Choosing an Online Business – Beat the Credit Crunch Part 1.
At the time of writing, the financial situation all over the world is not good. Credit is hard to find, and companies and individuals alike are beginning to find things difficult.
As companies struggle to continue operating, they are laying off more and more people. This is turn results in more people with severely reduced income, which means they have much less buying power. If the people aren’t buying, then the companies are not making any money, so their situation gets worse. This downward spiral continues untile the companies cease trading completely.
This won’t affect everybody of course; there are many companies who remain largely unaffected by this situation, at least for the time being.
But who knows when your company or your employer will be affected?
Don’t wait until it’s too late! Start thinking about alternative and supplementary incomes now. There are many opportunities available to you in the form of home-based businesses which you can run part-time, requiring maybe one or two hours a day. If that business is Internet based, you have the best of both worlds – a worldwide marketplace, low startup costs, low running costs, and relatively low investment of time and effort.
That’s not to say that it’s going to be an easy ride. There really is no instant cash system, no get-rich-quick scheme, or set-and-forget business. Any kind of business needs some thought and effort to get going, and continual input and further effort to maintain and expand it.
This series of articles, Beating the Credit Crunch, will take you step-by step through a logical and organised approach to starting an online business. Don’t worry if you don’t have a clue about computers, websites etc. Everything you need to know will become clear, and as your confidence grows you’ll wonder why you ever worried about it.
The first thing you need to do is decide what sort of business you want to run. Unless you always dreamed of running a particular type of business, that isn’t always as easy as it first appears. Throw away any predjudices or fears that you might have about running any kind of business, and don’t think that anything is going to be too difficult. If you start small, you’ll stay in control, and you’ll be able to expand at a controlled rate.
The whole point of setting up an online business is to make money. You offer one or more products or services, and people pay you money for them.
Now I know what you’re thinking – “If I sell xyz product, where on earth am I going to store my stock?”. That needn’t be a problem and ways around it will be covered later in this series.
So, sit down with a notepad and pencil and scribble down any ideas that you have. Go for subjects that interest you – you don’t really want to run a business that you have no interest in.
Talk it through with your partner if you have one, but also try to come up with ideas independently of eachother. Don’t be shy about it. Any idea could turn out to be a huge money-maker.
Once you have your list of ideas, whittle it down to a short-list of the strongest ideas.
As a computer programmer, my obvious choice for products to sell is software. It’s the business I know, and if I write my own software, all the profits made on that software are mine. Having said that, I have other hobbies which are totally unrelated to computers, and I could just as easily set up online businesses in any of those fields.
In the next article in this series, we’ll be covering the next step – determining whether your business ideas are going to be viable.
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