How To Start Online Business From Home [2022] – Definitive Guide

Contents

Start Your Online Business From Home And Discover The Entrepreneur In You

With the increasing technology and work from home ethics, in today’s world more and more online businesses are emerging as startups, especially these lifestyle business ideas.

The fast-paced technology has taken us to such an extent that, now you can build your home business right from your home with a wide variety of home business ideas from scratch. At the end, it all comes down to one question, how to start online business from home?

As the today’s technology is helping in rise of home businesses, more and more people have started discovering ways to use remote work opportunity to pursue their dream of entrepreneurship with their headquarters at home. People love to start their lifestyle business, or they turn their online business idea into a startup company.

Some of these home businesses requires no money or little money and can start just by converting any of your room into a warehouse for storing your products or you can go online completely.

 

Start Online Businesses With No Money From Home [2022]

When someone speaks about the online businesses, the only thing which comes into picture is the “Internet”. Now, anyone can start an online business, all you need is
a laptop and an internet connection. It has become so simple. Thanks to technology and the innovation that today there are plenty of online business tools which are available over the internet which makes building online business simple.

That’s it. You don’t need a huge investment. You can start your home business with no money or little money, by making the best use of resources that are available in home and in your surroundings.

The best part of online businesses or home businesses is that you can live in any part of the world, have your schedule, and work as and when its required, depending on how fast you want to grow your business. For this, you must understand, the lifestyle business definition to get started.

To start your online home business all you need to do is make the best use of internet. Buy a domain and web hosting from hostinger or kinsta hosting and setup your blog or website to get started with your business. You can learn from how to start a blog to make money. Neither you need a capital investment, nor you need an inventory cost.

 

How To Start Online Business From Home [2022]

If you are looking for a complete guide which will teach you to successfully starting an online business from home, then you must read this complete definitive guide.

Have you ever dreamed of the day when you realize that you have started your own online business from home and making money? Well, in-fact, this could be 100% true, as in 2020 during the coronavirus pandemic event, there are more than 6 out of 10 home-based businesses have emerged as full-time online businesses.

how to start an online business from home

However, when you check the reality many of us fail to go in the direction of our own online business dreams. Because many of us think that starting an online business is way too easy and end up starting nothing. It’s the simple fact that, you will always be getting stuck and figuring out how to start an online business.

That is the reason why you have reached us for today’s definitive guide that clearly guides you in successfully starting an online business. This definitive guide to start an online business from home, will teach you everything you need to know, starting from how to find a perfect niche, a business idea, and the steps to be followed to start your online business from home.

The best way to grow any online business is to to setup a website for your business and work on best SEO practices as there are plenty of SEO benefits among which one of them is to increase traffic to your website which will help you gain more customers.   

 

15 Steps On How To Start Online Business From Home

Step 1: Find your passion

Step 2: Find the best business idea

Step 3: Find what products or services to sell online

Step 4: Be legally compliant

Step 5: Conduct in-depth online market research

Step 6: Find a perfect profitable niche

Step 7: Define your target customers

Step 8: Outsource products to sell online

Step 9: Choose a perfect and best wholesaler

Step 10: Evaluate product viability

Step 11: Factors to consider before you start selling online

Step 12: Define your brand identity

Step 13: Define the marketing strategies to increase business growth

Step 14: Expand and Launch your own online store

Step 15: Future business trends of 2021 and beyond

 

Step 1. Find Your Passion

The first and foremost thing one must recall when you are starting a home-based online business is to find your passion. A passion is the one that keeps you in the hunt of starting a successful online business from home. Without passion, it is very hard for anyone to start any kind of business.

In-fact, learning how to find your passion may not be as easy as it sounds, however it is well worth the effort. This is going to be your first steppingstone in the approach of starting a successful business.

People always stay in the state of mind referred to as “flow”, which makes them to lose track of the most beautiful world, its time and full of opportunities.

Many people mis-understood that a work is work where you have to get a job, work under someone and do the work what they say and how they say.

This is the mindset that many of us have. The point here is that the work is not something to get a job, in-fact it is that passion which you do having fun, interesting and exciting. Having to work on something which is of your passion leads to the fulfilment of life and have better lifestyle.

If you are one of them, who is looking for how do I find my passion, the best recommendation that we can give you is to find and discover what you love. If you are still confused and not finding your passion, then you can follow below steps to find one. Blogging is considered to be one of the best passion business for many as there are plenty of blogging benefits. You can start from here: best free blogging sites.

How to find your passion:

1.   Identify any trait of yours such as hobby or interest which you already love doing

2.  Try to find out hours you love spend in reading about

3.  Brainstorm yourself or along with like-minded people to find your passion

4.  Read books based on failure stories more than successful stories

5.  Go and ask others about their passion to get an idea, especially to your role models

6.  Remember not to quit your current job without you putting yourself into a position where you can stand on your own legs

7.  Try it first and give your best, before you change your carrier or before you shift to your online business idea

8.  Conduct deep-dive and thorough research, before you conclude on something

9.  Practice and Practice as much as possible to find your passion

10.  Do remember not to quit while trying, keep on trying until you find your passion

The moral of finding your passion is that, to make yourself very clear of which online business you are going to start from home. Your passion not only helps you find the best online business which you can start from home, but also helps to keep you intact and fully concentrated all the time on your home-based online business.

It’s always good to start an online business which is of your passion rather than starting a business which is not of your passion. Starting your passion based home-based online business is going to be a successful business, which is not the same case when you start a business which is of not your passion.

 

Step 2. Find The Best Business Idea

Finding a business idea is the one which must look for next. Almost of all home-based online businesses start their business journey with an idea. This is where the toughest job of yours starts, i.e., where do I even begin to start an online business. 

How to find best business idea:

1. Look in yourself what skills do you have

The best approach to find the best business idea is to ask yourself and find out your own skills, knowledge, and expertise. The potential of converting your skills and expertise into a home-based business idea is going to give you 200% conversion rate in starting a successful online business.

To get best business ideas from yourself you can start asking questions as below:

·     What are my study areas? It could be at your college or it could be in workshops or it could be an online course?

·     What are the topics or subjects that I have trained others such as about systems, about software or any key skills?

·     What are the topics on which you have done the most of research?

·     Which are the skills on which you are an expert?

2. What your friends and family say you are good at

The other way to find the best business idea is to find out that what your parents, friends and family have to say about you. This kind of finding your business idea can also turn out to be a successful business as it helps you find out your best skills and capabilities which you can turn them as your home-based online business.

You can look for traits such as,

·     Find out in which area you were good at something while you have grown up?

·     Does your family or friends ask you for any help on something on which they say you are an expert?

·     Check what your family and friends compliment you about?

3. Check with your office colleagues for which they remember you the most when it comes to skills or work

This is also one of the best ways to find a perfect business idea working from home. Your office colleagues could be great assets who can let you know on which you are good at.

Your colleague at your workplace knows very well on what you are perfect and which you can turn it as your fulltime home-based business.

This means they can help you find the best home-based online business idea by identifying abilities in you.

4. Create skills map of your abilities

The skills map is the one that helps you to find the best online business idea from home. The skills map allows you write down all of your skills on a paper and then the same will be extended in the form of a spider web to find out other key sub-skills which combinedly defines your business idea.

To begin with you can write down your main skill at the centre and then draw a web of sub-skills so that you can find the best possible business idea that perfectly fits for you.

Once you have a drawn-up skill map you can be able to select a series of web that is perfect to start your online business.

 

Step 3. Find Out What Products or Services To Sell Online

The moment when you come to know that what is your passion and what is your best business idea focused on your best skill, it’s time to find what to sell online so that you can make your home-based online business idea into a profitable online business.

This all comes down to the point when you found that what type of business to start and what to sell online, products, services, e-books, digital products and so on.

1. Products

Here the products mean, anything that a user or customer can buy in order to use the same for his comforts. There are plenty of products that you can make out of your business to sell them online. For example, hand crafted goodies, homemade food products, plants for gardening and so on.

2. Services

Services are kind of businesses which can be taken online by offering your expertise to the people who is in need or potential customers on a chargeable basis based on the pricing models which you have defined. For example, online coaching, virtual software solutions, virtual assistant and so on.

3. E-books

E-books are one of the best ways to get started with online business from home. You can either create your own e-books and sell them online or you can setup a small warehouse at your home and buy the books from retailers, store in your warehouse and then sell them online against customer orders.

4. Know-How

If you are an expert in any one of the topics which meets your passion as well as your skill set, then you must focus on starting a know-how home-based online business. This type of business helps you to find real target customers to whom you can sell anything from videos, podcasts, audios, whitepapers, webinars, online courses and so on.

 

Factors That Matter for Anything You Want to Sell Online

1. Market Value and Demand

To sell any product online, you must always ensure that the product or service that you are going to sell is having a market value. There must be a high-level plan for ensuring that the product you are going to sell must keep on selling on all seasons. The more the demand, the more it is going to sell.

2. Sustainable Product and Market Viability

Selling a product online involves lot more strategy than you might think. Thus, for a sustainable sale of a product you must ensure that whether the product is going to be viable in the market or not. The viable market will ensure that your product is going to get profit for a sustainable and longer period of time. This will ensure the success of your product.

3. Your Product’s Advantage Over Market Competition

This is going to be an important factor as it decides how important your product is going to be in the market. What extra benefits your products are going to offer which allows your product to outperform your competitors.

4. Meets all Legal Requirements

No matter what product you are going to sell online, it must meet and comply all relevant legal requirements without fail. Only those products which complies with all legal requirements are the ones which are going to sell in the market.

5. Targeted Audience

The other part which also matters a lot is that the active target audience. Whether there are any potential targeted audience who is searching for your products and services. If you have a large audience that is searching for your products, it is going to offer huge sales for your company.

 

Step 4. Be Legally Complaint

The first and foremost thing you must focus on is the legal compliance whether it is towards your product, or your online business, or your company before you get started with your online business.

When it comes to meeting legal compliance for your home-based business, you must check your country specific legal requirements as it will be varying from country to country. You must ensure, apply, and collect licenses, permits or certificates (if any) as required for your country upon consultation with local government authorities.

You must also ensure that you are renewing such licenses and certificates before the expiry dates. To obtain a business license you must check with local authorities and proceed as suggested by government officials.

Most of the home-based online businesses does not require so many legal requirements to be followed. However, in some cases or for some businesses or when you want to take your business to the next level, you need to follow the below requirements.

To get a business license such as for your home-based online business, you must need:

·     Complete synopsis of your business or complete detailed insights of your business and its activities

·     Organization Structure with who is going to run the business, such as sole proprietorship, limited liability company or corporation.

·     On-site Inspection approvals from government authorities or labour officers depending on the rules and regulations of your region and country

·     Sales Tax License as per your States Government

 

Step 5: Conduct In-depth Online Market Research

The work conduct online market research means, you need to study the market well in advance on the market that you are going to enter, so that you can understand about your customer requirements, supply chain requirements and your competitors. This study will not only help you stand firm in the market but also helps you to easily execute your online business.

This step of doing market research eases your online business implementation and helps you to plan for starting your online business. This market research allows you to identify the product value, product demand and health of the market for the product that you are going to do as part of your online business.

What is market demand?

A market demand refers to the demand for any kind of product and who wants to purchase it, i.e., buyers or customers. The market demand is often determined by how willing consumers are ready to spend money or a certain price on a particular good product or service.

The market demand is very much important for anyone, especially for someone who wants to start their online business. It’s simple, as the market demand increases, so does the price of the product. However, when the demand decreases, the price of the product will go down. 

In other words, the market demand refers to,

·     How much customers are willing to pay for your product or service?

·     What is the need of your product or service in the market?

·     Who wants to purchase your product?

·     What is the age limit of your customers who is looking for your product or service?

·     What does the market share that other competitors are having?

·     Which are the specific countries that are looking for products or service like yours?

·     What are the offers, discounts, and benefits that your competitors are giving on their products or service? and so on.

The market research gives you the best results when you will understand where your customers are spending most of their time online? Are they spending it on facebook? or They are spending it on forums and q&a websites? Or they would love to watch youtube videos or they love to read the articles from blogs?

Knowing what your customers are spending their time will help you build, market, and advertise your online business. The market research is where you will get all the information for starting your online business.

hire_fiverr_freelancer

It is best to do or conduct the market research on your own when an expert in market research. But what if when you have no idea on how to do market research? Well, no problem. You have fiverr, which is largest place where you will find many market researchers for hiring based on your budget. You can hire them and assign the task of market research and get the relevant information that you want.

How to do market research?

Knowing market demand is what it helps you to identify the best future online business and how much it is profitable to enter the business. Hence it becomes necessary to conduct market research before you get started.

Market research involves plenty of studies of your customers, competitors, suppliers, products, and services, along with real data analysis. The following are the best methods to do market research.

1. Find and Hire Market Researcher From Fiverr

When you want to hire a market researcher for a certain period of time, or just for a project, then fiverr is the best place to find a market research specialist for your project. You can hire great talent for your project based on your budget. Depending on your deadlines and communications the hired personnel will submit with his market research.

fiverr_freelancer

Apart from this fiverr has plenty of freelancers whom you can hire and get your job done when you don’t want to hire any employee permanently.

Apart from this you can also look for market research specialist from freelancer.
Freelancer is also one of the best places to find skilled persons for your project, who will get your job done.

2. Conduct Market Surveys

The other way around to do market research is to conduct market surveys. To conduct surveys, the social media networks are considered to be one of the best places to post surveys of any products, services or industries.

Also, you can connect to facebook and ask with your friends and families to complete the survey and help you find the possible information that you are looking for.

Additionally, you can send the survey form to your friends and family through email. Ask them to forward it to their friends and families to collect even more information that you are looking for.

The more the people complete your survey, the more you will understand the scope of your online business. You can make use of websites like survey monkey to create survey forms.

3. Research Your Competitors

You must collect some useful information of your competitors by doing research from their website, local store or with their online business. The best tool or extension that you can use for online market research is the use of SimilarWeb.

SimilarWeb is one of the best tools to analyse your competitor’s useful information such as how much traffic they are getting, what are the products and services that they offer and what type of keywords that they are ranking on SERP’s.

With SimilarWeb you can do competitors research on,

·     Products or Services that they offer

·     Monthly Traffic that they get

·     Ranking that they are on google

·     Clients that they have

·     Pricing that they offer

·     Offers, Discounts and Benefits that they offer

·     Countries that they are getting traffic from

·     What are the traffic sources that they get traffic from?

·     How much the share of social traffic

·     What are their audience interests?

·     Niche of their website and online business

4. Research and Analyze Google SERP’s

The other best and free way to conduct market research is to analyse the SERP’s of google. SERPs mean search engine results pages, which are the pages of google search engine and are shown with exact results for any user’s search engine query.

This SERP research needs to be done for at-least two pages for better results. In-fact, the more you do, the better is your market research.

During your research, you must look for the kind of blogs they have hosted. The blogs could be,

·     Product review blogs

·     Informational blogs

·     E-commerce websites

·     Educational websites

·     Multi-purpose blogs and so on.

The SERP market research allows you to identify the keywords are right and can be targeted or not for your business. To understand all data’s of SERP you must understand what SEO is and how SEO works. This is because, the SEO is the one based on which the google ranks websites and blogs.

5. Conduct Keyword Research

Another way to understand the traffic potential of your competitors or any keyword that you want to rank for and how to generate traffic to website is to perform the keyword research. Through keyword research you can be able to find out the search volume, keyword difficulty and so on for the keyword which you are going to target.

Thanks to the best keyword research tools out there over the internet which you can make use of, such as,

·     Ahrefs

·     SEMrush

·     KWFinder

·     Moz Keyword Explorer

·     Ubersuggest

·     SEMScoop

·     Keyword.io and so on.

Keyword research allows you to find the best keyword for which you can easily rank for and beat your competitors with your content.

 

Step 6: Find a Perfect Profitable Niche

Finding a profitable niche for your business is key to the future growth of your business. In simple terms, a niche is a very focused business area for a broader market.

To give you better clarity, a business that sells shoes online is considered a broader market. Whereas the shoes for women is considered to be a niche idea. And also, the running shoes for women is considered to micro niche idea and the adidas running shoes for women is considered to be double micro niche idea.

When it comes to finding a profitable niche idea, a niche is going to be profitable when you have a narrower micro niche business idea.

Benefits of having a profitable niche:

·     A niche with low competition keywords with broader market is going to result in better growth of your business as its going to stand out among the crowd

·      A niche market helps to specially cater around your niche to your customers and emerge as an expertise in your niche with vast knowledge and skills

·     A niche helps you keep your prices higher for your products and services as there will be no competitors

·     A niche helps to build greater customer base, best in regards loyalty, higher customer retention rate and higher customer satisfaction

·     A niche helps to target smaller market and to generate higher revenue & profits for specific targeted customers

·     A niche helps customers to find you as a more preferred seller than your competitors in market as they serve general market, and you are serving specific market

Once you understood about the benefits of having a profitable niche for your business, now its time to understand how to find a most profitable niche for your business.

How to find a profitable niche:

·     Find your passion and turn it into your profitable niche business

·     Focus on your skills and knowledge to find the perfect niche for your business which is going to be a profitable business

·     Focus on narrowing your niche by finding more sub-topics which could be multiple profitable niches

·     Do proper research about target audiences, their needs, wants and all possible potential gaps that you can see in the marketplace

·     Analyse the niche completely and identify whether the niche is evergreen and is showing great and consistent interest over time

·     Perform google research and study the SERP pages

·     Look and study the google trends deeply to get clear growth of the niche that you are going to target for

·     Look for fastest growing industries or businesses over google

 

Step 7: Define Your Target Customers

The meaning of define your target customers or target audience is all about finding the same individuals who are willing to purchase products and services exactly same as that of your online business. Here you will become a seller who is going to serve your targeted customers and the customers going to be the buyers who are going to serve and are interested in buying your products and services.

To define and identify your target customers, you can make use of SimilarWeb and segment them based on demographics, age, gender and so on. This will help you create a mapping of your target customers which will intern help you better serve your online business and to grow your business.

Do a complete research on,

·     What is the age of the customers that your competitors are getting?

·     Which is the generation that the customers belong too?

·     What is the gender of the customers? More females or more males?

·     What are the countries that the competitors are getting traffic from? What are the traffic sources?

·     What are the social networks that the customers are most engaged with your competitors?

·     What are the most devices used to visit your competitors?

 

Step 8: Outsource Products to Sell Online

The best way to run any online business is to outsource the products that you want to sell online. This is because you don’t have to depend upon the manufacturing cost or neither to run the plant to produce products.

In order to start your online business, you need to put lot of thoughts and planning on what type of product that you are going to sell online? The goal of outsourcing products involves basically 3 types of strategies.

·      To work with dealers, wholesalers, or manufacturers

·      To work with a dropshipper

·      To make the products on your own

1. To work with dealers, wholesalers, or manufacturers

If you are not one of those who don’t want to spend manufacturing the products on your own, then you look for the option of working with dealers, wholesalers or manufactures.

·     The dealers will supply the products that you want to sell online from starting your online business

·     The wholesalers will supply the products in bulk quantities at a cheaper rate, which you can price them as per your cost estimation planning and sell them online

·     The manufacturers will manufacture the products that you would want to sell them online. You can have contract with the manufacture and ask him to supply the parts as per your needs.

There are plenty of benefits that you can avail from working with dealers, wholesalers, and manufacturers to run your online business smoothly. Here is how,

·     You can completely focus and plan thoroughly on your product series, consistently work on improving the sale of your online selling products and leave the rest to the manufacturers or suppliers, wherein you don’t have to take the burden of manufacturing products on your own

·     You can directly focus on outsourcing the products which are already doing well in market and are selling in huge quantities

·     You can completely take control of your brand and the quality of the product by asking manufacture to follow as you have instructed

·     Your experience sharing with the manufactures to produce better quality customer-oriented product for your online business

This seems great idea right. But hold on! You may need to make huge investments at the beginning to get started. But the results will be going to surpass your imaginations. Now the question comes, where do I have to find ideas for my products? And whom should I ask to manufacture?

·     The best way is to partner with your friends or families who are already manufacturing the products that you want to sell in your online business

·      Directly outsource the products from popular websites like Alibaba, Esty, Amazon and so on

·     Partner with small businesses and help them to take their products online and turn it into your online business idea

·     Partner with social media influencers or famous celebrities to sell their merchants in your online business

2. To work with a dropshipper

Dropshipping is one of the best modern lifestyle business ideas of many entrepreneurs today. Dropshipping is one of the business ideas where in you will be partnering with a vendor who will allow you to list their products on your online store for sale.

Here the dropshipper will take care of responsibility of stocking and shipping products completely. And for each of the sales that you make, you will be earning a certain commission as per the agreements.

The dropshipping is one of the best effective option for starting your online business. The best part of dropshipping is that, here the vendor will also get benefited in expanding their product catalogue of their existing store along with you also earn some commission from each sale.

Now we will come down to the ultimate question, how to find a dropshipper? You can follow the below steps to find a dropshipper for your business.

How to find a dropshipper:

·     Head over to google and do a comprehensive research about dropshipping companies online

·     Make sure that you go through the reviews and references of all your dropshipping companies to find out which is best

·     Check out whether they are offering trial samples. If not, you can request them for sample products

·     Among the crowd you pick the best product which you can start immediately with your online business

3. To make the products on your own

The last but not the least in the sell your own products is to sell your DIY products. If you are one of those who love to make DIY products like handcrafted products namely art products, necklaces, homemade products and so on.

Firstly, you need to collect all the raw material details that are required for DIY products, prepare a cost estimation sheet, and then accordingly place the prices of your DIY products.

 

Step 9: Choose a Perfect and Best Wholesaler

Before you get partnered with any wholesaler, you need to find the best wholesaler that fits in scope and theme of your online business. You can follow below strategies to find out the best wholesaler for your online business.

How to find a best wholesaler for your online business:

1. Terms and Conditions

This is one of the most important things you must go through before you choose a wholesaler. In terms and conditions of your wholesaler you must look for the following.

·     What are the key contents or key highlights of the contract that matters the most?

·     Is there an availability of JIT location or warehouse for storage of products?

·     What are the terms of termination of contract?

·     What are the payment terms?

·     Is there any return policy or refund policy?

·     What is the insurance liability?

·     Are the products and supplies require any certifications?

·     What is the minimum order quantity (MOQ)?

2. Production and Shipping

Production and shipping of products that you want to sell them online also plays an important role in finding the right wholesaler. Knowing all about the manufacturing and shipping allows you to take a call easily in choosing a wholesaler who offers cost effective services depending on your budget.

·     What is the location of manufacturing of products that the wholesaler is offering to you?

·     What is the location of shipping of products takes place?

·     What is the cost of production?

·     What is the shipping cost?

·     What is the lead time of supplies to warehouse?

·     What is the lead time for delivery?

·     What is the type of packing?

·     Are there any hidden costs involved?

·     How do you do the labelling and branding on packed boxes?

·     Are there any additional costs involved?

3. Customer Service

·     What kind of support and communications are going to be offered?

·     What is the procedure for placing orders?

·     What is the frequency of updations for key notes such as inventory, product changes, stocks, offers and discounts, so on?

 

Step 10: Evaluate Product Viability

Once you are sure of market research, now it’s time to find and evaluate market viability so that you can make the most of the profits which helps to grow your online business in no time. You must now that there are products which are having greater potential to sell than others.

Finding such products is great for any home-based online business to grow at a faster pace. You can increase sells effectively and efficiently. But this all makes sense only when toy know how to find a product which is viable?

In today’s world the bestselling e-commerce products all have the following characteristics which makes them potential products which sells greater than others.

How to find a minimal viable product for online business:

1. Lower Price

The best part of any e-commerce product that you find online is that they are priced at very low prices than you usually find on physical stores. But does this mean that they are not making any profits? Does this mean that they are doing wrong business?

Well, not at all. Most of the e-commerce websites over the internet works on dropshipping. The strategy is simple. Purchase the products from where you will get them for less price, store at a warehouse and sell them online at a higher price but still at a lower price wherein you are going to make enough profit.

Among many products the product which is more ideally priced is going to sell fast which is best quality and performance too. At the end they will make enough profit at a decent profit margin.

2. Unique, Authentic and Eye-Catching

The more unique the product the product is more viable. The product, which is unique, authentic, and eye-catching is going to sell faster on a periodic basis, which helps to run your online business with ease. The products which are having high demand are going to sell the best.

The more the product is unique, the customers obviously going to come to your online store to purchase as it has high demand and is unique and authentic as it can’t be seen anywhere else.

3. Rare and Difficult to Find

The online businesses which are going to be more successful and profitable are the ones which offers products that are more difficult to find. Such products are of high demand and have target oriented customers which is perfect for running successful online business.

High demand products online business results in high sales, increases customer demand for your products, and there will be hardly any competition for such products. Such products also result in higher conversion rates.

 

Step 11: Factors To Consider Before You Start Selling Online

Starting an online business is not an easy task as there are plenty of factors that involve in starting a business and start selling online which can turn into a successful business. Before we start an online business, we must fulfil and follow few requirements to make it a profitable online business.

There are several factors to consider before selling online to run a successful business:

Factors to consider before you sell online:

1. Market Competition

The first factor which is of most important before you sell online is that the market competition. The more you know about your competitors, the better you are going to sell your products. You must respond to the changes as well as on how your competitors are performing so that you can outperform your competitors.

You can develop strategies that will help you sell your products better than your competitors. The following strategies can help you to gain a competitive advantage:

·     The best part is to lower prices of products that you offer as part of your online business

·     Offer discounts, coupons, rewards, and lucky draws to outperform your competitor

·     Improve your product service than that of your competitors

·     Offer trials or testing for free for a week or 15 days

·     Provide and offer best online services

·     Enhance supplier relationships

2. Market Share

The market share study helps you to understand the percentage of sales within a market for the product that your competitors are selling. The market share can be measured in terms of sales revenue and sales volume.

3. Lead Time for Manufacturing or Dropshipping

The factor of how long it takes to manufacture your products or dropship a product matters a lot. It’s always to have an inventory to meet customer demands and keep your sales going and running. Having inventory helps to supply and ship the product as soon as the customer places an order.

It is advised to constantly keep checking the stocks so that you can top up as soon as the inventory reaches assigned minimum stock values.

4. Customer Base

Knowing what customers are buying in the market is the best way to start an online business. Those customers who buy your products define your customer base. Hence, knowing why they do even buy your products is the best way to assess your customer which will help you grow your online business.

5. Market Strategy

Having the best marketing strategy is going to decide the success of your online business. A well-developed marketing strategy with a proper marketing road map becomes the driving part in your business planning.

6. Branding

Any online business needs to have its own name which in future can turn into a brand name. Having brand name not only increases your customer base but also helps in higher sales and higher profits.

Hence, you must make sure of your company branding by asking yourself a question what does your brand stand for? The brand that has an emotional connection to its potential customers is the one that’s going to stand out in the market. Thus, best way to grow your online business is to start by branding your business.

7. Wholesale Value

This becomes another factor you must consider before you start an online business. Wholesale value is that wherein you will be buying products from wholesalers and then selling them online at a slightly higher price wherein you will register some profit.

Make sure that you have properly worked out by considering all kinds of cost and the profit that you are going to make by selling the products. Wholesalers are also gets benefitted from this as they will be reaching out to many and higher production of products.

8. Shipping or Delivery of Products

When you have started an online business and planned of selling your products, then you must also think of how you are going to ship your products to customers. Shipping products is not an easy job especially when you start getting bulk and continuous orders.

If you are selling digital products online, then delivering these products to customers is very easy as you can deliver them immediately right after the customer completes the payment. You can provide download link with customer, from where the customer
can download all the files of digital products through your online e-commerce
platform.

But this is not the same when it comes to selling physical products, as the products needs to be delivered physically at customer place. For example,

·     For DIY Products you can deliver them on your own with the help of courier services.

·     For Products purchased from wholesaler, you can ship products on your own through your vehicle or you can partner with shipping or delivery suppliers to ship your products.

·     For Dropshipping, the dropshipper will handle all the shipping and order fulfilment on his own.

9. Storage or Inventory Management

The next thing that must come in your mind in factors to be considered before you start selling online is the inventory management or storage.

Starting an online business from home doesn’t going you to need a warehouse or any large space as you can turn any one of your room a temporary inventory storage area. Since you just started, even a small room is more than enough to manage your products storage.

Storing products at your home not only eases your way of doing business online but also helps in keeping your running costs low, offering you to make more profits from each sale. But the moment when your business starts growing you need a warehouse or a huge inventory storage area.

·     For your DIY products you can store your products at your home itself

·     For wholesale products that you brought, you can do an agreement with the wholesaler and ask him to store at his place or you can even take warehouse on rental basis when you can be able to still make profit

·     For dropshipping, the dropshipper will take care of all the inventory storage by his own

10. Customer Relationship

Last but not the least another key factor you must consider before you start selling online is the customer relationship. Building a strong customer relationship with your customers not only keep them coming back for your products but also helps in getting more customers from referrals of existing customers.

Keeping the customer updated with the products delivery timeline throughout shipping, helps you in gaining more trust of your business and services that you offer. For any delays, sending customers with thank you for your patience letters will ensure you of customer beliefs on you.

Once the product is delivered you can even send letters for asking feedback on your products, delivery, and the service that you have offered which will in-turn helps you to improve your business. You must think and plan all ways that you are going to adopt to make your online business a success.

Thus, before you get started with your online business, do a proper planning on how to build customer relationship throughout your online business journey.

 

Step 12: Define Your Brand Identity

The next thing when it comes to starting an online business is to define your brand identity so that you can stand out among the competitors. A brand identity is the one that helps to stand out among the crowd and helps many businesses to grow in the market at a rapid pace as well as attracts more customers in no time.

Branding your business involves many strategies that helps to grow your business with ease. Let us go through few of the branding strategies for your business.

Branding your business:

1. Designing Your Brand

The first step of branding your business must involve designing of your brand. This means you must have strategy a common principle on how your brand is going to look online as well as offline. For this you must have a rule book which tells how your brand look visually in terms of design.

When you are defining your brand identity, focus on below brand design features that offers you unique identity in the market and helps to easily get recognized among the competitors:

1.   Brand Logo: Having a unique brand logo that defines your vision, mission, and the ease of business which you are doing is great way to get recognized in the market.

2.  Brand Color Scheme: Having standard and common color scheme throughout your business gets easy recognition and keeps your customers emotionally connected

3.  Typography or Font: A standardized typography or same font throughout your business documents, website and so on helps you be professional and experienced in the business that you are doing

4.  Visual Graphics Representation: A standardized graphics visualization helps to get more referrals or more potential customers as your brand can be remembered easily

5.  Photography: A brand with thousands of photographs on social networks helps to bring in more followers which can turn into potential targeted customers

In addition to this a website designed with the above same requirements helps you to make branded company that offers great products and services that the customers can’t wait to buy.

2. Choosing Right E-Commerce Platform

Choosing an e-commerce platform is not easy task. The e-commerce platform that you chose helps you to build an online central hub for your online business. Hence, it becomes much necessary to understand your requirements and chose an e-commerce platform that offers the following:

·     Offers to sell unlimited products including both physical products as well as digital products

·     All built-in e-commerce features such as flash sales, daily offers, discounts, promotions along with analytics and catalogue management

·     In-built e-commerce templates, easy drag and drop e-commerce website builder, responsive and mobile friendly

·     All security features that prevent hacks, malwares, backups and so on

·     Secure payment processes

·     SEO friendly features that help to rank your blog posts and pages on SERP easily

·     Offers custom domain name and best hosting

·     Add to cart features and abandoned cart recovery tools

·     App on iOS and android with pre-built integrations and add-ons

3. Define Vision, Mission, Values and Objectives

Any business whether its online business or offline business has no meaning unless and until it has defined its vision, mission, values, and objectives. These helps any business or company to focus on their ease of doing business, ethics, and values. These are very important for any business to stay focused and grow in the market.

These will help you run your business with ease, stand firm in the market without losing any interest.

 

Step 13: Define The Marketing Strategies To Increase Business Growth

There are number of strategies which are involved when it comes to growing your online business. Implementing marketing strategies is very must for the growth of your business. One of the best marketing strategies is the inbound marketing strategy which includes different channels and types of content to attract potential customers.

The best way to use inbound marketing strategy is to keep your customers to engage and delight them always for both new as well as existing customers.

The inbound marketing strategies examples:

·     Blogging or Website

·     SEO

·     Image Marketing

·     Video Marketing

·     Social Media Marketing

·     Email Marketing

·     Content Marketing

·     Paid Advertising

Here are 7 best business growth marketing strategies that you can start today to grow your online business from home:

1. Study the Trends

It’s obvious that one can easily rush into growth marketing, especially when you want to scale your online business. This is for the fact that you might be thinking you are missing on an opportunity if you don’t jump right into it without having a well-defined
marketing message to conduct your online business.

Thus, the best strategy before you start to make the best product launch that outsells your competitors’ products and helps to the growth of your business is to “slow down and spend time as much as possible to study the trends” and behind the scenes before the launch of your product.

Once your product is out there in the market it’s hard to undo or change it. For the worst, if you get it wrong you may have to work even harder to undo what you have already messed up.

Hence, the best advice that anyone can give is to spend a considerable time in the market research, current businesses, and consumer trends, as they give you all the insights that you need. You can make the most of these trends on every season and make it as your continual process every month to get the best results.

The best part of trends is that they will continue to appear which can impact heavily on your growth strategy. The trends are easy to spot as they are available in abundance on social media platforms like instagram, facebook, linkedin and even websites that are already serving your customers.

2. Understand Your Audience

When it comes to business growth marketing strategy for your online business is to focus and understand your audience. To take the best advantage of this business strategy is to collect and create personas of your audiences will help you understand each stages of their
purchase journey.

For example, you can start with what made them to search for your products? what problem are they facing so that they end up on your website looking for solution in the form of products or services?

These questions are very much essential when you combine them with more questions throughout the journey of your customers. The moment you find answers for every question will help you start your online business journey with ease. This also helps in future product developments and services that you will be offering.

3. Use the Channels your Audience Frequents

For any online business it’s easy to think that you can be on every social media channel and will help in the growth of your business. It’s a great idea but is it effective enough to serve your customers well?

The answer is no. Putting yourself on to multiple channels can only do more harm and damage rather than good. To understand this, you can ask yourself a question, can I be able to manage all social channels?

Hence for the growth of your business as part of growth marketing strategy, it is advised to truly understand and know how about your audience in detail that where they spend most of their time on social channels? You can then target only those social channels to better communicate with your customers.

To get better results you can also find the best day and the best time of customer interested social channel and start interacting with them to offer your services for their queries.

The bottom line here is to find few social channels where in you can engage and interact with customers effectively and efficiently. Before you get started make sure that you have all the resources to manage these social channels.

4. Focus on Digital Tactics

The future of growth marketing strategy for your online business is to focus on digital tactics. Since, the digital marketing strategy is on it boom, it’s always best to keep yourself ahead of digital trends so that you can win over the competitive advantage as compared with your competitors.

The digital tactics not only involves having your presence on few of social media profiles but also involves actively using them so that you can create dynamic digital presence with your regular updates and changes, which helps in better engagement with your customers.

To begin with you can start with basic digital tactics and then once you have mastered them you can add more digital tactics such as targeted mobile advertising, lead generation, funneling and apps to cater around your business.

5. Set a Budget

To run and manage your growth marketing campaigns, you may need more digital tactics and more resources which all will comes down to one thing, that is budget.

Running and managing digital tactics needs lots of investment which includes ranging from inclusion of team to handle all the work that goes into planning, executing, and measuring. Having a budget set for growth marketing strategy will help you better manage your spends.

The best ways to lower your labor costs is to operate a comprehensive growth marketing strategy by working with freelancers instead of full-time employees. Assign projects, pay minimal costs, and get your campaign running.

Further moving automating as many tasks as possible will result in further reduction of costs and spends. Once you start getting returns and your tactics start growing you can reinvest to generate more revenue from digital marketing tactics.

6. Switch up to Exceptional Growth Marketing Tactics Quarterly

Changing to new things and implementing new technologies to communicate and engage with your customers is the key to the growth of your business. Once a quarter you can try new growth marketing initiatives. Keeping yourself trying and testing new types of digital tools will help you better engage with your audience.

Here are few of exceptional types of digital tools you can implement:

·     Mobile Video Streaming

·     Live-Video Streaming

·     Chatbots

·     Geofencing

·     Artificial Intelligence

·     Machine Learning and so on

 

Step 14: Expand and Launch Your Own Online Store

Now you have opened your online store for your online business, it’s time to take it forward by expanding your ease of doing online business. To ensure the success of your business and growth you need to implement few of the important steps.

1. Steps to be taken after your First Sale

The moment you complete your first sale on your online store of your online business, you must measure the growth of your business by working on below key important factors.

(a) Order Fulfilment:

·     Read and understand the order

·     Offer coupons, discounts, or benefits on order

·     Process the order

·     Ship the order (if you are doing the shipment on your own or do it through logistic partners or wholesalers)

·     Manage and analyze orders cancelled

·     If required, manage and process returns

(b) Follow-up:

·     Send customers a token of letter of thank you for purchasing

·     Update the status of order or consignment for every stage

·     Send out the order confirmation to customer once delivered

·     Ask for feedback on delivery and satisfaction of product purchased

·     Ask for review and testimonials for doing business with you or on product that they have purchased

(c) Enhance and Build Customer Trust & Loyalty:

·     Send emails and invite customers by asking them to contact you on social media platforms by following you

·     Ask customers to join your premium membership clubs for special care, discounts, and coupons

·     Offer lucky draws, rewards, or reward points for next purchases

·     Offer reward points for referring you to new customers

·     Send emails or greeting cards on customers special occasions such as birthdays, anniversaries and so on

(d) Generate More Sales

·     Send emails of updates about your product or new product of sales, offers, discounts, and promotions

·     Send product demos to customers to try and experience to increase customers buying ratio

·     Link to other products that benefits customers by offering additional offers and benefits

2. Measure Success

The moment when you think of measuring success of your online business, you must consider the key performance indicators (KPI’s) as a measure of success. There are plenty of KPI’s that you can set for your online business. But make sure that they are measurable.

Here are few of the KPI’s to measure the success of your online business:

(a) Data of your E-commerce Online Store

The best way to measure your online business success is to monitor your online store data’s. Here are few of the important KPI’s that you can measure:

·     Total Number of Sales (Target vs Actual)

·     Conversion Rate (Target vs Actual)

·     Average Order Value (AOV)

·     Shopping Cart Abandonment Rate

·     Products Affinity (which of the products that are more often purchased together)

(b) Your Online Store’s Google Analytics Acquisition and Audience Behavior

Another best way of measuring your success of your online business is to analyse the complete data offered by google analytics. The google analytics offers many useful data which can help you to grow your online business with ease. Among those data’s, the acquisition and audience behaviour are the most preferred KPI’s.

·     What is the value of Organic Traffic?

·     What is the value of Direct Traffic?

·     What is the value of Social Media Traffic?

·     What is the value of Referral Traffic?

·     What is the Bounce Rate?

·     What is the audience view duration?

·     What is the page views per session?

·     What is the percentage of purchases executed by visitors?

·     What is the call-to-action percentage?

·     What is the percentage of sign up? and so on

(c) Business Performance

Apart from this few of the key business performance areas to focus on are the profitability, growth, and overall progress of your online business. Here are few of the KPI’s that you can consider as part of your business performance in terms of goals:

·     Total Cost of Goods Sold

·     Gross Profit

·     Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)

·     Customer Lifetime Value (LTV)

·     Average Margin and so on

 

Step 15: Future Business Trends of 2022 and Beyond

There are plenty of future business trends which you to watch for, especially if you are thinking of lifestyle businesses. These can emerge as biggest business ideas of future. Here are few of them which we have listed down.

Future business trends of 2022 and beyond:

1.   Work from home (WFH)

2.  Data as an Asset (Data Science, AI, and Machine Learning)

3.  Business Model Innovation

4.  Automation

5.  Decentralized Finance

6.  Electric Vehicle Business

7.  Electric Batteries Business

8.  Virtual Interfaces

9.  Global to Local Businesses

10.   Purposeful and Meaningful Businesses

11.     Sustainability

12.   Social Engagement

To start your online business from home you can make use of the following ecommerce platforms.

Most popular e-commerce platforms:

1.   Shopify

2.  Wix

3.  Squarespace

4.  WooCommerce

5.  BigCommerce

6.  Magento

Home Business Ideas For Your Online Business

When someone thinks of doing business, the first thing that they come up with a business idea is that real estate business, commuting to an office or managing employees. The reason of doing business is simple to be independent and be your own boss.

Well, in today’s world the work from home culture has driven in rise of home businesses as more and more people are looking for running their own online business to pursue their dream of entrepreneurship.

You can start your home business as online business just by converting any of your room to an office and make the best use of technology and services to get started with your business.

There are plenty of ways that you can follow on how to start home-based business, the following are some of the strategies that you could adopt to start your home business from scratch:

7 Home-Based Business Ideas For Your Online Business:

1.   Buy products in bulk and sell them online

2.  Sell DIY homemade products

3.  Start dropshipping business

4.  Sell and offer your services, knowledge, and expertise

5.  Start print-on-demand store

6.  Grow your audience base so that you can monetize by various ways

7.  Buy an existing e-commerce business

 

1. Buy products in bulk and sell them online

This is one of the best strategies that you can adopt wherein you can buy products in bulk quantities and sell them online or offline to make enough profit.

The best way to do this is to import as much as products from other countries where you can get for cheaper price, which are unique and not found easily in the market. The best part of this home-based business idea is that you can use any of your room in home for storing and get started with selling. Go online to reach larger audience for high sales.

2. Sell DIY homemade products

If you are one of them who loves to make DIY products such as handcrafted products then this is the home-based online business idea that can bring you profits.

The DIY products are easy to make, fun and a part of your hobby. DIY products are cost-effective and results is higher profits for each sale. The best ways to sell these DIY products is to get started with Esty, a marketplace best for home-based online business.

On Esty or Shopify you can sell anything from handcrafted jewelry to cosmetics, art, food, apparel and so on. This type of home business is easy high profit business and offers enough profits. The moment you want to grow your business, just start scaling up by onboarding new employees, production and sales.

3. Start dropshipping business

Another home-based business which is of highest popularity in today’s world is the dropshipping which is preferred by many as a lifestyle business or as entrepreneurship. This is the best online business which doesn’t require any warehouse to store your products as everything happens online.

To start a dropshipping model, you can choose shopify which is the most preferred choice of many for dropshipping business. This all depends upon the supplier whom you are going to choose, local or overseas doesn’t matter, you need to ensure that he is trustworthy and always delivers products as per agreements.

4. Sell and offer your services, knowledge, and expertise

If you don’t to sell products, then you can sell your services, knowledge and expertise to those who are in need just by sitting from home. You can find plenty of service-based home business ideas such as to start with freelancing wherein you will be offering service of the skills that you have as requested by the clients.

To make you understand and give you example, you can just offer animated presentations with in-depth content for which on freelancing the clients can pay you up to $150 per project.

The service-based home businesses ideas:

·     Freelancing

·     Online coaching services or tutoring

·     Personal training

·     Home cleaning services

·     Virtual assistance

·     Marketing

·     Designing services and so on

5. Start print-on-demand store

Another creative home-based business idea is to start a print-on-demand business which can be extended to various business categories. The print-on-demand business doesn’t require any inventory nor a warehouse or even need to ship them.

The best part of this print-on-demand business is that you can bring in your creativity, design ideas and customization strategies to label the products or printing the products.

The print-on-demand business is wide open and can be extended to sell printed products ranging from t-shirts, hats, books, backpacks, blankets, pillows, wall clocks, mugs, cloths, shoes, hoodies, phone cases and so on, the list is never ending. The best part is that you can setup an online store on shopify or esty or your own website and sell products as per customer print-on-demand.

6. Grow your audience base so that you can monetize by various ways

This all comes down to the fact when you can monetize by various ways to make money online from home when you are a content creator and have large audience to monetize for. You can do this by starting your own blog, a YouTube channel, an Instagram account or a podcast and so on.

The best part to make money here is by affiliate marketing wherein you will be selling someone else’s products and earn a commission. To add to this, you can do sponsored posts for selected brands of your choice.

The potential to monetize your audience is completely depends upon the type of niche you are creating content. The best way to start growing your own audience is to work on yourself by learning the following materials:

·     How to start a blog to make money

·     How to make money on YouTube

·     How to make money on Instagram

·     How to promote your blog 

7. Buy an existing e-commerce business

If you are one of those who have plenty of money at your end and love investing on businesses then you can simply invest on an e-commerce business and maintain it by just sitting from home.

The best place to look for buying or selling on an e-commerce business or e-commerce store is exchange which is the best marketplace powered by shopify. Depending on your budget or investment value and area of interest you can choose to buy an e-commerce business.

 

Conclusion

For many there is always one question which will come in mind, Can I start my online selling business from home? I don’t have warehouse nor a shop. Can I still do an e-commerce business without warehouse or shop from home? If so, how do I start? Thus, we have covered all the strategies and ideas on how to start online business from home.

Starting any online business from home is not an easy task and not a quick process as it takes time to setup and to give you returns in terms of profits. This is wherein we
have provided you with an in-depth step-by-step guide on how to start your business from home on your own step-by-step.

Once you go through all the home-based ideas listed above you will be very clear on launching your successful home-based online business, no matter what you sell digital products or physical products or services and so on.

The best part of this guide about starting your business from home will help you lead the path of your dream of becoming a successful entrepreneur. Not only you will setup a successful business, but also make profits from it.

This Page uses Affiliate Links. When you Click an Affiliate Link, we get a small compensation at no cost to you. Our Affiliate Disclosure for more info.

13 thoughts on “How To Start Online Business From Home [2022] – Definitive Guide”

Leave a comment