Starting A Successful Online Business With Limited Budget

Everybody needs to have something extra to do in order to earn a little more than his or her 9 to 5 job entails. Most people choose the Internet as a tool since this provides a way out without the hassle of finding a office or shop space and it cost relatively less than setting up a real life business.

How Much Does It Cost To Set UP An E-Business?

Well, let us look first at what it entails. The first thing you would need with e-commerce is a website which you may design yourself or have a professional do it for you. This would be your virtual shop – hence, it needs to be presentable, inviting, and easy to navigate. Simplicity would work fine, just as long as the website is attractive enough to get the surfer interested in looking around and functional enough to get him or her what they want when they want.

Then, you would need a domain name and web hosting services. A domain name is www.yourbusinessname.com or edu, org, or whatever which would be your address on the Web. In order to have a good 24x7 presence on the web, you would need a good web host which would give you sufficient bandwidth (meaning space to spread your website) so many people could watch and use the website at the same time. You need to have a server uptime of at 99.8% and that would cost some funds as well.

Once you have a great website and an excellent web host, you would need to concentrate on getting people see and visit your 'shop'. For this you would need to advertise online and offline with whatever means you have. There are many, many ways to draw customers to your website, but in order to make the effort count you need to concentrate on attracting only those people who are in some measure interested in what you have to offer. This is called targeted advertising, i.e. you target your dragnet to only those surfers who would be most likely to buy something.

There Are Excellent Alternatives

The above procedure would at the minimum cost you about US $500. If you insist in getting outstanding quality in everything you endeavor, the cost might go to US $1000. This means that unless you have this capital, you might not get the returns you would have planned to get. So, what happens if you do not have this cash ready to invest?

Do not worry – there are some great alternatives to set up a very profitable business. It is called affiliate network. What you need to do here is find a great affiliate network – some of them charge a huge fee to allow you to become a member, while yet others offer you all kind of help for free + offers you an excellent commission for every item you sell for them.