Starting an E-Biz - Part 1: Planning your business

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Welcome to my four part series on How To Start Your Own E-Business. In these series of articles I will cover Planning your Business, Securing a Domain Name and Hosting, Site Design and Content and Marketing your E-Site.

So, let's focus on Planning your first E-Business. To start any business, especially an online, I would recommend focusing on what you enjoy doing. It might be playing golf, knitting, reading books or cooking. To be an entrepreneur in this field, you need to be genuinely interested in what you are selling, otherwise, you may lose interest and that will result in a loss of sales and money.
Now, using this category (eg. golf), jot down some rough ideas on the type of golf-related item or information that you could use for your site. Don't get me wrong. Information can sell just as well as a physical golf product, things like Ebooks have become famous for their ease in creation and for their cheap manufacture and shipping. However, you will still need a website in order to sell your final product.

Once you have a few ideas, for example golf tees and balls, try and think of a way in which you can stand yourself out from the crowd. If you search for golf tees on Google, there are hundreds if not thousands of small or large businesses hoping to make it big by selling these tees. However, they are faced with too much competition, resulting in lower sales prices, and lower profits. If you can come up with a novel concept or an idea which has little competition then you could be onto a winner. I came up with the great idea of selling personalized golf balls and tees. Although there is competition, this is limited, allowing me to make a good profit on my items.

Planning your website before creating it, will also help you focus your goals, and avoid useless information on the site. I recommend making a site flow, i.e. draw a simple page which shows links, and navigation around the site, no images or content, merely the site frame.

Once you have planned your site's navigation then things such as layout, colour schemes and content will be easier to add, however we will cover this topic and other more thoroughly in my next articles.