One of the most common questions that I’ve been asked since I’ve started this blog is ‘How do I start an online business?’ and unfortunately there’s no one instant answer, no one magic bullet that I can say to help answer that question.

You see, starting an online business takes a bit of thought and planning, a lot of work and a little bit of luck.

I can help you with the first 2, but luck you’ll have to work out luck for yourself.

What Kind Of Business Are You Starting?

Yes, I know, you said ‘online business’, but an online business is still in essence a normal business and there are a large variety of businesses out there.

· Are you starting a new business selling a physical product or service online?

· Do you already own an existing business and want to bring it online?

· Or maybe you want to start a website that only brings in income online, with no physical product or service, just electronic products or advertising?

Each type of business has its own ways of making money, but when it comes to starting or bringing the business online, they all start the same every time.

Research, research, research.

Depending on which country you live in, the competition you will face from other websites in your niche will vary greatly. If you’re reading this in America, starting a website on making money online, food, cars, insurance, finance or sports is going to bring you face to face with some big players.

If you’re reading this from less internet established countries, such as Malaysia (which you probably are) then there’s still a lot of room to maneuver and get your website into the eyes of the public.

One of the benefits about living in Malaysia is that we have a relatively under-developed internet space, where local businesses still advertise the traditional way (such as brochures, newspaper adverts etc.) and those that start up websites do so with no real purpose, just as an after thought.

Regardless of the country you live in, research is important, as it helps you plan out your strategy, what type of content to publish on your website and even if you should bother starting up in the first place.

Do A Google Search

The first thing you should do is a Google Search on the category that you’ll be starting your business in. For example, if you’re starting a company selling fishing rods, you would google ‘buy fishing rods’ or ‘buy fishing rods online’ or even ‘fishing rod shops [insert country here]’.

Next thing is to see the types of results that you get from the above search. Pay close attention to the main results (on the left hand side) as well as the advertised results (on the right hand side).

Open up the first 5 results from the main results and study them each carefully – you’re looking for the quality of the content, how many pages of content there is, how nicely the website is designed and if possible how often and when was the last update to the content of the site (in the case of a blog).

As an Internet marketer, there are certain tools that I use to help me shorten this process and get a quick picture on how big my competitors are.

SEOQuake

SEOQuake is a free add-on that I have installed on Mozilla Firefox that gives me a range of web statistics on the website that I am currently viewing all in one handy toolbar at the top of my browser window.

SEOQuake allows you to get an instant picture of how big a website is at once glance, using a range of key web traffic/ search engine parameters.

Get yourself the toolbar at http://seoquake.com/ and install it as a Firefox plugin, select ‘SEO Toolbar’ when it asks you which type to install, I find it better than the ‘SEObar’.

NB: Install the SEOQuake toolbar before continuing on this post. It will make it much easier to understand what I am talking about.

Taking the above example, let’s have a look at the results I get in Google if I type in ‘buy fishing rods’:

The first thing you want to take notice of is how many advertisers there are for this market you are targeting. In the case of fishing rods, there are quite a lot, with the 3 slots above the search results completely taken and also about 8 adverts down the right hand side.

You’ll next want to look at how many web pages there are for this search term. You can find that at the top right side, where it says ‘Results 1 – 10 of about …’. For fishing rods, this is also quite high.

Last thing you’ll want to look at are the statistics that SEOQuake should have populated for your search terms.

Do you see all the numbers under the search results? These are the ones that I typically look at and what they represent:

• (Google Symbol) PR: This represents the Google Page Rank and is a number between 1 and 10 on how ‘authoratative’ Google has calculated this web page to be. The higher the number the higher a webpage typically appears in Google’s results
  • If most of the links are PR:3 and below, you have a good shot of penetrating the top 10 of Google’s search results for this keyword
• (Alexa Symbol – looks like a big letter a) Rank: This number ranks your website on how it has calculated you are in the entire world. It takes your moving average of visitors over a few months and gives you a number. The lower the rank, the more traffic a website typically gets.
• I look for Alexa ranks above 100,000 for the top 3 results. That means you would be competing with slightly smaller businesses than if you were going after websites with Alexa rank less than 100,000 as some of these websites can get thousands of visitors a day.

Google’s Keyword Suggestion Tool

The second tool I would use to test whether a target market is feasible or not is to use the Google Keyword tool. This tool is usually used by Google’s Adword users, to find out how many competitors a given keyword has.

Go to: https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

And type in your search term. For our example, again we’ll type in ‘buy fishing rods’ and see what it gets. You might want to type in a more general term such as ‘fishing rods’ to get more suggestions.



In our case, it looks like there aren’t that many local searches for buy fishing rods, but lots of searches for the more generic term ‘fishing rods’. Also, it looks like there is lots of competition for almost every search, except ‘fishing fly rods’.

If you scroll down the list, you’ll probably be able to find keywords with a lot less competition as well. It would be a good idea to write down these keywords for future use.

So What Does All This Information Mean?

In our case study for fishing rods, it looks like there are lots of competitors and advertisers who you would be going up against if you entered this market. Also, the Google PR for some of the links on the front page are as high as 4 and their Alexa ranks are typically lower than 100,000.

You would then have 2 options

1. Don’t enter the fishing rods market at all and try some other market, as you will be facing some very stiff competition

2. Be more specific – instead of just fishing rods, you could target people who are looking for the less competitive keywords, such as ‘fishing fly rods’, ‘fly fishing rod reel’ etc.

NB: I personally would not enter this market. Too much work and headache for too little gain.

But for your market, there may be a lot more room to maneuver, more chance at getting a piece of the pie as they say it.

Just remember, do your research first and you’ll probably save yourself a big headache later on.

And that’s how your start an online business. The next steps come in a later series of posts…

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Why Start An Online Business In Malaysia? Or Anywhere?

How To Start A Business Forum.

How To Start A Small Business (In Malaysia)

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