Hi everyone,

I just wanted to give you a short update upon the start of my online business. In the first days, it’s essential to begin building the foundation of the online business. Every step I made was in focus of reaching my audience, the people I want to work with, YOU. So let me show you, what I did. This post is meant to be a report about my first decisions, dos and don’ts – for deeper explaination of each step I’ll publish further posts in the next week, so be sure to stay tuned and subscribed to the newsletter.

First step: The topic for my online business

The first move I made, was to decide about the topic, I wanted my online business to align with. As you see, I want to help other people to overcome their fears of startingtheir own online business, so that’s what I wanted my online business to do. It’s important to know, what you want to do, because you’ll want to keep that in mind everyday.

The topic should match your passion, so it’s fun for you to act online and generate value for your customers. After my topic was clear, I had to come up with a name for my business. Out of my experience for search engine optimization (SEO) I knew, that the business name is most likely to be the domain of my online business. And because my topic is helping you, to start earning money online, I knew that my business name should be related to this for SEO aspects. I came up with „My GREAT online business“.

It’s exactly what I want to build and more importantly, what I want you to build. So I bought the domain (my domain registrar is Namecheap) and headed on to creating my website, so I can reach my finally customers.

Second step: Setting up a website

The first step I took was setting up the website for my online business. My background and experiences as webdesigner help me a lot, so I could do this really quickly. Of course, I’ll provide you with a step-by-step tutorial on how to choose a webhost, set up WordPress and publish your first content. The web presence obviously is a really key fact for any online business, because that’s the way you’ll interact with your visitors, fans and customers. It’s very important, that you have an idea, what your audience is and how to reach them in their preferred way. Make yourself clear, who you want to work with. That will affect the way you interact with them. I decided, that I want to work with people, who are interested in earning money online and creating more freedom in their everyday life. I choose the design of my website to be a magazine like blog and to look modern. I hope, that my visitors like this design (if not, leave me a comment or contact me!). In my tutorial about setting up the website I’ll explain more in depth how to choose a WordPress design.

Third step: Set the foundation for your list

As stated in Starting your online business with a newsletter and Tools for your mailing list the list is one of the pillars for each online business. You’ll create a relationship to the members of your list, provide them with extra content and (most important) make them trust you. They’ll accept you as an expert in your topic, because of your great and helpful content. You’ll help them with your posts, links to other websites or blogs and any other website content. Online people who trust you will buy your products or trust in your reviews for affiliate products.

My mailing list is based on this three components:

• Sign up form for a newsletter in my sidebar
• Creating a facebook page to interact with fans
• Publish my content on Twitter

Right now the stats for this pillars are:

• Newsletter subscriptions: 0
• Facebook fans: 6
• Twitter followers: 49

As you can see, I’ve got no mailing list subscriptions. That’s totally ok with me, because my signup-form is not very prominent on my site and only active for 2 days. I’m confident, that one of you will subscribe in the next days to benefit from the extra information that you’ll get with my newsletter. My Facebook fans are mostly my private friends and contacts, which is also no problem for this early state. I’ve created the Facebook fanpage 3 days ago and of course the only persons I can reach are friends of my private profile. But that will change soon and than I’ll reach people I don’t know myself. By far the best social network for my is Twitter, which is going incredibly great. Through Twitter I reach the huge number of 49 followers, which I didn’t expect at all. That shows to me, that I’m on the right way and I have definitely to focus something more on Twitter.

Be aware of the different possibilites to grow your list and choose the best for you.

Fourth step: Enridge your plan

You started making your plan for your business by choosing topic, audience, name, web presence and by starting to build your list. Now it’s time to get more focussed on the next steps and to create original and valuable content for your customers. For me that means the following:

• Publishing this report
• Plan how to get more Twitter followers
• Plan my eBook
• Earn money with affiliate products

Because you know, who your audience is, you’ll get an idea of what they want. Make a plan to give them, what they want and they’ll pay you for it. For me a great help on creating this plan was the content of the Internet Business Mastery Academy*. But of course I’ll show you next week, what my plan is and reveal every detail in creating the plan.

Stay tuned and do your first move on starting your online business!

* = Affiliate links