You don't need to be an elite marketer or programmer to start an online business

You don't need to be an elite marketer or programmer to start an online business

A lot of people think you need to know how to do everything website-related to start an online business, and that's not true at all.  When I started in this industry I had no clue how to purchase a domain and set it on my hosting, I just knew I wanted to work online and make some money, so I started reading everything I could.

Fast forward 16 years, and I'm able to work from home and have a team of freelancers I outsource to if I need something done.  I don't even handle my SEO for clients anymore, I have my team do all that work, and then I pay them when the job is done.  In the beginning, I would do a hefty amount of work, outsource when I was overwhelmed, and get the job done with most of the profit going in my pocket.  After a few years of that, I learned that if I were to just manage a team and focus on bringing in sales, I could make much more money, be less stressed, and never burn out from working 16+ hour shifts lol.

Below are a few things that I had to focus on when starting my own online business from scratch with no knowledge of what I was doing.

Learn to love freelancer services
It took me a little while to find the bigger freelancing platforms and be willing to outsource some of the work, but I'm glad I did because I've found some amazing people that do an incredible job.  I've found freelancers from all over the world that speak perfect English or broken English, but they all do an amazing job, and I continue to send them work. 

You can't do everything yourself, even if you have the skills.  I'm saying this because you will be overworked and get burnt out quicker than you could ever imagine.  I was working 16+ hour days at least five days a week, and I couldn't handle it anymore.  I started bringing on freelancers to help me with projects and quickly noticed my 16 hour days went to 8 hours, then to 4 hours, then to 2 hours, and eventually my only job was to bring in more clients so my team could handle everything lol

Learn how to do market research
One of the biggest things that will help you is if you know how to do market research.  This will help you if you have SEO clients, it will help if you have design clients, programming clients, and it will even help if you want to launch your website and aren't sure about the industry you're targeting.

If you can figure out a flaw in a system, a problem that you can fix, or something that doesn't flow well, then you have something on your hands that could be a gold mine.  If you don't know how to do basic market research, you'll never know what to do next, and that's why I'm saying this is something you should focus on right away.

You can use tools like Ahrefs and SEMrush to figure out how a few of the top websites in an industry are performing and how well their SEO is.  If you think you can jump into that industry, take over, and flip your website for a profit, then I'd say go for it


Understand your brand will carry weight over time
When I started, I thought that my website would be the best thing there is in my industry, and no one will ever be able to compete with me.  What I didn't factor in was that I didn't have a brand name, and no one wanted to work with me or purchase one of my services, and now I had to focus on building my brand a bit before I had any trust factor.

You won't get rich right away unless you have an investor backing you, but that doesn't happen every day, so focus on building your brand through citations and guest blogging.  The more content you get into the internet, positive content, the more likely someone will find it when they try to search for you online.  Not many people will purchase their first visit, because they will look for more content online about you, and if you've done everything right, they will find the guest posts you've written lol.


Final thoughts,
It doesn't take much starting with an online business, but it does take a lot of work if you want to become successful with it.  You'll need to trust freelancers after working with them a few times; you'll need to understand how to do proper market research so you know if you're getting into a bad industry or not, and you'll need to understand how branding works and that it isn't an overnight type of thing.  Do those three things, and you'll be ready for anything online

Thanks for reading

- Tommy
https://www.seoclerks.com/user/TommyCarey