Starting an Internet Small Business

How to get a small business started on the internet?

With great care, lots of research, money and/or time. It usually takes three to six months to create a top of the line website ( your internet marketing or yellow pages ), install a easy to use shopping cart ( your actual store shelves loading with products ), your eCommerce hosting ( your secure checkout stand with a merchant account ) and get it registered with the search engines, then another six months to a year to realize a fair cash flow.

It's all a numbers game, store location and appeal, product demand, quality products, competitive pricing, x traffic and x conversions. These will vary depending on a myriad of things you need to do, research, research, more research, an attractive, easy to navigate website and wonderful benefit copy written webpages on your website.

Keep in mind, you are not necessarily marketing to your local community, you are competing in the world wide market and the competition is huge and fierce. You need to be at the top of the list if you intend to succeed using the search engines.

Getting to the top is the hardest part. Just make sure you take your time and do your research and build your website search engine friendly. We'll talk about the various other methods of marketing your website later.

Pros and cons of a small business on the internet.

First, lets discuss the difference between a fixed location small business store and an internet small business store. The fixed location small business is a person to person experience in a product type business where the potential customer has a three dimensional product with a touchy, feely experience and a real person to answer their questions. A service oriented business needs to provide the customer the feeling of security in doing business with you. I might suggest a personal telephone conversation is much better than an email.

In an internet small business, the potential customer will only have a two dimensional product experience with awkward person to person communication, not to mention a service type internet small business, so being creative in this area will help to get more conversions, which equals sales.

With this said, the internet business is here to stay. So you will have to establish yourself, and product and/or service, and credibility with great care. Ebay is a model to look at, however, I find it still doesn't work well for most small businesses unless you actually run your business on Ebay.

The Better Business Bureau has an internet business division that you can apply to get an endorsement, BBB logo, to put on your website. Testimonials, time in business and a fixed location of business also helps.

Free Small business resource organizations.

• United States Small Business Administration
• Counselors of America's Small Business (Score)