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As a small business owner the need to get online is pretty apparent no matter that you do to make a living. The ability for potential customers to find you online can be a key factor in building brand loyalty, gaining increased exposure and providing a better initial impression of your business. One of the problems that many small business owners come across with their first website is under anticipating the time and cost involved and over anticipating the results.

When jumping into to online marketing of a business the first impulse is to want your brand new site to do everything under the sun! You want it to look great, load fast, show off your business in its best light, show up first the search results and get tons of traffic, right? Assuming that we are dealing with a limited budget approach this process in a series of steps rather than expecting the world on the first go.

Step one is to choose a good domain name. Choose something that is both easy to remember and does a good job describing or identifying what your business is. There are a ton of resources online that will help you make a good decision. In general shorter is almost always better than longer and avoid hyphens in the name (like my-great-website.com). You’ll ideally be using this domain name in your business emails as well so make it something well thought out and practical.

Step two is getting an online presence. Just a simple website that is clean and readable is great. The two main things you want your first website version to provide to web surfers are as follows:

1) Contact information – your business address, phone and fax numbers and email address. Once someone finds your website don’t make them have to dig around to find out how to get a hold of you. Put it right up front and encourage contact.

2) What your business does – are you a painter? Yoga instructor? Photographer? You know what you do for a living, of course, but many of your website visitors might not be so sure.

That’s it. Just a page or two will get you going. From this point you can start to decide on what is important next. Maybe it’s pictures of your store or inventory or videos of you doing your craft or service. Later on you can incorporate ecommerce into the site, support desks, help sections and everything else you can image.

I see so many small business owners get caught up in totally unimportant points and obsess over their first website that they get paralyzed and nothing gets done. It’s like a deer in headlights. Don’t get caught. Get a couple of clean pages up online, make some business email accounts from that domain and go from there.

These days it seems like you can’t hardly turn around without bumping into somebody who has started a successful Internet business of some sort. From your neighbor who sells yard sale type items on eBay, to the kid down the street who invented a new twitter app, all the way to the small business owner who’s made the transition from brick-and-mortar to online business… people are making lots of money online, so why aren’t you?

In this article today I’d like to discuss the very basics of starting a business online. Of course, there are millions of different businesses you can start and it would be impossible to describe all of them in this short article. I just want to talk about a few of the basic building blocks that nearly all businesses will need to get started online.

The first thing you probably need is your own website. This entails two things; a domain name and web hosting.

Domain names generally cost less than $10 per month and there are many different places where you can order them. It really doesn’t matter which company you use. A good place to start is Go Daddy because they have cheap prices.

After you have your domain name you need web hosting. To create a very simple website you shouldn’t need to spend more than $10 or $20 a month on Web hosting. A search at any major search engine will give you large list of different web hosting companies to choose from. I recommend host gator because they are relatively inexpensive and fairly easy to use.

Next you need a way to accept credit card payments from your potential customers online. Many banks offer online merchant accounts but these can be complicated and expensive. For somebody who’s just getting started I recommend you check out PayPal or Click Bank because they offer easy-to-use, easy to set up, and inexpensive payment processor solutions.

Next you need a way to build a list of potential customers and past customers that you can continue to contact in the future to market your products to them. E-mail marketing is very important when starting an online business, and that means setting up an auto responder service. There are several to choose from but I recommend aWeber.

These are the basics starting just about any business online. Once you get your domain name, Web hosting, credit card processing, and e-mail solutions set up you can focus on the specific business that you decide to go into.

At the end of the day, starting your own online business doesn’t have to be prohibitively difficult. Once you get these building blocks set up, the rest should fall into place much easier. Now you can join the ranks of successful people making their living online.

So what are you waiting for? Get started today!

A virtual assistant (VA) is a self-employed professional who provides administrative, secretarial and creative services on a remote basis.

Working from their own fully equipped offices, VAs work with a variety of different clients on a regular, ad hoc, or individual project basis.

In other words, a VA is a professional small-business owner who provides virtual PA support to a number of clients and who can undertake those tasks normally performed by a PA or an office manager.

By forming a partnership with a VA, you can make more money by focusing on what you do best and expanding your business. Once you have a VA, you will be able to be far more productive as a result.

We recommend you bring one on board as soon as possible.

What are the benefits of working with a VA?

Focus can be switched to moneymaking activities - by outsourcing their administrative tasks, clients can focus their time on making moneymaking activities.

A cost-effective solution - clients only pay for the time you are working on their tasks, not lunch breaks, networking events, holidays, etc.

No office space or equipment requirements - as VAs work from their own premises, clients do not need to provide the office space or equipment they would if they employed their own support staff.

No employee-related issues - as a VA is a self-employed business owner, clients do not need to worry about employment law, national insurance contributions, PAYE, pension contributions, etc.

Flexible support available - most VAs work on a regular retainer, ad hoc and project specific basis, alleviating clients’ requirements for employed support staff.

Experienced professional to support their business - if utilised correctly, a VA with professional expertise can help a business grow.

Can complement existing support staff - a VA is a perfect resource to complement existing office staff with tasks that often get overlooked in the day-to-day running of a business.

Allow more time for leisure activities - by outsourcing tasks to a VA, clients can increase the amount of time they can spend with their family and friends.

The Internet as a venue for transacting business is the most inexpensive in the world. Furthermore it has a reach that is constantly growing and refining itself. As the internet matures, there are so many ways for one to make money online. As a small business owner, you can have your products placed online and have a merchant account for you to accept online payments. As a service provider, there are a variety of services you can focus within the internet sphere itself. Here are some tips on making money online for both the small business and the service provider:

For a small business:

- Make your presence known in the internet. This can be done by making a website and ensuring that your website has the proper tools to be search-able on search engines. Websites can be done by a professional or if you have the time, you can make it yourself. It is a document which enables browsers to view your products and know more about it. Your website needs to be set up so that it can be listed on search engines when looking for your type of product. This is done by correctly tagging your website to the possible ways people might query a search engine in looking for your product.

- Have a merchant account set up. A merchant account enables your business to accept credit card transactions online. There is a small set up fee of perhaps 50 to 100 dollars and for every transaction a percentage is paid which can run between 0.75% to 2%, Finding and choosing which merchant account to use is your option. There are some merchant accounts that can be coursed through search engines like Yahoo and Google. They may offer the best rates and is something you can consider doing

For the service provider:

- Focus on your core competence. If you are a good writer, then ghost writing for blogs for a company may be the way to go. More technical people may choose graphic design or the current favorite, Search Engine Optimizers

If you are a small business owner, then you have one main goal to accomplish in the near future. If you aren’t online with a website yet, then that is your new goal to accomplish as of right now. You might ask why being online is so important, so here are some of the best reasons why small businesses and large businesses alike benefit so much from being online.

Websites give searchers confidence. These days, just about everyone is online, businesses and people alike. If a person asks to do business with you and then finds out that you do not have a website, their confidence levels in you will immediately drop. There is something comforting about having a website for people. They believe that having a website shows how legitimate of a business you are.

Websites give customers information. When people talk to you about your business, they usually don’t ask you all of the questions just yet. They are more interested in getting the gist of what you do and then going to your website to get the full amount of information. People enjoy being able to learn about a company or product without a person there pushing them to buy anything.

Websites increase your market. You can’t talk to everyone or sell to everyone. Websites are great because they expand your market for people who can buy things. You might find yourself selling things to people overseas or in other states. These are people who you would have never reached had you not had a website.

If you are a small business owner or plan to be one then there are many business services online which will help you run your business much more easily and much more efficiently. The biggest advantage of the internet is that it has made the whole world smaller and has allowed us to share our information anywhere we want. And since businesses are based on contacts and information, the internet has given every business to become a truly global entity which is not confined by any geographical borders.

The biggest reason that businesses used to be consolidated in a small area was information and contacts. Being closer to customers and competitors meant you will be able to observe the changes in the industry and demand and adjust your business practices accordingly. This close view allowed sharp minded business men to react quickly and beat the competition. The business services online today provide you with the power to do all of this all over the world.

There are some absolutely great business services online which many people do not know about. One thing that businesses are finding very useful is cloud computing. Cloud computing is a system of networking wherein your data is stores on the network and not on your PC so you can access it from anywhere. This allows you to share data between as many people as you want.

Another great business service online is online workspaces. These workspaces make things easier for the management and the workers. The management can easily assign tasks to people and manage their progress with some simple clicks and the workers can see what they have to do just by logging on.

Another great service is conferencing tools. These allow people from different countries to just talk on video chat. This allows companies to grow beyond borders and still be able to have meetings, make decisions and discuss problems as if they were talking face to face.

There are many other great business services online which really help you streamline your business and work more efficiently and quickly.