I have noticed that a lot of people are having their own unique skills. But they don't know how to monetize their skills or they don't have enough skills needed to do the monetization.
Similarly many people think about different business ideas, but they find it difficult to make them a reality.
I used to go through various social media discussions related to people sharing their experiences of starting businesses and failing to succeed. By reading their stories, I could understand that many people are not getting enough guidance from experienced people. Actually, I too faced this difficulty and failed in my software development business. I might have avoided the failure (or at least some money loss) if I know some simple things that I realized now.
So, I thought of sharing my experiences and suggestion through Live sessions (e.g Digital marketing, earning from YouTube, developing timesheet) on my YouTube channel. But unfortunately, my Live sessions are not attracting viewers.
Therefore, recently I decided to do paid one-on-one meetings for helping people to convert their ideas into online businesses.
As explained in my ebook , I have around 24 years of experience in various things like web development, software testing, running a small IT company, writing/publishing/selling ebooks, flipping websites, doing digital marketing, and running blogs and youtube channels. So, I believe I can help anyone to start doing online business effectively.
Contact me (rajamanickam.a@gmail.com) to hire me to help you earn money online. I can develop PHP/MySQL scripts, set up WordPress / e-commerce sites with all the required things, do proper testing to keep it secure and with good performance, do SEO, and run paid promotions. I can guide you to publish/promote your ebooks and guide you to run your Youtube channel effectively. And, I can suggest the best business suitable for you based on your skill set and competition. Even if you don't have any business ideas, I can suggest dropshipping/POD services.
I am planning to charge just $15 USD per hour. Sometimes, when I have more free time, I will charge only $12 USD per hour.
Note that I won't work on tight schedules. So, if you need to do something urgently, I am not the right person.
I was doing freelance work for many years previously. But I stopped doing them in the past few years, as I decided to put maximum effort into my YouTube channel. Now I realized that doing freelance work for a few hours daily during my free time will not affect my YouTube channel growth. i-e The key is, I need to do freelance work only in my free time. Another change is, previously I was mostly doing web development (php/mysql) tasks. Now I will be giving more priority to online business coaching, and if needed, I will be doing web development, testing, and promotion activities also.
Find below my general suggestions for people interested in starting online businesses.
- Make sure that your Product/service actually helps to solve people's problems. It should be either entertaining or educational.
- Don't spend much in the initial stage. Do the scaling only after testing the market with a simple version of your product.
- Don't try to copy successful businesses. Instead, build your business based on your own skills, and market situations at the time of starting your business. Starting a business related to emerging technologies will be easy and the success rate will be high.
- Don't be greedy. If you are greedy, mostly you will be cheated by scammers.
- You need to understand the fact that succeeding in online business is not easy. You need to put in a lot of effort and withstand a lot of failures.
- You should understand that starting an online business is very easy. For example, a complete e-commerce site can be set up in a few hours without spending much. But things like doing proper testing, promotion/marketing, customer support, and maintenance of the site require a lot of effort and spending.
- Give more importance to hiring a great Team. If you couldn't find great Team members, it is better not to hire anyone instead of hiring some average or low-performing candidate.
I am planning to do this freelancing work for 2 or 3 hours per day. So, I will be accepting a few customers only. If you are interested to hire me, contact me by sending email to rajamanickam.a@gmail.com
Let me share some details about how to start an online business. I am writing it in a very general way. Doing actual business will vary based on various factors, like your skill set, competition, resources, regulations, compliances, etc.
Once you decide to start an online business, you need to decide your product or service. Select your product/service based on your own interest and skill. If you are interested in music, you can sell your own albums or just run a youtube channel from which you can earn money from ads, sponsors, merch, membership, affiliates, etc.
Having your own website will be an advantage for doing online business, though you can do online business through other social media websites or by using free blogging sites. Owning a website won't cost much. You need to register a domain with domain providers like Godaddy and you need to have a hosting to keep files of your website. Generally, Godaddy itself will sell hosting services. But I heard that generally domain providers are not good at hosting. So, it is better to have a hosting service from a company that is good at hosting. I use HostGator for many years without any issues. We can easily point the domain from the domain provider to our website at the hosting provider by doing a simple DNS entry.
We need to be very careful in choosing the domain name. It should reflect our brand name, and it should be easy to remember, it shouldn't create any confusion, and it should not violate anyone's trademark.
Another important thing is the pricing of the domain name. Though the domain names won't cost much, you need to remember that we should renew them every year. Most domain providers provide huge discounts initially, but we need to pay higher prices without discounts when renewing them. So, keep this in mind when deciding to have your own website. If you are on a tight budget, you may simply start using free blogging services. In this case, you need not pay for domain and hosting, everything will be free. Actually, this blog is hosted with Blogger which is free and allowed me to link my own domain.
While choosing a hosting service, they may offer various plans. Choose the plan which is more suitable for your requirements. It is better to start with a low-price plan, then we can move on to higher plans based on the necessity.
Once after buying a domain name and hosting, you can start developing your website for doing online business. One important thing is, you need to be very clear about your target audiences. It is very important from various perspectives. Even for choosing a hosting service, your target audience is important. If your target audiences are in the US and you host your website in India, the website will be loading slowly for your US audiences even though it loads quickly in India. In case, you are planning to target a global audience, it is better to use CDN services like Cloudflare which is having free options also. Apart from helping to load your site quickly throughout the world, the CDNs will provide a lot of security features and performance improvement services.
We need to be very tough in keeping our websites free from hacking attacks and spammers, otherwise, our entire efforts in doing business will be spoiled.
For developing a website, I would recommend WordPress which is free, open-source, and supported by almost all of the hosting services. It is very very easy to set up a WordPress site. Maintenance and customization are also easy. We can expand the functionality of the site by adding the required plugins. A lot of free plugins are available. For example, we can set up a complete e-commerce website within a few minutes with a lot of useful features without spending any money. We have to set the plugins for handling cache to reduce the server load and improve page serving speed, set up security-related plugins, set up plugins to add analytics code, etc. But we shouldn't add unnecessary plugins.
Starting a website is easy, but bringing potential customers to the website is the real challenge. We need to do digital marketing effectively and do lead capture and follow-ups properly.
And, we need to make sure that our website is loading quickly. It should appear correctly on various devices like Desktop computers, Tablets, Mobile phones, etc. There are various free tools available to check the page loading performance and checking mobile-friendliness.
Once you are ready with your products and your website developed to sell your products, you can expect sales immediately even though you bring your potential customers to your sites through campaigns. Because no one is going to buy from a random person. You need to have social proof or you have to establish your brand name. You can achieve it in various ways. For example, if you are selling your ebook, you first start selling through Amazon. Once after getting significant reviews and ratings you can start selling through your own website. Similarly, if you are planning to work on freelancing projects, you can first work through freelance websites till establishing a good reputation. After that, you can sell your freelancing service through your website itself.
One important approach for getting a reputation/branding is writing a lot of good quality and useful articles on your blog. Write articles related to your products and share them through various social media sites consistently, especially write about your personal experiences related to your products, how you are developing your products, and the story behind choosing those products. Encourage people to subscribe to your free newsletter and send your articles through the newsletter. Once people are familiar with you, you can start telling them about your services or product sales through the newsletter. i-e you need to follow the proper funneling, starting from content marketing. And lead capturing is also important. People who are going through your product details may not buy it immediately. They may take some time to analyze your product and compare the price/quality/shipping/payment methods with your competitor. You have to do the lead-capturing properly to follow up with them later by offering discounts to make the sales. Lead-capturing can be done by various methods. For example, if you are selling computers, you get the email id for sending free ebooks about various computers, their maintenance, links to download the best free software for the computers, and best practices of using computers and troubleshooting them.
Once you are ready with your products and website built with key things, like good performance, easy navigation, proper lead-capturing system, and customer support system, you can start promoting through various ways, like, SEO, Social media promotion, PPC campaigns, email campaigns, affiliate marketing, running PPC campaigns, etc.
Doing SEO and running PPC campaigns are very important and huge topics. I will write about them later.
