To start an online business nowadays, it doesn’t take a lot of experience and huge budget as it did in the past. It’s becoming more accessible and affordable for everyone to start an online business in no time.
From a fourteen years old kid to a grandma, starting an online business and making money from home, is possible. All you need to do, is to learn how to do it, follow a specific procedures and more importantly, take actions.
From creating your own website, having your own business name, attractive logo, branding color, marketing strategy, email list, and much more. Earning a multi-stream income from the comfort of your home, is becoming easy and no high tech knowledge is needed. Just trust in yourself.. and start today.
If you are asking questions like these. How do I start a business ? What niche do I need to start with ? What if I have no money to start ? What if I’m not smart ? What if I don’t know anything about business ?. It’s totally ok and we all asked the exact same questions when we started our online business. But don’t worry, you get covered and we have answers to all your questions.
In this post, we’re going to explain you the first steps to start an online business, all necessary elements and the basics of creating an online business from home. This is an overview of the list, almost each step has its own link to a complete guide to learn more.
Start An Online Business At What Cost
In the past and still today, starting a physical business cost a lot of money. From the physical store renting, employees paying, different bills like electricity, buying physical products to sell like clothes, shoes, furniture, electronics, and so on.
All these cost thousands of dollars just to start. On top of that, you need to spend a lot of money on Ads to let people know about your physical business. All these expenses, let you sell your products and services to only the population in your physical store area, except if you have an e-Commerce website, which is considered an online business. With these data, you see than creating a physical business is not the best option for someone who don’t have a good budget.
Starting an online business in other hand, is almost free and cost only few dollars. Website hosting and some applications to use in your online business management, it’s all you need to start an online business. The products to sell are all digital products, and not even made by you, they are developed by someone else. Overall, starting an online business is easy and any one can do it. All you need, is to create your own website, find easily digital products to sell, and start making money from home.
Online Business Creation Steps
Creating or starting an online business is easy, and need only few steps to follow. These basics are very important for starting an online business properly. Some of these basics seems to be obvious, but if you don’t start correctly, you may have issues in the future. Creating a Gmail account for example is so easy to do, but it’s very important in your online business, to keep the management easy and sweet.
In the steps below, we’re going to list all needed basics to start an online business in a good way. To avoid having a very long guide, we’re going to explain the steps with short explanation, more information will be discussed in our complete detailed guides, you can find the links in each step.
– Step 1 : Create Your Gmail Account
Creating a Gmail account for your online business, can help a lot on your daily management. If you already have your personal account, it’s a good and best practice to create a new Gmail account to use it only for your online business. If you can name it like your business name it will be great, if the name is already taken, choose a name which make sense for your online business.
Crating a Gmail account vs other email providers like Hotmail and Yahoo, will help you a lot, because Gmail allow you to create and manage multi profiles, which allow you to separate your personal and business accounts, you can also use Google Sheets, Docs and much more options for free.
Check our detailed guide about Gmail account.
– Step 2 : Setup You Google Chrome Profiles
After having your new Gmail account, which you are going to use only for your online business, creating a new Google Chrome profile will help you manage your online business easily.
Google Chrome allows you to create different profiles for each account. If you already have your personal Gmail account, you may have a lot of links in your Bookmarks, your saved passwords, history searches and so on.
Creating another Chrome profile for your online business, will let you create your Bookmarks, passwords, history only for business, which helps a lot in your management.
Important Notice : Even though Google Chrome allows you to save your passwords. For security reason, avoid saving them in your browser, in case your computer get hacked, you protect access to your data.
Check our detailed guide about Google Chrome profile.
– Step 3 : Create Your OneDrive Storage Space
Managing an online business is easy when using the right tools, one of the biggest tools can help your manage all your data in one place is OneDrive. OneDrive is Microsoft cloud application used to store your business and personal data, and access them from any place in the world with internet connection.
Using OneDrive will remove a huge expenses and stress, since you don’t need any more to buy an expensive computers with huge disk space, an external storage equipment like QNAP which are very expensive, keep your data in USB keys and so on. All these physical storage equipment can fail and make you lose all your data.
To avoid all stress of losing your personal and business data, avoid paying high bills maintaining the physical equipment, keep your data secure. The solution is easy getting your OneDrive account and accessing your data securely from any place on the internet.
OneDrive gives you the peace of mind, the flexibility to organize your files and folders, share your data with a team, easily access from any place in the world and much more. This is exactly the goal of having an online business, is to get your freedom and be able to work when travelling.
Check our detailed guide about OneDrive.
– Step 4 : Find A Niche For Your Online Business
Finding a niche, is one of the biggest decisions a startup and new entrepreneurs need to take. If you already have an idea about your online business, this is great, but before to move forward with it, it’s always a good idea to check if it’s profitable or not, since some niches can do not be profitable because there is no demand for that product or service.
It’s sometimes a challenging step to find a profitable niche to use in a new online business, but no worries you get covered. We have a full and complete guide with a lot of profitable niches to choose from, with a full explanation on how to select a good niche for you.
Check our detailed guide on how to find a profitable niche.
Check our detailed guide about 20 profitable niches to choose from.
– Step 5 : Create Your Brand Name
After having selected your profitable niche, it’s time to find a name for that niche to create your brand name. It’s always a good idea to find a name that match your niche, but because most of the names are already taken, you need to be creative to find a good name for your new brand. Again, no worries, we have a complete guide for you to learn how to find the best brand name for your online business.
Check our detailed guide about the best brand name.
– Step 6 : Find Your Best Brand Color
Like the brand name, the brand color is in the same level of importance. Because there is a lot of colors to choose from, you need to know which color to use for your online business. From the Red to Green, from the Yellow to Orange, from the Black to White, each color has its own meaning and customers react differently with each color. It will take a full post to explain all colors, their meaning and when to use them. For this, we have created a complete guide explaining the marketing and the psychology behind the colors.
Check our detailed guide about the best brand color.
– Step 7 : Create Your Attractive Logo
We all react differently with different logos, some are nice, other are very nice, and some are ugly. Having an attractive logo is a challenging even for designer experts, and almost all big companies changed their logo over time, because the first version of their logo was designed at that time, which is not working anymore. So, don’t keep your logo stop you from starting your online business, design as you can and change as you grow.
Check our detailed guide about the attractive logo.
– Step 8 : Register Your Domain Name
The most important step when you start an online business, is to check if the domain name you are looking to use is available. Because there is millions of businesses in the world, finding the best name for your brand which is still available, is a time consuming and challenging.
You need to be creative and open minded in case you need to change your brand name if necessary. Our complete guide about the brand name explain all the strategies to use to find the best name, as well as our guide below about how to register your domain name.
Check our detailed guide about registering a domain name.
– Step 9 : Find The Best Web Hosting Provider
If you are already in this step, I would like to congratulate you for your good decision to start your online business. Now you have your brand name, brand color, an attractive logo, a registered domain name, the next step is to find the best web hosting provider where to host your future website.
There is tones of web hosting providers in the market, and it’s always hard to find the best once. Because a lot of criteria need to be taken in consideration, this is a time consuming and challenging process. But no worries, you get covered with our full guide about finding the best web hosting provider.
Check our detailed guide about web hosting.
– Step 10 : Host And Install Your WordPress
Now you have found the best web hosting provider, all you need to do, is to create your account and start building your WordPress website. WordPress is one of the best website builders, is used by millions of websites all over the world. It’s very easy to use with no coding knowledge whatsoever. Follow the steps explained in our complete guide to get your account easily created and your website hosted with the best website hosting provider.
After creating your account, you get access to all your hosting accounts like cPanel, wp-admin and more. By opening your cPanel, you can manage your domain names, install your WordPress, create your professional emails and much more. From wp-admin, you can start configuring your WordPress website, creating pages, posts, products and more.
Check our detailed guide about website hosting.
– Step 11 : Register Your LLC/Incorporation
Depend on the country where you are, the company name can be an LLC, which stand for Limited Liability Company. The Inc. stand for Incorporation, or any other name used in your area. All these acronyms define a company.
Registering your online business is a good idea to get protected. Because you are going to earn money online, this need to be declared and controlled by your local authorities. The good news is that only few dollars will cost you creating your incorporation depend on your country, and it’s so easy and quick process to register your company.
Because it’s hard to create a complete guide for each country. The procedure differ a lot from place to place. Just contact your local authorities to find out how to register your incorporation, what are the steps, the cost and all needed documents. Once it’s done, go ahead and complete your online business creation with peace in mind, since you are legally protected.
What Next ?
Congratulations on this big progress, you did the heaviest and time consuming part. As a startup, maybe all these steps are completely new for you, please take your time to read all our guides step by step, and when you are done, the next steps will be to keep learning from our website for your online business journey.
As example, the following steps will be to create your WordPress website, create your blog, create your affiliate marketing strategies, add your links to your posts, add Google AdSense, maybe adding some products and making your website as an e-Commerce platform, using Dropshipping, create your email marketing and much more. Start making money online from your website by following our step-by-step guides.
Final Thoughts
Start an online business today and make money from home, is easy with some challenges like any other project. The first steps are always challenging and heavy, but when you start understanding how things work, it will become more and more easy. Just keep going and never give up, and when you see the light at the end of the tunnel, you will thank yourself and be happy about your achievement.
In this overview guide, we explained you the first steps you need to go throw to start your online business. In each step, a complete guide has been created, where you can find all information you need.
We hope that this guide helps you start creating your online business, start making money from home and from anywhere in the world, make money when sleeping, travelling, drinking coffee with family and friends, is possible. Just keep going, don’t give up, and know that we are here to help.
What about you, did you create your online business already, are you in the creation process, did you face any challenges. Please share your experience with us by leaving a comment below.
