Starting an online business in Fitness, health, wellness: Tips and techniques. While your aim should be to get organic traffic, you should also try to diversify the traffic source to your online properties.
Types Of Business Websites/Blogs
Planning to start an online business? You will need a website and a blog.
If you are new to blogging as a business, or just want to get the word out on a certain business, you need to know about the more common types of business blogs, as it can provide you with a good starting point.
Here are the most common types of websites/blogs that most businesses use to promote their business.
Specialty Blogs
This type of business blog is usually written to attract readers with a common interest. It’s also a great way for you to build an online community with people that share your interests and ideas. Weight loss, how to stay healthy, golf are some examples of such blogs.
Industry Blogs
These blogs are used by industries that sell their products to other businesses (more of B2B). It includes varied topics such as trade shows, new lines of product, and materials, among others.
These blogs require more effort to create & maintain because you need to keep it updated with your latest products. It also requires careful research and you need to know a lot about the industry.
Consulting blogs
Usually, consulting blogs are run by people offering their opinions and advice on certain topics. This is a great way to develop an online community in a topic that interests you.
Feature Blogs
These are used usually by the creative (or skill based) types of businesses such as sewing, crafting, t-shirts, organic farming, sports photography as well as many others.
These blogs have various pictures, video clips, showing your creativity, the more creative you are the more visitors you will get.
Tourist Blogs
Of all the business blogs, this is by far the easiest and the most fun to create. You can write on specific tourist areas of your interest (Wellness resorts, yoga retreats, adventure camps), and include pictures, videos, climate and travel information of the area.
Profitable Blog: How to Build One
Though one can go on and on, one could actually sum it up in a few points.
- Make Google Happy (You need visitors to your site without resorting to shortcuts)
- Make the Visitors Happy (You want them to tell others about your site)
How Do You Make Google Happy?
Here are some things to keep in mind when building your web pages:
- Good on-site seo
- Original Content
- Good site layout
- Properly themed site & formatted content
These along with proper link building should start the flow of visitors from organic search engines to your website.
How to Keep the visitors Happy?
This is more about your content:
- Have excellent, valuable content
- Have ON TOPIC (relevant content)
- Have content vs keyword match on your pages
This will not only make your visitors happy, its likely to result in a couple of more good things for your site:
- Visitors will stay longer on your site (makes Google happy)
- Visitors will share your link with friends (you get traffic from other sources, which also makes Google happy)
These practices will help you build a better website and also get traffic from non-Google sources (long-term you should strive for traffic from varied sources).
“USER EXPERIENCE” is really becoming the key now!
This is why it’s important to write compelling content for your site. In case you own multiple sites (it’s not possible to do this all alone), it does make sense to find writers who can write good content for you.
Controlling the quality of content is important, irrespective of how you monetize your site.
How to Start Your Online Business
Find Your Niche
Chances are, you already have a target audience that you are marketing your products to.
Maybe you have a group of business-people or those from the corporate world, or a group of young mothers, or a group of retirees that frequently make purchases.
If not, decide what segment of the market will you cater to?
Pay attention to the individual characteristics of each group, and then plan to divide your advertising into similar segments, or niches.
Create A Unique Selling Point
Why should someone buy from you and not your competitor?
Customers are attracted by offers that point out the things that benefit THEM.
If you want to stand out from the crowd, create a unique selling proposition that stresses the benefits the customers will receive from doing business with you.
Will they get faster service? Go ahead and dramatize it, but keep the customer at the focus…
The most effective things to emphasize are the benefits that your competition cannot or is not willing to give.
Offer Your Way To Greater Profits
Greet every sale with an offer of an item that is related to the purchase. The offered product doesn’t even have to be yours.
The Internet is wonderful for affiliate marketers who can make great profits selling the material of others.
Leverage the Big Players for Your Business Success
When it comes to marketing your online business or blog, you should strive to get traffic from websites such as Google, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram.
From time to time, you may see the rise of some giant and you should definitely try to take advantage of those sites, for example “Pinterest”.
It’s also great to have traffic from various sources, just in case one of them dries up.
Besides, having a presence on the top social media sites also helps in branding your business.
Always strive to add value to your website, get links from diverse websites, and remember that quality is better than quantity.
Popular Money Making Opportunities for Bloggers
Although there are various ways in which you can monetize your website, these three are the more popular types:
- Placing adverts on your site: Every time someone clicks on the advertisement, you get paid.
- Placing affiliate links on your site: every time someone clicks through via your link, and buys something from the affiliate site, you get money (commission).
- Making agreements with local businesses: Every time someone fills in a form (and provide their email address) to request more information about them, you receive money
How to Use Maintain Your Blogs
Although you can use free blogging platforms like WordPress and Blogger, its better to have blog that’s part of your own website.
You can make your blog a pure information/entertainment site that people will read for the enjoyment of it. A blog with a reputation can attract advertisers, just as any newspaper or magazine can.
If your blog gains a reputation for being something that a lot of people read, advertisers may well approach you, or you can approach them offering a not-to-be-missed opportunity to get their product advertising space somewhere people are likely to look. This can be enough for an individual to live on, although this is not going to happen instantly.
Alternatively you can use the blog as a way of promoting a more conventional business. Blogs are easily navigable sites that are equally easy to update. So it is not necessary to know a lot about internet technology to keep one running, and to use it as a way of bringing customers through the door. Then all you need to do is have something they are prepared to pay for and that can be almost literally anything.
Do You Write All the Content?
No doubt, many prefer to write themselves for their profitable sites (where they also have an active interest), in most cases however they do outsource the content writing part.
If you own only one blog, you should be able to do it all by yourself. But it really isn’t a one-man job if you own multiple blogs.
When outsourcing, make sure the content is written by NATIVE English speakers, so that the content is on tune with the slang or common language used in everyday conversations (unless you are targeting local).
And where can you find these writers?
You can find good quality freelancers on sites such as eLance, and also some decent ones on Fiverr.
You obviously need to review some of their writing samples and also read reviews by other customers.
You Need to Create More than a Website to Make Money
When it comes to doing an online business, your aim should be to make an authority type of website.
You should try to create a following of loyal subscribers and customers who are passionate about your stuff and are often coming back for more.
Of course, it requires more efforts but this approach is effective in the long run.
It means you need to consistently update your site with new content for your readers, be active on social media, build a mailing list, and so on. Basically you try to build a brand; doing this can really be fruitful in the long run.
Of all the different ways to make money, building a community of loyal customers has the highest pay-off.
The best part about this model…
The best part is that people do all the advertising for you. It means more business over time with no extra traffic strategies needed.
By creating a movement you can make repeat sales off the same person as they’ll naturally be coming back to get more from you. It also gives you the opportunity to create your own products to further increase your profits, if you wish to do that.
The best part about such sites is that they also don’t get penalized by Google, as your sites will naturally give off ‘good SEO signals’ to Google.
So think long-term and consider creating a community based website in a niche market. It definitely doesn’t happen overnight, you have to stick at it, and over time it will definitely pay back big time!
Follow a Proven Strategy for a Successful Online Business
This is what almost all businesses (who have an online presence) do, and even you would be going this to start with.
- Write content on your chosen topic/niche (hobby or topic in which you have experience)
- Put that content on a website (easier than you think)
- Get visitors to your web pages (from Search Engines, social media, etc)
- You ‘presell’ and ‘monetize’ in any way you want
This is just a basic strategy that every online business owner follows, but the ‘getting visitors’ and ‘selling’ part requires you to do a lot of experimenting.
While earning money through display ads (such as Google adsense) and affiliate marketing are popular, there are more methods to earn a living.
Some require you to deal with customers.
Some require you to stock products, do all the posting and packing yourself (unless you outsource these tasks, which probably may not be an option to you if you have a limited budget and are just starting up).
As you can see, there are several ways to go about it! This definitely is a question that deserves your time and attention, before you go in with all ‘guns blazing’.
You Need a Plan
The road to creating an online home business & generating good income is to have a good strategic plan.
Once you’re comfortable working on a strategy, and you know that it works, do more of it!
Try scaling it up, and cut down on the other task that are not showing the required results.
Can You Really Start an Online Business With No Money?
You can, but you need money at least to spend on domain and hosting.
The minimum investment for your domain name will be around 10 dollars and hosting (around 50 dollars). That’s good enough to get you started.
But money can give you a head-start; it makes it easier to get quickly off the blocks.
For instance:
- You can buy a course/eBook on how things work online, rather than spending your time and figuring it out.
- You can spend money promoting your FB page
- You can outsource the content creation part for your website.
So having money can definitely help you move quickly. But in case you’re short of cash, get started and whenever you start making money, you can reinvest the same in your business.
You may also want to get an email-capture software. Though it may look like an unnecessary expense, it’s important for the long-term growth of your business.
There are lots of methods, techniques & strategies out there to run your online business, and most of them do work (with varying degrees of effectiveness). If there’s one thing that I’ve learnt over the years, when it comes to succeeding online, is there’s no need (thankfully) to reinvent the wheel. So if you want a home business that generates good income, just follow a proven online strategy.
To Conclude
There are millions of people who are online at any given point of time, and there are companies who are constantly trying to promote their products to these people.
As a result, opportunities exist all the time to make money online.
But then you need to be realistic about what to earn, although with more experience you can definitely earn more.
Though, it is easy to setup a blog, you need to promote it so that you get good traffic which you can then monetize. It is important to be passionate about your subject and to generate as much traffic as you can. Blogs that make money are blogs with a specific market and have tons of good content. Also, don’t expect to get rich from your blog. At least not right away. Some popular blogs report thousands of dollars a month in earnings but they do get millions of visitors. If your blog is not seeing any success, its time to take a look at your content again, and make it better. Backlinks are important but you don’t have to overdo it anymore. The good thing about excellent content is that once people see it, they know its good, and they’ll do all the back-linking to it. This is how to start an online business.
Bottom-line is that you need to make investment in terms of money and put in tons of effort to be successful online.
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