need to write an eBook on a topic that people are searching for information about. The topic can be one that you’re very knowledgeable about or it can be one that you become knowledgeable about by researching the information you need to know. Other than eBooks, you can also create online courses or workshops sharing your expertise.2. Affiliate Marketing.One of the easiest online business opportunities is affiliate marketing. This is when you promote other people’s products or services and when you make a sale, you get paid a commission. You find a product that you believe is good and will sell well and you begin to promote it for a commission. Promoting just means that you’re raising awareness about a product by driving traffic to it.You can promote products without cost to you and many people find this type of an online business one of the easiest to break into. You can promote products by writing articles about it and submitting them to article directories, or you can blog about it, promote it on your own website or on any of the common social sites such as Twitter or Facebook.3. Build A Membership Website.Many successful online business ideas are structured around membership websites. A membership website is you get paid to give your knowledge and expertise to others. For instance, if you’re an specialist on repairing computers, you build a website where people can log in and get access to answers to their questions, get involved in a forum, etc. Once you are making a profit from your membership website, you can teach others how to do it by writing a how-to eBook or by putting together a course!4. Freelance Your Services On The Internet.Another one of our online business ideas is offering freelance services. Freelance just means that you are your own boss. You can take on the jobs you want and turn down the ones that you don’t. There are so many online business opportunities for freelancers. You can do graphic design work, build websites, edit what other people wrote or you can write articles from scratch for other people.5. Drop Shipped Product Website.Dropshipping means that a warehousing company makes its goods available to you for sell. This includes shipping the order directly to your customer, often without the customer knowing that it came from the dropshipper’s warehouse. It can be a very good way to start an online business as you don’t have to worry about fulfillment or inventory issues.
3 Ways To Grow Your Online Business
Do you know how you can grow your online business? Many marketers focus so much on getting new customers as if this is the only way of growing their businesses. Little do they know that it’s actually the most costly and time-consuming method of growing their businesses. Focusing on existing customers to build your business by coming up with various ways for them to buy more and more often is actually the quickest and cheapest way to grow your online business and to increase your income.That said, I would like to draw your attention on 3 proven ways of growing your online business, which include getting new customers, selling more to existing customers and selling more often to existing customers. Do you do that? Well let’s focus on one by one to throw more light on the importance of learning to grow your online business with the three methods.1. Getting new customers.As already pointed out, getting new customers to grow your online business is the hardest and time-consuming method. Persuading new customers to buy from you requires you to do a lot in terms of marketing and advertising.People do not easily buy from strangers. For you to convince them, it really takes time. You need to build your online credibility and believability through applying proven ways of presenting yourself as an expert in your field of specialization, to outcompete your competitors. This is time-consuming and is one reason why new marketers find it difficult to break through. Focusing on getting new customers without having a clear plan to maintain old ones is another reason why some marketers fail to grow their online businesses.While getting new customers is very important to grow your online business, you need also to focus on maintaining them so as not to waste the resources you invested in getting them. Learn techniques of getting new customers and maintaining them to grow your online business.2. Selling more to existing customers.It’s very easier to grow your online business with existing customers than getting new ones. This is because they already know you and know your products. Because they have already used your products, even when you introduce new products it’s easy to convince them to buy.Your responsibility now is to create various ways for them to buy more and more from you. You can do this through introducing various promotional programs that will persuade them to buy as they see the benefit of buying again from you.For instance, if you have 4 customers, who buy products equivalent to $50 each per month, you earn $2,400 from them in a year. If you work hard to get 4 extra customers within the same year, who can also spend on average $50 per month, you will earn $ 4,800 from your 8 customers (4 old & 4 new customers). But if you get 4 new customers and encourage the four old customers to spend 50% more, your revenue will jump from $ 4,800 to $ 6,000 in a year. Do you see how fast you will have grown your business by directing your energy on both old and new customers?In the example above, what you have done is to increase what your old customers buy from you by 50% and this is what is known as the TRANSACTION VALUE. Always focus on your old customers by coming up with ways of increasing their transaction value to grow your online business. Will you do that?3. Selling more often to existing customers.Growing your online business will largely depend on how often each of your customers buys from you. This is very important. You need to come up with ways to keep them coming back to buy from you.Let me illustrate this by building on the same example above. If each of the 4 old customers you have spent $50 per month, you would earn $2,400 in 12 months. But if you worked harder to encourage them to increase their transaction value by 50%, each customer would spend $75 per month and you would earn $3,600 within one year. If the 4 customers increase the number of times they purchase from you to 3 times per annum, through your promotional efforts, they would spend a total of $10,800. Can you imagine your revenue jumping from $6,000 to $10,800 as a result of focusing on the frequency each customer buys from you?In the example above, your assumed revenue has increased from $6,000 to $10,800 due to the number of times each of the 4 customers returned to buy from you. You have not got new customers but your revenue is increasing. That’s what is known as THE FREQUENCY OF PURCHASE. Grow your online business by focusing on the number of times each customer buys from you!As you work hard to grow your business, ask yourself the following questions and make sure you find the answers.I. How many customers do I have currently?ii. How much do they spend on average in one transaction?iii. How many times do they spend in a month or in a year?iv. What would happen if I increased their transaction value by 5% to 50% or even more?v. What can I do to increase their transaction value?vi. What can I do to increase their frequency of purchase?When you successfully find answers to the above questions, you will obviously find no obstacle in building a successful business. You will have known how to grow your online business. Will that help you?