Ink and Toner Cartridges: How Do I Start an Online Business From Home on a Low Budget? Part 1
By Andrew F James
About a year ago I took over an existing online business from a friend of mine selling ink, toner and other printing consumables and decided that there was a lot of potential for promoting the website more aggressively over the internet. I started with maybe a hundred dollars or so and a handful of customers carrying over from the previous owner. One benefit was inheriting his website as that gave me a good benchmark on what I wanted and didn t want when I got my own going.
Now a year later I have around ten times as many customers, a respectable page ranking in Google (more about this later), first page search engine rankings (SERP s) in MSN with respectable SERP s in Yahoo and Google still needs some work.
Although I still have a long way to go (in truth I will always have a list of more stuff to do) I ve made a good start and by all accounts done quite well considering my limited resources. I have found that there are a great deal of free or very cheap resources you can utilise for building and promoting a business online and this is what I shall be passing on through this series.
Although the following guide talks about starting an online business selling printing consumables in Australia you can apply much of it to other business types and I would imagine in other countries.
Why do you want to be in business & does having an online business suit you ?:-
Often people go into business with intention to get filthy rich overnight and then find themselves trapped with a crumbling edifice that consumes their lives but they have no passion for. So the question is why do you want to be in business to begin with? If your answer is something like to make tons of money at some point you will need to rethink this as it wont be enough anymore. Of course I want to make more money than I currently do but it s the lifestyle I will have when I have more money that creates my goals for next year, five years etc.
Personally my desire was to create a place on the internet people could go and shop with peace of mind knowing that they would be getting great service, great prices etc. My focus is always on developing good relationships with my customers and I believe this psychology actually affects my attitude to how I run my business as I am constantly looking for ways to better serve my customers needs rather than trying to figure out how to make more profit. I can honestly tell you that I rarely think about building my business in terms of profits, rather I try to identify ways to improve products and services to give current customers more bang for their buck and attract new clients.
As to whether what you wish to do would be suited to having your business online this is a trick question really because I can honestly say that it doesn t matter what you do, you should definitely have a website for it ! If you have any doubts about whether its worth spending time and money getting your business online you can go to http://www.nichebot.com/ type a word into the box that represents a likely keyword for your business and look at what s in the count column to see how many people have used that word or words in the last 60 days. Then it s up to you as to whether you would like these people coming to your site as an additional source of revenue or whether you re happy to let them go to your competition.
Anyway its about time I got into the good stuff so here goes…….
Registering your business & domain name:-
Your business name and domain name - You obviously need to decide on a business name and may have already done so but what may not be so obvious is taking into consideration your websites domain name BEFORE you choose a name for your business. Basically a domain name is what you call your website so for example the domain name for my website is “cartridgespecialists.com.au” and generally speaking you would have your domain name ending with either .com.au or .net.au and this makes you subject to the laws of Australian domain name registration as explained below.
If you are going to register a website ending in either .com.au or .net.au there are some rules you need to know about. Australian rules of domain name registration state “The domain name you order should have either be an exact match, acronym or abbreviation of the supplied business registration, or it should bear a close and substantial connection to the domain name”, so before you rush out and register that really cool business name you ve just thought of its worth your while checking first to see if the domain name has been taken or not.
You don t have to register your domain name ending as above, you can choose to register an international domain name such as .com or even use the name or a place or person instead of an Australian domain or in addition to. In fact this can be a smart thing to do if you re looking for as many ways as possible to protect the name of your business or something you re selling.