The first thing you have to do in order to start your online business is think about the topic you are the most passionate about. It's not a joke, actually it's so important that I consider it to be crucial to your success, so do not overlook this aspect. The reason why it's so important is that you can not give advice about golf clubs to people if you hate golf, but you can give great advice to people on tennis raquets if you're passionate about tennis and you have had like 10 raquets so far.
The second thing you have to do is build a website on your topic. If you do not know how to build a website you can find cheap web-designers on Elance and on Freelancer. This step requires a bit of work on your part because it involves a bit of research so you can provide quality content to your visitors. I recommend you also shoot a few videos on your topic because search engines love videos.
The third thing you need is a domain name. I recommend you go for a.com domain because it inspires more confidence then a.net domain for example.
The fourth thing you need is a webhost. You can find a hosting company that takes care of registering your domain name too – I use BlueHost but HostGator is also good and you are free to use any hosting company you choose as long as it has unlimited traffic included.
The fifth thing you need is an auto responder account so you can build your list of subscribers. This is very important although it may seem a little expensive in the beginning you must do it. I recommend Aeber but iContact is also good. These two have the highest email deliverability rates. If you are wondering why do you need to build a list I will give you my opinion: if you do not build a list you are not building a business – your list is your business because it's your potential clients database and without clients you can 't have a business.
After you have your autoresponder account set up you have to send your webform HTML code to the programmer you hired to build your website so he can integrate your opt-in form on your homepage – that is if you can not do it yourself.
The sixth thing you need is traffic and this is the most difficult part for every new online business. You must be patient and you must never give up. I'm telling you this because the search engines take their time before indexing your pages and then you have to wait even more before they start sending you visitors. My advice to you is to diversify. Do not rely only on SEO traffic because the big G is always changing the algorithms and you may get slapped so to avoid that you have to get traffic from as much sources as you can.
I recommend building a Facebook fan page with an opt-in form. I also think a new video every week posted on YouTube and on other major video sharing sites will help you a lot because you can put a link back to your site in the beginning of the description area so that the people who watched the video and enjoyed it can come to your site. Articles are a good source of traffic too, but only if you provide quality content to your readers (not a blatant sales pitch) so please write one quality article per week and submit it to ezineArticles and you will be amazed at the results.
This is it for this article, I will be posting a new article soon on how to keep your subscribers happy.
Please remember to have fun while building your online business – you will succeed eventually.