First of all starting an online business does not need a huge capital. We only need a little fee for a domain name and a hosting server which cost less than $20. As for a brick and mortar business, we need at least $20,000 for rental and renovation of premises. An online business can be set up within days or even hours if you are good at it but offline business may need months to from planning till to open shop. As there are lots of nitty-gritty things you need to attend to such as license application, water & electricity installation, stock order, shop design and furniture arrangement and many more.
For an online business selling ebooks for example, there is no need to rent a place to store their books whereas their offline counterpart, a bookshop for example, they need to have a storeroom for putting stocks of books which need a systematic method of storage and personnel to take care of the stocks. Doing an online shop can be handled by yourself alone where as offline shop needs a handful of staffs to take care of respective departments such as finance, operation, marketing, human resource, store and etc. To hire such a group of people require further cost every month. Together with other overhead costs like, water & electricity, transportation and handling charges, the monthly revenue will be greatly reduced as compared to an online business which does not need to have all these overhead costs and can enjoy a higher margin of profits.
The market for a conventional shop is only within a certain town or location in a particular country where as an online store can sell to anyone, anywhere around the world who has access to internet. According to statistics there are around 1.8 billion internet users last year and growing. So you can imagine the earning potential as compared to those in a brick and mortar business.
Tuesday, July 27, 2010
Wednesday, July 21, 2010
How to do Keyword Research - Part 3
With the information on demand for your chosen keywords from Google Keyword Tool, you also need to know how many competition you are going to face. This is very important as you do not want to use a keyword that is too competitive that people will not be able to see you in the search engine as you would be many pages down in the search result of search engines.
Let us go to the Google Search page. From here you type in your chosen keyword. For example, "Golf". The results will show that there are 537 millions websites out there with this particular keyword. What this means is that although you have 185 millions searches which equals to demand on your keywords, there are actually 537 millions competitions on the "golf" keyword which roughly comes to 3 times the size of your demand. This basically means that the "Golf" keyword has too many competitions and it would not be wise to choose such a highly competitive keyword to put in your website unless you can find a way to beat all the 537 millions competitors!
Well, do not get disheartened by this. You can always choose another keyword. In fact other longer keywords may even be more profitable as they are more targeted and not so competitive. For example you can choose "golf swing". In Google keyword tool, the monthly search is about 1.2 million while the competition is roughly about 8 millions. Well, still quite competitive, but 8 million is better than 537 million competitions. Let us try the word "How to perfect your golf swing". The competition is 276 thousand but the search demand is only 720. There is hardly enough search to get you sufficient traffic. The trick here is you need a balance of high enough number of searches to get you sufficient traffic to your website and you do not want too many competitions. So, something in the middle will be fine.
Let us go to the Google Search page. From here you type in your chosen keyword. For example, "Golf". The results will show that there are 537 millions websites out there with this particular keyword. What this means is that although you have 185 millions searches which equals to demand on your keywords, there are actually 537 millions competitions on the "golf" keyword which roughly comes to 3 times the size of your demand. This basically means that the "Golf" keyword has too many competitions and it would not be wise to choose such a highly competitive keyword to put in your website unless you can find a way to beat all the 537 millions competitors!
Well, do not get disheartened by this. You can always choose another keyword. In fact other longer keywords may even be more profitable as they are more targeted and not so competitive. For example you can choose "golf swing". In Google keyword tool, the monthly search is about 1.2 million while the competition is roughly about 8 millions. Well, still quite competitive, but 8 million is better than 537 million competitions. Let us try the word "How to perfect your golf swing". The competition is 276 thousand but the search demand is only 720. There is hardly enough search to get you sufficient traffic. The trick here is you need a balance of high enough number of searches to get you sufficient traffic to your website and you do not want too many competitions. So, something in the middle will be fine.
How to do Keyword Research - Part 2
The keywords shown are ranked from the highest searched by people around the word to the lowest. You can see that there are 185 million searches globally for the word "Golf" for last month and 55.6 millions searches locally for the same month. This will tell you what the demand is for the word "golf". Speaking of demand, well, in business there is always the other side of the equation which is the supply or we called it the competition here. We will talk about how to see how many competitions for our chosen keyword in our next post. For the time being, we can see that from column 2, the green bar is full, meaning that the competition is very stiff for the keyword "Golf". But for the keywords "Golf discount shoe" for example, the green bar is only half, which means the competition is lesser.
In the "Local search trend" column, there are 12 mini vertical green bars which represent the search trend for each calendar month of the past 1 year. From here we can see whether the particular keyword is being searched evenly throughout the year, or whether it is only popular for a particular month of the year. For example, you type the word how to cook turkey. The result will show only one high green bar in the "local search trend" column. What this means is that people are only more interested to know how to cook a turkey during December, which is Christmas season. So if you want to have constant traffic to your website throughout the whole year, it is advisable to choose those keywords with roughly even green bars on the "local search trend" column. The "Estimated Avg CPC" column is the estimated average cost per click which means if you were to put your ad with Google Adwords, that is how much Google will charge you per click.
In the "Local search trend" column, there are 12 mini vertical green bars which represent the search trend for each calendar month of the past 1 year. From here we can see whether the particular keyword is being searched evenly throughout the year, or whether it is only popular for a particular month of the year. For example, you type the word how to cook turkey. The result will show only one high green bar in the "local search trend" column. What this means is that people are only more interested to know how to cook a turkey during December, which is Christmas season. So if you want to have constant traffic to your website throughout the whole year, it is advisable to choose those keywords with roughly even green bars on the "local search trend" column. The "Estimated Avg CPC" column is the estimated average cost per click which means if you were to put your ad with Google Adwords, that is how much Google will charge you per click.
How to do Keyword Research - Part 1
Before you start an online business, it is advisable to do a market research first. You can start off by selecting a niche that you have interest in. Choosing a niche within your interest will ensure that you will always have the passion to put in a lot of valuable content in your website and will not give up half way though. Having chosen your particular niche, you can start to do keyword research. Putting the right keyword in your website is essential for the success of your online business as it will affect the ranking of your website in search engines like Google, Yahoo etc.
There are many ways of doing keyword research over the internet. To make things simple, I will use Google Keyword Tools to explain here. You go to Google search engine and type in Google keyword tool. Click on the Google adwords keyword tool. When you are in the page, go to advance search and change the country to "All Countries". After that you type in a keyword on the word or phrase box and click search. If your niche is golf, you type in golf and keyword idea will appear. You then go to columns on the top right corner of your search result and choose, "All Columns". You then click on the "Local monthly search" column to sort it so that the most search keyword will appear on top. The columns on the search results run like this: Keyword, Competition, Global Monthly Search, Local Monthly Search, Local Search Trend, Estimated Monthly CPC, etc... I will teach you how to read and interpret these columns on my next post.
There are many ways of doing keyword research over the internet. To make things simple, I will use Google Keyword Tools to explain here. You go to Google search engine and type in Google keyword tool. Click on the Google adwords keyword tool. When you are in the page, go to advance search and change the country to "All Countries". After that you type in a keyword on the word or phrase box and click search. If your niche is golf, you type in golf and keyword idea will appear. You then go to columns on the top right corner of your search result and choose, "All Columns". You then click on the "Local monthly search" column to sort it so that the most search keyword will appear on top. The columns on the search results run like this: Keyword, Competition, Global Monthly Search, Local Monthly Search, Local Search Trend, Estimated Monthly CPC, etc... I will teach you how to read and interpret these columns on my next post.
Tuesday, July 20, 2010
The Right Mindset
Many think that starting up an online business is easy. Little do they know that those internet marketers that have made it big in the internet world for quite some time. They have accumulated for themselves at least a couple hundred thousands of leads through their opt-in page and most of their income comes from selling to their leads through email marketing. As for newbies like you, who has just set up a website and put some products on it for selling. Do not expect to get any single sale for the first couple of months. The reason being that you are new to the internet world, nobody has known you and your website is not viewed by many people yet. So do not think that buyers will just come from nowhere and buy from you. Most people buy only from trusted website and your website is by no means anywhere near to the classification "Trusted" website yet.
Having said all these, do not get disheartened. Trust can be built through time and also how well you get traffic to your website. Most newbies would have given up already on their online business after a few months as they see no money coming in. They will think that this online business thing is not for everybody. That is why many have fallen. We must not have this kind of mindset. And especially the "see no money = no success" attitude. Do not worry or even think about money for the first couple of months. Just concentrate on building your website and attracting more traffic. Sooner or later your website will become known by a increasing number of people online and that is when your business will starts to come and the flowing in of money will ensue.
Having said all these, do not get disheartened. Trust can be built through time and also how well you get traffic to your website. Most newbies would have given up already on their online business after a few months as they see no money coming in. They will think that this online business thing is not for everybody. That is why many have fallen. We must not have this kind of mindset. And especially the "see no money = no success" attitude. Do not worry or even think about money for the first couple of months. Just concentrate on building your website and attracting more traffic. Sooner or later your website will become known by a increasing number of people online and that is when your business will starts to come and the flowing in of money will ensue.
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