With the trend towards digitalisation of commerce picking up steam in the wake of the pandemic, and new technologies with marketable applications abound the opportunities for entrepreneurship on the internet are only becoming more enticing. The freedom to work surrounded by the comforts of home, freedom from the drudgery of daily commuting and office life, and the flexibility to take work with you anywhere you wish are enough to pique anyone’s interest.
But it’s not all scrolling social feeds while sipping flat whites on Bondi Beach. Acquiring the skills needed to become an online entrepreneur takes time, patience, and serious preparation. Not everyone needs a degree, but if you don’t feel like enrolling in an MBA online course to get a leg up on the competition, you’ve still got a lot of research ahead of you!
If You Build It, They Will Come
The first step to getting yourself out there and letting the world see your products or services is a website. Nobody can have an internet business without having a website – it acts a bit like your digital business card and office front combined. Your website conveys your brand identity to the world and acts as a portal to your products and services that anyone, anywhere in the world can access with ease.
Building a website is easier than ever. Tools like WordPress, Squarespace, and Wix make it possible for anyone to build a website with little to no experience. They also include powerful SEO tools that allow you to optimize your site for the best search engine results, helping you rank higher on search engine results pages.
With that said, the DIY approach isn’t for everyone; if you can’t get the hang of these tools, there’s no shame in hiring a graphic designer to do the job for you. If you’ve got the budget for it, professional design firms can often be a big help in ensuring that your website looks clean, runs smoothly, and shows up high enough on search results pages to help you start moving the needle.
Crafting Your Digital Presence
Perhaps the most important skill for an internet entrepreneur to master is marketing. If you don’t put in the work to spread the good news and get the word out, you could be a master of your craft, or build one of the most incredible products ever, and still slide slowly into obscurity.
A marketing campaign should never be one-dimensional. Successful marketing campaigns normally include some combination of search engine optimisation (SEO), pay-per-click (PPC) ads, social media marketing, email marketing, and text message marketing. Attacking your target market using multiple vectors ensures that people of different demographics all receive exposure to your ads.
Each of these requires a unique skill set, and a deeper understanding of how best to utilize each medium, if you want your campaign to be executed properly (and effectively). It sounds like a lot to learn, but there are more resources for learning about these techniques available online, for free, than anyone could ever exhaust: free and paid online courses, YouTube tutorials, blogs – the list goes on. If you’re not ready to take that task on yourself, and you’ve got the budget, you may want to think about retaining a digital marketing agency to help you get your head around the process.
Closing the Deal
When most people hear sales, they think of cold-calling, door-knocking, or guys in overpriced suits with fancy watches. The digital marketplace is a bit different.
Curating a customer journey that leads to sales is a nuanced process that begins with marketing, ends at checkout, and, ideally, leads to repeat business. Moving customers along the “funnel” and into your checkout isn’t easy – it takes time and practice to know exactly who is looking for your product, and why they might choose you over another brand.
New digital sales platforms like WooCommerce, BigCommerce, Shopify, and Squarespace make it easy to build a store, make your product as attractive as possible, and create a simple, pleasant buying experience for your customers. They can also help you understand your customers using analytics: by collecting and giving you access to valuable data about your customers, these platforms can help you understand who is buying your product, how they are arriving at their decision, and how you might be able to get them back for another round.
Fulfilment is a crucial part of sales. If you’re selling a service, having good communication and getting deliverables in by the deadline might be the most important parts of your business. If it’s a product you’re selling, you may want to start off shipping by hand, but if your business scales, you may need to look into fulfilment services, the availability of which will depend on where your business is located.
Know Your Machine
If you want to run a successful business online, you’re going to need to understand the medium you’re working in, and that means understanding computers. You don’t need to learn Python to run an online store, but you will need to understand the basics of how to navigate the software that your business runs on.
First and foremost should be basic office apps: Microsoft Office, Google Workspace, Adobe Acrobat, and basic accounting software like Quickbooks should all be in your wheelhouse. If you want to in-source your website and marketing material production, you’re also going to need to learn graphics software, like Adobe Creative Cloud apps, Canva, or, if you’re especially thrifty, an open-source alternative like GIMP.
You’ll also want to understand, at the very least, the basics of the software that your website and store are built on. Even if you outsource all of your IT, you’re going to have regrets if you start making sales and still have to call your web designer to do something like change the price in your Shopify store. It’ll cost you, too!
If your business begins to grow, you will definitely benefit from understanding some basic project management software. Unless you want to build your own Gantt charts in MS Paint and send emails to follow up on every little task, you’ll want to invest in something like Trello or Asana to assign and manage tasks. If you want to keep it really simple, Google Keep and Microsoft Tasks can at least help you build and share to-do lists to track and communicate progress on tasks that you assign.
This is a taste of what you’ll need to do if you are serious about becoming an online entrepreneur. Working from home sounds great, but even if you’ve already got a great product, or are a master of your trade, you don’t start at the top – you have to build from the ground up, and that means mastering the basics. Mastering these skills will give you a solid foundation upon which to build an online business, and, if you work hard, they may just help set you down the pathway to financial independence.
2023-08-08 15:07:26