Driving With Oscar – Episode 2 – Tips on Starting a Business Online

Another episode of Driving with Oscar. This is slightly out of order because I already published episode 3 when I talked about building your list.

But in any case, I am your host, Oscar Gonzalez and this time I want to talk to you about starting a business online.

Here are the notes from the video. If you find corrections, please leave a comment.

Requirements to start a business online:

• Audience
• Product
• Marketing

Keyword Research

Use Google for keyword research and take a look at the bottom of your results. See video for full explanation. This is a good start before you start marketing your product or service.

What about local? Can you mix online and offline?

Do competitive research and find out if and who is in your same space. What are they doing differently, why do they stand out? What are they missing and can you fill that with your own services to stand out and take the lead?

You need a website

Even if they search for you on Yelp, Bing, Google, anywhere else you still need a website of your own.

You can get your website for free through one of my websites, or just get in touch with me and I can build your website for free. Try this http://realfreewebsite.com (done for you), or http://howtoblogtutorials.com (do it yourself).

If you just want some recommendations, try these guys. They will set up your WordPress website for you too.

What else do you need?

I added the following to these notes. I'm not sure I cover it in the video but I got a little sidetracked while driving so I had to make it up somehow.

Fulfillment & Returns

You need to make sure you can sustain the product you promised and you have all  your channels for delivery in place. If you are shipping a physical product then make sure you have found the best ways to ship your product. Did you negotiate a better rate? Can you outsource the entire thing to a warehouse and shipping service?

Also, if you need to handle a refund or a return, have you prepared yourself and your staff for that and do you know how to handle these?

I hate having to fulfill, I rather have someone else take care of that which is why I love affiliate marketing. I just promote the product and the original vendor of the product fulfills the orders and maintains

Lead management

When someone is interested in your product but doesn't buy right away, they are a special type of lead. When they ask about something specific then they are a different type of lead. And then if they buy something they are no longer a lead but a customer.

You need to find a way to manage these groups of people and the way I do it is with Aweber. You can get it for free here for 30 days.

Customer Management

Once your leads and prospects become customers then you need to take care of them in a very different way. I recommend  you start using custom fields in your Aweber account.

With custom fields, you can enter things about the customer into their profile and then use this to send special announcements to a small segment of people in your list. This should increase conversions and increase loyalty.