Photo by Vince Alongi

There’s only one foolproof way to make sure your online business doesn’t fail, and that is to make sure your product sells like hot chocolate! Here’s 5 steps to help your online business career on your way:

Step 1. Upfront researching:

Before getting started you should do some research to get a feel of what’s popular in today’s online market. You probably don’t want to find yourself down the road with no fuel left getting you nowhere. So by doing a little research before getting started will help you from spending a ridiculous amount of time on a project that has no future.

To get a feel of what’s popular, dig around and see if there’s any pain or urgency. Remember that people go online to search for solutions to their problems. Be there and help them.

You can simply have a look around popular online sites like Amazon Hot Releases, Google’s Top 100 Trends, eBay Pulse to get a feel of what’s considered to be popular and hot.

Choose wisely – and by that I recommend going for products that your passionate about – if not, the risk of failing is more likely to occur. So search around to see what might fit your interests.

Step 2. Building your product line:

Got some awesome ideas lined up already? Great! If not, don’t worry – simply go back, take your time and look around. I’ll be here when you’re ready to take the next step.

Don’t be afraid going into a well established niche. Popular niches are probably the easiest ways to make money online – you just have to remember to bring new interesting information or solutions to your product line.

To be able to sell your products like crazy, you got to remember to create a one-of-a-kind idea. Also bear in mind, you won’t make it a step further if you ain’t got a user friendly product.

So make it simple to understand and make it unique. This is also your first product in line, so learn as you go further.

I know this might seem as a lot of work, and yes that true, but that’s why I’m here to help. So to help ease the workflow you may want to consider outsource some of your design work, or even more, with experts at Elance. Then you can focus your mind of the main important things like your content and the next step…

Step 3. Creating your landing page:

by Hamed Saber

Now as you got your ideas and products in place, you should focus on building a landing page for your product. This is an important piece of the puzzle where you send visitors to your site.

The landing page should be kept simple, and do not include a bunch of image or text links pointing out of the page. Neat headline and text will do just fine. Remember pain and urgency! What would be the outcome when using your product?

Remember to add terms and conditions and privacy policy at the bottom of the page.

I’ll do an article later on building your kickass landing page.

Step 4. Learn marketing:

You ain’t going nowhere without learning some marketing. How can you get your products out to the public if you can’t manage at least some dissent marketing tactics?

Marketing services like Google Adwords, Ad Brite are good places to start. Let me know if theres any interest in learning more about these services and I’ll set up an article on getting started.

Hot Tip: Words that Sell, Revised and Expanded Edition are some excellent information to read.

Hot Tip 2: More Words That Sell

Both books are simply, a bunch of words, that sell well! So use them in your marketing.

Step 5. Make a free offer:

Take some of your best advice and give it away. Make it a free downloadable ebook, video, tele class etc. Don’t expect to tell your customers into buying. They should get a feel of what you’re offering and by giving away some valuable free information they’ll be wanting more.

Remember to gather visitors email address when offering free content.

You’re building an online business that’s here to support your future – so start thinking of it like your real business and get busy building your line of products.