The 1 Thing You Need For an Online Business

Hmmm… What is the one thing you need for an online business? Different people will give different answers and this isn’t suppose to be a trick question, but you must know the answer in order to be successful online. The answer: A Website, and by website I mean your own website, not some one off site type of deal. Easy enough, right? Seems easy, but I still come across multiple sites every single day that some is promoting as their own, but it really isn’t. If you see someone with a website websitename.blogger.com or websitename.wordpress.com, they are doing it wrong. That is not their site. That is Blogger’s or WordPress’ site. This is a huge mistake and in my mind you immediately lose credibility of what your telling me to do with my online business.

Personal Websites – Branding

If you are going to or are running a business online it is essential to brand yourself. You can look no further than this site as an example MikeShamon.com. My name is my brand. You can follow me on twitter @MikeShamon, branding myself there as well. I would highly recommend getting your name as a domain name, even if you are not going to use it any time soon.

Aside from branding yourself, don’t use free websites to start your business, like Wix, Blogger or something similar. To me and many other people it seems cheap and you could potentially lose prospects because of it. As a web designer this drives me crazy as it is not hard to pick up a domain name. Now if you have a more common name it will probably be harder to find your exact name. Pick up a professional domain, apply it and start your own brand no matter what.

A website gives you a platform to express yourself and your brand. It lets you get your message or product across the world literally at a click of a button. Although, just because you have a site doesn’t mean you will start making a million dollars. You have to drive traffic to the site. You know that saying “If you build it, they will come” well that’s not true in the internet world. You can have the best site in the world, but it might as well be an abandon building if you don’t have traffic to the site. We will go over some traffic strategies in later posts, for now make sure you are using free traffic to your site which is…. drum roll please…. social media!