Start An Online Business From Scratch From Home
Over the past few years, many people have gone and done several online businesses that have generated multiple six figures in profits each, and today we will be spilling all their secrets. We will be sharing how to start a profitable online business from scratch, from choosing a product to branding through advertising.
To put it to the test, we will be creating a brand-new business alongside you step by step. We will even share with you some AI tools to make things easier.
Step Basic: What to Sell?
What product Should I sell? This is often the first question new entrepreneurs focus on. The problem is that’s what causes most of them to fail. Isn’t it questionable, All that you’ve been told is wrong? Your first question shouldn’t be what product should I sell? Your first question should be what problem I can solve. It doesn’t matter how cool or fancy your product is if it doesn’t solve a real problem that people care about. It’s not going to sell well.
4 Basic Steps
There are four ways to find a problem to start a business around
Step 1: Bussiness Idea
There are several choices to proceed with in step one let’s look at them
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The First Way
its through yourself. Start by examining your own life and interests. What problems have you faced? What skills do you have that you could help others with?
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The Second Way
Its through ChatGPT. You can ask it for a list of problems to start a business around and generate some good ideas. You can then keep asking if you guys deeper and deeper into specific categories to find issues that you’re interested in a table.
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The Third Way
its to target markets , a specific group of people out there that you could sell to. For example, people who go to the gym think about what they’re struggling with and what you could solve for them. You can use ChatGPT to come up with target markets and list their problems.
If you feel your target market is too broad and diverse, keep niching down on their demographics and interests. Instead of all gym goers, what about women aged 18 to 24? Or people who practice yoga? Or people who work out at the playground? Get specific questions for a specific answer.
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The Fourth One
it Is to examin existing businesses and products. You can gain inspiration from the problems they’re trying to solve. You can find ideas on Google, YouTube, and TikTok where a good hashtag you could search is #tik T.O.K made me buy. If you’re thinking of drop shipping or working with the manufacturer, you can browse Alibaba and AliExpress and find products there. You can also explore services and digital products. Focus on the problem, not the product.
It’s the easiest way to tell if something will sell or not, once you. And on a real problem, you can then decide on a product you can sell to Before the business we’re creating together, you find ideas anywhere like as I was browsing Alibaba and saw this electric pot and it sparked a real problem that if people had this in university back in the day. As most people always wanted to eat late in the evening after a long day of study.
The problem was every small dorm had no kitchen appliances and the residence dining hall always closes early. The food there wasn’t that great either and it was expensive, so people always wish there was a way to cook in their dorm. This electric pot would have solved it all. We could cook at any time. You could cook noodles, eggs, and a mobster. This has the potential to the problem and a product we can now go to the next step.
Step 2: Traget Market
To target the market, it’s now time to figure out who has your problem as willing to purchase your product. You may already have an idea, but sometimes a problem in a product can be shared by a lot of different people in which you’re going to want to niche down on a smaller target market so you can stand out. In the case of our electric pot, this product could be handy for a range of people, travelers, campers, and office workers. But instead of selling to all of them, we are going to niche down to that target
- Market size. How big is this group of people? It shouldn’t be too big where it includes everyone, but it shouldn’t be too small either. There are a lot of university students out there living in dorms. So, for our electric pod, we think we have a pretty good market size. Typically, the bigger the market, the more money there is on the table.
- However, it usually brings along more competition, which is the second factor. How many competitors are out there selling your product to the same, are they established a professional? If there’s a lot, it’s going to be harder for you to stand out and sell. While there are a lot of electric pot brands out there, we don’t find many of them specifically marketing toward university students.
- The third factor is profitability in this target market. Willing to spend their hard-earned dough on your product? And if so, how much profit is there to be earned? Note that a small market size or high competition doesn’t always mean it’s not profitable. Maybe each person has a lot of money to spend or there’s so much demand that it doesn’t even matter if there are a lot of competitors.
Probability-wise, for the electric pot, it’s decent. University students are typically broke but being that this product is genuinely useful and can save money, it could sell well if the pricing is right. Parents may also see the benefit of this product and buy further children for help. You can ask ChatGPT to weigh the pros and cons of a certain target market. Most new entrepreneurs, and really all entrepreneurs will likely keep going back and forth between step one and Step Product and a target market. While it is important, don’t get stuck here for too long. Most of the time you must start the business first to get the answers. It’s always better to start with an imperfect product and target market and change things later versus never starting at all.
Step 3: Platform
We will move on to the step three platform. You’re building an online business, so of course you’ll be selling your product online, but where online will it be? Through a marketplace like Amazon, eBay, or Etsy.
These platforms come with an existing customer base that can help bring traffic to your product, but they come with fees, competition next to your listing, and limited customization for your brand. The other type of platform would be your own website.
It gives you complete control over your branding, has fewer fees, and can really make your business look legit. However, you need to build the website and you must drive traffic to it through marketing. The best type of platform to choose will really depend on your product and the way you’re going to advertise it, which we’ll get into later. What we will say is that you can never go wrong with having your own website.
Let’s begin by grabbing a domain name a Simple, straightforward, Catchy one.
Tip: Use .store extention
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Why .Store is better than .com?
try for dormpod.com and whoops, it’s taken 🙁. Finding agood.com domain name these days, that’s just gone hard. Instead, we are going to go with a domain that’s been trending on the online streets. dot store is a domain meant exclusively for online stores.
It tells people your website is a store and instantly associates it with selling. It has over 1,000,000 businesses, celebrities, and influencers using it. It’s been found that almost 70% of domain name availability checks on dot com fail. But with the dot store, there is a huge pool of good and short domain names available, which means you don’t need to compromise. Let’s check if the dorm pod dot store is available.
And it is. Oh, it’s got a ring to it. You can buy a dot store domain at any registrar like GoDaddy or Namecheap or a website builder like Shopify or Wix.
After adding your domain name, you can add it to your cart and press proceed. You can then consider adding a professional e-mail from Google or SSL certificates to your order. That’s A heck of a good deal. This is for selling so consider it for the online store Link is in the description.
With a domain name. We can now begin on our website. There are plenty of e-commerce website builders out there like Shopify, Wicks, and Squarespace. They all have their pros and cons so feel free to choose one that fits your needs the best. Make sure the website looks good and professional.
Don’t have it looking like a scam? OK? Take inspiration from other websites and keep things minimal and streamlined. You don’t need too much on there, just words and media to help you sell your product and showcase stuff for branding.
Step 4: Connections And Customers
Branding Having a strong brand is essential to connecting with customers. A brand is what separates a business from some dude selling random things online. A blank website is a great canvas to start building your brand because it’s very visual. When designing your website, you can build your brand along with it. There are four branding elements you need to determine before launching your business.
- Start with your name, our recommendation is to keep it simple. Something that isn’t confusing and can be searched for efficiently. Especially as an online business. People are going to type your name with the dorm pot. It’s kind of basic, but it instantly gets the product across and works excellently online. If someone searches for an electric pot for dorms, they’ll likely come across a dorm pot.
- next your logo, Your Give off the personality of your company. Again, keep it simple. It can be an image, but it can also just be text. If you want a quick way to create a logo, you can use AI art generators like Mid Journey or Leonardo to generate one for you.
- Visual identity. This refers to everything else that’s visual. Your brand’s color palette, font imagery, and the looking packaging of your product. All this is going to influence how people will perceive your business. Everything should be catered towards your target market for door pot. We want to have a young casual university feel to it since we’re targeting university students. So, we are going to use a range of colors, modern fonts, and fun imagery.
Lastly, message This is probably the most critical and most overlooked part of a breath. What it says to its target market People resonate with businesses that solve their problems, so you’re going to want to craft all of your brand’s messaging to revolve around them. For instance, the dorm pod’s key message is going to be simple. It’s a convenient and affordable way to cook at your door.
All the messaging from the homepage to the product page is going to focus on this aspect as it touches on the problems that this target market has. If you need help with any of these branding elements like ChatGPT, it can basically write a whole branding strategy for you. OK, the website and branding are all done. It’s now time to go to the battlefield.
Step 5: Promotion
Step 5, Promotion This step will decide whether your business will live or die. If you can stick through and figure out a way to successfully market your business, you win. There are many different marketing channels to choose from to promote your online business. Paid ads, Search engine optimization, e-mail marketing, Affiliate marketing. The list goes on.
While your business should eventually grow to utilize several channels, the one we recommend you go all in on at the start is social media marketing. Right now, the best way to promote your business is through short-form content. Tick tocks, Instagram reels, YouTube shorts.
The algorithm is boosting those right now, and it’s just so much easier to grab eyeballs through them versus traditional YouTube videos or Instagram posts, for example with Dorm Pot, what we do to promote it would be to make videos. A guy just cooks all kinds of food with his electric pot on his college bed and its genius. Making branding simple and easy.
It’s weird and engaging, it’s very authentic and it demonstrates the product perfectly where people are begging to buy the electric pot. And that’s the thing. This guy is selling the electric pot through his website in his bio. That was his plan all along. That’s how you do it.
Some products are naturally visual, like the dorm pot, but some aren’t, so you’ll have to get creative. Once you get the hang of social media marketing, you can then consider other marketing channels like paid ads. Most of the time, people just jump straight into paid ads when they don’t even know how to craft A good social media post.
Conclusion
Adjust and be literate, you’re going to get everything right on your first try. Maybe the problem you chose wasn’t that big of a problem. Maybe you’re focusing on the wrong target market. Maybe TikTok isn’t the best way to promote your product. Expect to fail and expect to change things. If you keep working on the steps we mentioned, we can almost promise you that you will eventually land a profitable online business. And there you have it. We wish you the best of luck with your business.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
Q: How to find the best niche?
Ans: The first way is through yourself. Start by examining your own life and interests. What problems have you faced? What skills do you have that you could help others with? The second way is through ChatGPT. You can ask it for a list of problems to start a business around and generate some good ideas. You can then keep asking if you guys deeper and deeper into specific categories to find issues that you’re interested in a table.
Q: What are the basic steps to a good marketing strategy?
Ans: Start with your name, our recommendation is to keep it simple. Something that isn’t confusing and can be searched for efficiently. Especially as an online business. People are going to type your name with the dorm pot. It’s kind of basic, but it instantly gets the product across and works excellently online.
your logo, Give off the personality of your company. Again, keep it simple. It can be an image, but it can also just be text.
Visual identity. This refers to everything else that’s visual. Your brand’s color palette, font imagery, the looking packaging of your product. All this is going to influence how people will perceive your business
Q: How can I find a good business?
Ans: All that you’ve been told is wrong. Your first question shouldn’t be what product should I sell? Your first question should be what problem I can solve. It doesn’t matter how cool or fancy your product is if it doesn’t solve a real problem that people care about. It’s not going to sell well