The purpose of the eBook "Start Your Own Online Business - Steph's 10 Steps to Getting Started" is to provide useful information to those who would like to make money from home. I hope that you find my 10 step process to gettting started useful. Feel free to share this information with others. And good luck with your home-based business!

STEP 1 - What type of online business?

The first step in any business venture is to decide what line of business you want to go into.  Doing business online offers a variety of options for the new business owner, existing business owner and even for the hobbyist. You must decide if you are starting this web site as a business or as a hobby.

Once you have made that decision, you will need to decide what it is that you want to do online.  I have surfed the internet and found that there are a lot of options to choose from when starting your own website; selling products that you create, selling wholesale items, reselling items, online auctions, providing services, providing information, ghostwriting, copy writing, editing and much more.  The options are absolutely endless you will need to decide what category or niche your web site will service.

Keep in mind that the best idea for providing an online product or service is to base your web site on something that you already know. 

I found an article with a few ideas, written by Jay MacDonald called "6 Hobbies that can make you money", that made me realize that there are more choices out there than I had originally thought of myself.  In the article, Mr. MacDonald talks about several home-based businesses that are already out there in different areas of the United States that have been up and running for years and are making a good living doing what it is that they were already good at.  This article is a prime example of taking what you already know and figuring out how to make money at it.  What could be better than doing something that you love doing?

STEP 2 - Prepare to get started

Now it is time to start gathering and preparing the content for your web site. The first step is to make an outline or hierarchy chart of your web site.  See the example below:

Making this chart will allow you to determine how many different pages you may need along with planning the layout or flow of your web site. You may also find it helpful to create a “story board” for each page in order to determine the layout of each individual page on your web site.  See the example below:

LegalZoom also offers several other business organization packages as well as a variety of other services from writing wills, trusts, and Power of Attorney to trademarks, copyrights and patents.

Now you can go to your state website and file the paperwork for your company yourself, however, as I found out, there is a $105.00 filing fee for my state, plus they refer you back to your own attorney and recommend talking with an accountant as well.  So for me, this was more work than I wanted to put into getting my company legal and it made more sense to sign up with LegalZoom and have them do all the paperwork for me.  It saved time and the hassle of not knowing what I was doing as well as preventing me from making any errors.

STEP 4 - Getting set up to accept payments

The next step in setting up your online business is figuring out how to accept payments for your goods or services.  There are two companies that are very prominent on the internet that allow you to accept payments over the internet.  Both of the services that I am going to recommend are free.

The first company, and probably the most well known company, is PayPal.  With PayPal, you can accept credit card payments, payments from other PayPal entities, you can email invoices through PayPal, Outlook or QuickBooks, and you can accept payments by phone, fax and even by mail. You can offer gift certificates through PayPal. You can also get a PayPal debit card to have direct access to the cash in your PayPal account.  

PayPal also offers many merchant services such as the ability to set up "Buy Now" buttons on your website, subscription services, donation buttons, shipping solutions, tax calculator, and much more.

The second company is ClickBank. ClickBank works much the same way as PayPal except that they provide services for “digital products” such as e-books like this one.  You can buy or sell digital products through ClickBank. 
They have subscription services and offer many other services to members.

STEP 5 - Tracking your time and income

Now every successful business owner keeps track of everything they do when it comes to the daily tasks involved with owning/operating their business.  You are going to need to have a few forms in order to keep track of everything from your time spent working and expenses to money earned.

I have found a couple of websites where you can get free downloadable business forms. The first site has many forms to choose from.  These forms are in the excel format and are very sophisticated, but you will find that they have a form for everything.

Now the second site I found has free time sheets, contact sheets, search engine tracking sheets, monthly profit sheets, payments by job, payments by hour, products inventory, project time sheet, promotional spending sheet, promotional time sheet, promotional tracking sheet, returned inventory list, product shipping lists, and product pricing sheets.  And the sheets located on this site are easily converted to fit your business or add your business name and logo.  You can view them online or download them into Excel to use.     

STEP 6 - Software

At this point you should be ready to start designing your web site There are three ways you can go about doing this:

Since you are just getting started setting up your home-based business, you probably don’t have a budget that will allow you to hire someone else to design your website.  Not to mention that hiring someone else to do it could be very costly and may not meet your launch deadline.

If you would like to use a software program, which I recommend if you know absolutely nothing about building a web site, you can download a 30 day free trial of Dreamweaver by going to the adobe and creating a user account (which is free), then download the software. Now at the end of the free trial period, you software will no longer work and you will need to buy the product, but it is definitely worth using to get you started and once you start making money, it will be no problem to purchase the software.
 
I have found an eBook, "Step by Step Websites" that hep you use Dreamweaver to design your website. The cost for the eBook is $39.00 and you get to pick the eBook for the version of Dreamweaver that you currently have (The Dreamweaver download above is for Dreamweaver CS3); it also comes with several free add-ons that you will find very useful and 30 minutes of free consultation. The add-ons alone are worth the price of the book.

Now if you know how to read and write Html, then you can download a free Html editor by selecting the link below to CoffeeCup.com. I didn't know how to write Html and the Html for Dummies book was not very helpful for me, so even though I downloaded the Html editor, it was not very useful for me.  However, CoffeeCup.com does provide tutorials and online help. You can also get free Html code off of the internet by going to one of the search engines and typing in what type of Html code you are looking for (ex. Html code for disabling right click action).  I believe this Html editor also has the FTP (file transfer protocol) as part of the whole package.

I have also found that you can create web pages in Microsoft Publisher. If you have Microsoft office on your computer already, you may also have Microsoft Publisher, and of course they have a lot of templates that you can download from the Microsoft web site that you can start from and then modify to fit your needs.  They even have blank pages that you can start from as well, if you don’t want to use a template.

STEP 7 - Design Time

Now that you are ready to design your website, get out your story boards and get started designing your web site.  You will want to refer to your Dreamweaver book or use the help function or online tutorials in order to start the design process.  Depending on which software you have chosen to use will depend on how you proceed with making your design a reality.

There are a few things that you must remember when you have finished designing your site:

FTP (file transfer protocol) software is used to send your web site up to the host server that will be hosting your web site (I will get to that in a moment); from the files you have in your computer. I believe that all of the systems listed above have FTP capability, but if the system you are using doesn't, you can download free FTP software.

There are several different companies out there that provide FTP software that you can use, get for free, try for free, or just buy. Most of them cost under $40.00. I have used two of them and would recommend either one. The first one was designed by CoffeeCup.com (CoffeCup Direct FTP) once you are ready to purchase this software the cost is only $34.00.

Or you can get a free trial from CuteFtp.com (CuteFTP Home).  The downside to CuteFTP is that it only lasts for about two weeks, which is about 15 day’s too short for trial software in my opinion. But it works really well and is worth it if you want to try it and then buy it. The cost for CuteFTP Home is $39.99.

STEP 8 - Web site hosting service

It is now time to pick a hosting service for your web site. I personally use GoDaddy.com for all of the web sites that I have designed. Several of my family members and fellow site designers use their services as well. They are very professional and their customer service and technical support department is top notch.

At this point you are going to have to invest in your home-based business.  It does cost to obtain a domain name (that is the name of your web site ex: www.StephsGoodStuff.com).  Purchasing your web domain name will run you about $ 9.99 per year, which is very reasonable.  GoDaddy will check to make sure that the name you want for your web site is available and will make several other suggestions if it is or isn’t available.

Once you have your domain name purchased, you have to purchase server space.  This is the space on the host server that you will upload your web site files to make your web site viewable and accessible for others. This runs about $48.96 plus tax for one year if you purchase the economy plan.  You can purchase server space by the month, but I don't recommend doing this, you should just purchase a 12 month or more plan so that you don't have to renew every month and ensuring that your site is never down due to forgetting to pay for your server space. You will also want to have GoDaddy certify your domain and this service costs $2.99 for one year.
 
One thing I almost forgot, when you purchase server space for your site, if you have not designed your site already, GoDaddy will provide starter pages for you to work from. I did not utilize this but it is available. And remember, GoDaddy has a phenomenal support team that is available 24/7 to help you make your web site successful.

STEP 9 – Launching your web site

You now have your site designed, your domain name, your space on the host server and your FTP software and are ready to send you file up to the host server, but you don’t know how to use the FTP software to transfer the files up to the server.

You are in luck; one of the great things about using GoDaddy is that they will email you directions to FTP your site up to the server.  Remember, you have already downloaded your FTP software, so you just have to enter the host server information, which GoDaddy provides, into the FTP software and send your files up to the server.  It really is that simple.  If you get confused, you can call the GoDaddy support team and they will walk you through it. 

STEP 10 – Support Services

Support service from GoDaddy is free; however they do offer other services that will help make your website successful.  One such service that is definitely worth the expense is Traffic Blazer.  The cost for Traffic Blazer is $29.99 per year and it provides help with getting your site submitted to all of the top search engines as well as several other not-so-well-known search engines.

This service also provides web site analysis which is a process that makes sure that the search engine "spiders" (an automated tool that search engines use to make sure your site is maneuverable - all the links work) can move through your site correctly and efficiently.

Traffic Blazer also has an optimization tool that checks your site for meta tags (tags that are placed in the header of your Html code that will provide information about your web site to search engines) containing key words and phrases that will maximize your web site traffic.  Traffic Blazer also provides statistic reports pertaining to your web site such as search engine ranking, keyword ranking, competitor ranking, and link popularity.

This is a service that I use and it helps when you add new pages or even new content to ensure that you don’t loose your ranking on the search engines due to human error. 

Now that you have designed your web site, gotten all of the forms you need, uploaded your site to the host server and utilized all of the necessary services, you are well on your way to earning a living as a home-based business opperator.