Building a low-cost online business in 7 steps
Highlight reel
Squarespace is the best and easiest tool to build your first professional website at a low cost (exhibit A: diversehires.co.uk)
Produce an excellent website then sign up for affiliate programmes within your space to generate passive income
Content, content, content - produce regularly and give away value for free to your followers to get your reps up
Building a low-cost online business in 7 steps
1.) Settle on an idea
There is a common misconception that you need to come up with a completely new concept. Not every movie is as outside the box as Inception, most are Fast and Furious vol 23 (shout out to Tyrese). If you’re able to successfully create something completely unique then great but this is the most difficult route. The most straightforward way to start out is to find another online business doing well, take on that concept and then put your own spin on it. You’ve probably had 10 million-pound business ideas in your life but ideas are common, it’s all about how well you execute.
2.) Research existing interest and competition
Check out SimilarWeb to see the level of traffic existing websites in this space get. Look at Google Keyword Planner to analyse how many people are searching for keywords around your topic every month. Ideally, you want to go with a topic that has a high search volume but low levels of competition.
3.) Build your website on Squarespace
Squarespace is like the Netflix of website design, you can put together slick professional designs with ease even if you’re not that technical. This website only took a week to put together. And no, you definitely don’t need to know how to code. This is the hub for your online business, from here you can generate revenue for advertising, affiliate links, selling products and charging for space on your website. It’s important to offer a huge amount of free value before monetising to get your reps up and create a loyal following. This also has a huge word of mouth benefits, followers who are advocates for your service will spread the message for you. Watch the social network movie to see the best example of this.
4.) Get a domain on Godaddy
To have your site on Google etc. you’ll need a domain name. Head to Godaddy.com and search for a domain name that would work well with your website. If your business is international, try hard to get a .com domain. The rough rule for picking a domain name is to be able to answer yes to - could you tell someone at the end of a phone call to go to yourdomainname.com and they can easily find it? Try to avoid names with lots of hyphens and full stops.
5.) Setup Google Search Console
Add your website to Google by creating a Google Search Console account and requesting for your site to be indexed. Essentially Google sends its online bots to ‘crawl’ your website to index your web pages so they can show up in search results. You can also do this with Bing and other search engines.
6.) Sign up for affiliate programmes
Sign up for affiliate programmes in your space such as Shopify for eCommerce. Here you can generate revenue if someone clicks on an affiliate link or buys a product through this link. You can also now put ads onto your site easily. Go to Google AdSense, sign up and you will receive an add code that you can put on your site using a Squarespace feature called Code Blocks.
7.) Market on social media
Promote your website using bite-sized snippets on Instagram, TikTok, Facebook and Twitter. Film yourself discussing topics within your field and upload it to Youtube and Twitch. You can also record the audio and make a podcast on Anchor. Add longer articles to Linkedin and post links to your site on pages related to your topic on Reddit and Quora. These platforms will help drive traffic to your site which you can monetise with ads and sponsored posts once your following is large enough.