How to Start an Online Business

Posted on by Armando Aguilar

How to Start an Online Business  

Starting an online business can be challenging for a lot of people. Most people don’t even know where to start. The truth is, anyone can start an online business. You need to have a plan. First and foremost, you have to figure out a budget. How much can you spend a month on marketing your business? You can have the greatest product on the internet, but if you cannot market well, you’re not going to make a whole lot. If you want your business to grow, you have to set aside a budget for it. 

That brings me to my next point, your product. Do you have a product? If you don’t, don’t worry. You can market other people’s products on the internet and receive a commission on each sale. Start small, see if you can find a high converting item that’s relatively cheap. Once you begin making your first few sales and getting the hang of it, go for larger commissions.  

High ticket items or, “top tier products”, are some of the best ways to make significant income online. It can be harder, but the reward is far greater. For this reason, you should start with smaller items and scale up to the bigger ones.  

Set Goals 

You really need to set goals for yourself. Ideally, you want a conversion rate of at least 1.5% per 1000, or about 15 sales for every 1000. This is realistic. Once you achieve that and perfect your marketing strategy, it’s time to start lifting up your financial ceiling on your marketing budget. If you can, reinvest every dollar that you earn into marketing. Set 2% conversion as you goal. Once you have a solid stream of cash coming in, it’s time to start your business budget.  

Your business budget will cover a lot of the simple things you do. Hire a few people from oDesk to do your daily tasks. This gives you time to do what you want, from golf to coming up with ideas for your business. Figure out your overall cost for marketing, your total cost to run your business and add at least 10% to business growth. The remainder of this, is yours. This can be broken down even further, but we’ll save that for another time.  

For now, 

Happy Marketing 

Make Money Blogging

Posted on by Armando Aguilar

Ah, the almighty blogging question: How to make money blogging? The answer to that is more complex than you might think. Making money online in itself is a tough, tedious, rigorous and sometimes, a monumental task. When you decide that you want to make money online, you really need to understand something: It’s a lot of work.  

Many people fall and fail unfortunately, buying into cheap and poorly made programs that really offer only ideas and basic principles on “how to make money online”. This is truly a tragedy and is one of the main drivers of why 96% of people who try to earn money online, fail at making any money. That’s right, almost all people looking to make any significant money online, fail. So, what’s the secret? What are those 4 percent of people doing online that makes them so successful? The answer is this: they work long and hard at it.  

That may not be what you want to here, but the truth is, when you start an online business, you have to understand that you’re starting a business. The more hours you put into your business, the higher your chances for success become. Take this business for example, Royalty Online Business, as a business, we’ve put literally thousands of hours into our business to get it where it is today. It was no small task and we’re not even close to where we want to be. That place being, a dominating online financial guidance business.  

How has blogging helped our business grow? Search engines love blogs. If you go to any major site, right now, you will almost certainly find a section where they just write. They may call it “news” or “the latest buzz” or something catchy, but in all reality, they’re blogging. You see, you need content on your website. That is, a combination of words that are attached to your website that are meaningful, rich, informative and trendy. If you’re online business is trying to sell shoes for example, you need to be constantly on the lookout for the latest and greatest. When something happens in your industry, you must be one of the first to write about it. It’s easy to get left behind. Let’s take, for example, a sports event. Team A wins over team B and you decide to write a blog about it 2 weeks after the games ended. Guess what? You now have thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of stories all over the internet about exactly what you’re writing about. You’re competition also has search engine popularity over you.  

Relevance is a big part of a search engine. When the user types in, “what happened in game 1 of the world series”, the search engine will pull up the most relevant sites to that user based on recent overall user popularity using those keywords. That’s just one component of what the search engine uses to bring sites to that user. You have to be on your “A” game. The other thing you really need to focus on is bringing new content to the table. Using keyword analytical software or programs, find the best keywords that go with your website. Next, find a search result with low competition and at least 1,000 searches a month. When you start writing your blog post, use that keyword or phrase as your title and write about it. Make it meaningful. Put your heart into it. You don’t want to use a phrase or keyword that has too many search results. Chances are, you won’t even compete with the bigger fish. 

Once you have your visitors to your site, you need make sure that you’re offering them something that is relevant to the blog post that you just wrote. Whether you’re trying to make money from advertisements, affiliate programs, or physical products, it must be relevant. If you’ve gained your readers trust, they’re more likely to buy from you. This is why you have to love your readers. You may think it’s all about you, but it’s not. It’s all about your readers. It’s all about captivating them and intriguing them enough to finish going through your site. 

Facebook Marketing

Posted on by Armando Aguilar

Today, facebook is arguably the most powerful and popular social networking site in the world. With more than 70% of it’s users coming from the United States, there is not a single good reason for you and your business to not be involved with facebook. So, how many people use facebook? As of March 2015, there is a reported 1.2 billion members on facebook. That is a truly phenomenal number. 

So, how can facebook help my business? First, you need to create your facebook business page. Make sure your page is engaging and to the point. When people search for whatever it is that you’re selling or promoting, you need to grab their attention very quickly. The University of Missouri found that users on a webpage spend just 2.6 seconds scanning a website and an incredible 180 milliseconds fixating on one area. Think about how quickly you gaze at a site to find relevant information. What does this mean? It means that your posts or titles need to be short, eye catching and to the point. 

Here’s an example, let’s say that you were promoting a book that taught people how to gain more followers on Twitter, your title should be something like, “Get More Twitter Followers”. If a user is interested in growing their twitter base, they’re most likely going to click that link or read that post. Remember though, you need to capture them once you land them. Chances are, that user is going to continue on with their life and never look at your facebook page again. 

That brings me to my next point – Use facebook to take the user to your website.  

Once a user actually visits your website, they’re much more likely to browse around your site, which gives you the obvious: the ability to make a sale. If your website is convincing, truthful, meaningful and attractive to the buyer, your chances of making a sale sky rocket. This is why having a clean and simple website are crucial to your business.  

Let’s talk a little bit about how you should use your facebook page. First off, you need to complete your facebook page, 100% of it. Make sure you have your business logo there, your business web address, your business hours (if your business has open hours) and contact information. Next, start making simple post that literally just put content on your website. When someone visits your facebook page, they’re not going to stick around if there’s only one post. If you have a blog, start making summaries of your blogs and posting them to your facebook page. Remember, you need to grab the users attention. If you want to take the slow route, by all means, go for it. You should be posting at least 3 times a day to your facebook page, though. Users want to your engagement. If they like your page or follow you, it’s because they agree with your business or they simply want to know more about your business. Once you build a decent following, start using these new followers as your leads. Don’t bombard them and don’t ever take advantage of their privacy. A simple message won’t hurt though. Keep it short and simple.  

Your page needs to be about your business and nothing else. Don’t post your feelings or how your day is going. This isn’t about you, it’s about your business, that is, unless of course your business is about you. If you’re business is about fashion, post about fashion, if it’s about sports, post about sports. Remember, the end game is for them to land on your site so they need to like you and they need to trust you. If you’re posting about video games and your business is about books, the user will immediately leave your page once they realize your business is not what they’re looking for. It’s about targeted visitors, even if just a few, targeted visitors are much more likely to buy from you.  

To summarize, is facebook important to your business? Yes. With over 70% of it’s users coming from the United States, these are some of the best visitors you can have. Make sure your page is completed and looks good. Keep your post titles short and to the point. Link your page to your posts. Most important, stay relevant and engage with your users and facebook can become an amazing traffic source for your business.