5 Rs to Starting Online Home Based, Drop Shipping Internet Businesses – Part Two

5 Rs to Starting Online Home Based, Drop Shipping Internet Businesses – Part Two

In Part One, we discussed the importance of finding a niche area and strong keywords without a lot of competition, and researching products and suppliers. The remaining 3 R’s for starting online home based businesses successfully and quickly involve finding individuals to mentor you along the way, using quality hosting services at the best prices, and finally, promoting your new internet business.

Research for Good Mentors & Forums

Anytime you want to do something new, it is extremely beneficial to find people who have done it successfully already. Because they have experienced success in a home based internet business, their experience can help you with starting online business ventures. A great venue for finding experienced online merchants is forums. Forums allow you to ask questions and seek answers from people who have been down the same road you’re traveling. You can find mentors that you can replicate their process and success – helping you to avoid mistakes and shorten the learning curve to becoming successful much faster.

Research for Good Hosting (including shopping carts, store builder and payment processing)

When you want to earn money online by selling products in a drop shipping home based internet business, it’s important to find good hosting. Hosting for this type of website should include a storebuilder, which allows you to easily create your storefront, shopping carts for people to add their selections from your store effortlessly into their virtual “shopping cart” to purchase later, and a payment processor that can accept credit cards, e checks, or PayPal (or any combination of payments).

Having cost effective and quality solutions to run your online store will decide how fast you can recover your capital and start profiting from your efforts. Choosing high-end but very expensive solutions can really take a big bite out of your pocket, and in order to turn a profit quickly, you must maintain a positive cash flow between what you spend each month to operate your home based internet business, and what you expect to sell on a monthly basis. Most high end credit card processing companies have annual fees that are well above the average sales volume of the beginning home based internet business. There are less expensive companies that can provide a quality service for the lower sales volume business owner, including PayPal and Google Checkout.

You can check on various forums to get advice from other work from home business owners on what merchants they use for their hosting. If you don’t have HTML experience, you’re going to want a storebuilder that is easy to use, and that has excellent customer support to assist you in getting your first store up and running.

The hosting solution you decide to use should include a shopping cart that ensures your customer’s privacy and security. Shopping carts are typically programmed in either ASP or PHP languages. It’s important to note which language(s) your hosting solution will support, and make sure that the shopping cart you select is in a compatible language.

Research on Internet Marketing:

This may be the most important “R” to setting up and running a successful home based internet business. If you’ve got the best store online, it won’t make you any money if no one knows it exists! You must work to promote your store so that people know your website is out there, and can make purchases from you. You can learn a lot regarding internet marketing in forums from people who have experience. Try High Rankings for information on marketing your internet store: http://www.highrankings.com.

Not only must you make your website visible to people online, but you must become visible to the RIGHT people. If you have thousands of visitors per day on your site, but they aren’t people who are interested in what you’re selling- you’re not going to be successful! You must learn how to market to the individuals and groups who are going to be interested in your products and services in order to make sales and succeed in your online business venture.

An important tip for internet marketing is to make sure you have quality links pointing back to your store. Quality links directing back to your online store will tell search engines that your site is well regarded amongst the online community, and so will list your site higher in the search engine results, making you more visible. Avoid link farming, where you link solely for the sake of linking and you could end up linking to your competitors or worse have illegal/porn sites linking back to you. Search engines have evolved to detect such “black hat” SEOing and will penalize your site if detected.

Another helpful warning regarding internet marketing your home based internet business- watch out for companies who advertise marketing services. There are countless sites/companies claiming that they have vast experience in their industry. They may help you optimize your site, but do not show effective results or will end up costing you a fortune. Also be aware of click frauds, where you pay a company to help manage your PPC campaign only to have them use software or pay people to click on your ads, resulting in artificial traffic with no sales and high costs due to those artificial clicks.

Starting online business ventures with a drop shipping store may sound difficult and overwhelming, and you may think you’ll never learn everything you need to know to become successful- but if you maintain a positive attitude and follow the 5 R’s, you’ll be up and running successfully in very little time. Set milestones and goals along the way, and celebrate each time you achieve a goal. This will help keep you motivated to reach your ultimate goal of earning money online with your very own home based internet business.

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