The idea.

The best way to find the idea for a good online business is detecting one of the following opportunities :

• Solving a problem you’ve experienced
• A deficiency in a specific industry
• A new technology that can be used in another way in another market
• Go ahead with a dream you’ve always had

Think and detect who your potential customers are. If your answer is that everyone can be your customer that means you still don’t know. You need to find a niche market and the more specific the better. For a good online positioning you must become a reference and as a platform if it’s less specific, the harder you will become the leader.

Research.

It’s a very important step to determine the capabilities of your ecommerce . Do not skip it, and make sure you know these answers:
What is the size of my market / industry?

• What competitors online?
• What are the dynamics of the industry: its growth, its online penetration, experience from mobile devices, …
• What is the price? How much it was and how much it will be ?

There are two ways to find this information :

1. Paying a company
2. Use the information that another company has already paid: Find out public companies (which are in the stock market) for your industry, as a competitor, a manufacturer of a product, a service provider. Find the investor’ section on its website and download its PDFs about sales, profits, and what interests us: its market research.

Decide.

Everything points to have chance of success, but double check these questions before definitely go for it :

• Am I ready to fail?
• Do I want to do this just myself or as co -founder?
• Do I have capital for the first user acquisition?
• Is the market large (moves a lot of money), fragmented (very specific) and grows online?

Brand.

Define your brand perfectly before you start to invest in it. It is something that doesn’t show immediate results but your reputation will matter over time:

• Define how your tone will be when you talk to your customers on your website, customer service, blog.
• Define the colors which will accompany you throughout your website, on your business cards and your presentations.
• Define the principles of the company: Why does it exist? Which are its values ​​and want they represent.
• Defined per units of time what you consider a sales success.

Your primary user will bring the secondary.

If you have a website, online store or any marketplace site, you will have a clear differentiation of two users: One, the product providers and other, the consumers.
Normally there is one of them key to acquire, and the other come by himself . Detect the former and focus on him, writes the blog content for him , invest in advertising for him and take care of him very well once you have him.

Launch and invests strong.

It will not be free, but you can decide between investing:

• Time
• Money

Everything will happen very quickly if you accelerate it properly. Here you should invest 80% of your budget, because it there won’t be a clearer thing to determine the potential of your business than this moment.

You can wait one or two years until your web or ecommerce site increases organically the position in google and after optimizing the site carefully for search engines, or you can pay an online marketing expert or invest heavily in online advertising. There are different channels and you should think about where your customers are :

• SEM, paid ads on search engines.
• SEO: Rank for free in Google and Bing results after constantly optimize your website.
• Affiliates: External vendors put your products on their website, earning a commission per sale.
• Email : Sending mass emails to all your subscribers to newsletters, promoting new products.
• Retargeting : Once the user has visited your site, they will see an paid banner in the next sites he visits. Remarketing requires to install cookies to users, but Google does it automatically.
• Social Networking: It depends on your business, but sometimes to have Facebook pages can be useless, but on the other hand, maybe your users do not search in google for the product, or the concept doesn’t exist or is unknows , so then Facebook can be an ideal tool to advertise the brand.
• Bloggers and PR : get PR’s and bloggersto write and talk about your product. You can find more information in my post on “how to work with bloggers¨

You will also need to invest in staff with different skills: Developers, online advertising agencies, etc.

Calculate results : Sales and users.

Nothing will make sense after all if you can not draw conclusions. Make sure once you’ve got traffic and new users / customers you identify your KPIs:

• What has it cost on average each new user?
• What is the average cost that users make when buying on the web?
• How much is net profit that each new customer does?
• Which has the main source of traffic been and what has not worked?
• How long is the fidelity of acquired customers?

All answers should be positive and with specific numbers to perfectly model your business and knowing all the above you should be able to define it using formulae, helping to predict how it will go in the coming months.

Decide if you need to change the marketing strategy, pricing or product margins.

Free tools to measure results :

– Google Analytics:

You can determine a lot of information about the visitors to your website as well as their behavior, the way the path they follow across the pages, and if the convert or buy.

– A / B testing from Google:

Useful to display different landing pages to users served at 50% and see which helps them to become customers.

– SEO:

Measure and improve your ranking through the Google webmaster tools. Check in which position your page appears for specific search queries, the page rank and the authority of your domain.