4:  What is your online business product or service?

If you have read some of the previous chapters, by now you should have a good idea about what is an online business niche market – probably you would have found couple of niche markets yourself, if so well done.  Good enough, you have found the online business niche market – you know what exactly people want in that particular market.  What next?  Next, you might want to investigate how exactly you are going to serve the market. 

In short, we are trying to setup a website – you could do one of the following with your website

• Sell products through your website – the product could be the one you have developed on your own or you could be just selling others product
• Offer service through your website – for instance, web site development service, web hosting, etc.
• Offer information to your visitors
• Act as an online brokers
• …

Whatever you choose to do, it is going to be an important strategic decision.  Whether you choose to sell a product or provide service or information – they all have there pros and cons. 

Selling products through your website: 

If you want to sell something that will earn you maximum profits for minimum efforts, you should definitely think about creating your own product.  If you already have one, great – or else don’t worry, developing your own product is not as difficult as you may think.  Today’s technology has opened a whole new world of opportunity for even the smallest home-based online business owners.  While developing your online business product, make sure you have something which is unique – if you are entering a market in which you are competing against hundreds of other products similar to yours, your chances of success will be minimal. 

There are 2 types of products you can sell online – physical product and digital product.  Any physical products you sell, whether they are mobile phone, wallets or laptops – need to be stored somewhere.  Then, when they are purchased, they have to be delivered to your customers doorsteps.  You are constantly going to be stocking, packaging, and shipping orders.  These services cost you time and money – unless you have high profit margin, you will need to sell a lot of stock to earn a decent income. 

When you sell digital products such as software or ebooks, you don’t have to worry about these things.  First of all, digital products are easy to create – you don’t have to deal with manufacturers or suppliers. All you have to do is gather information and package them in a form such as ebook so that they can be delivered electronically. Second, they cost you absolutely no money to reproduce! Once you have packaged your products electronically, you can make and sell as many copies as you like – forever – and it won’t cost you a dime.  There is no shipping cost either, you can save yourself a lot of time and money while earning bonus points with your customers. 

The most difficult part of creating your own product is deciding upon the product itself.  First of all, you will need to decide what type of product you would like to develop.

Some of the top online sellers include Software products, information products, private sites, online services, …

If you have the capability and the time to develop the product yourself for your online business – good enough, that would be the best approach to take and you can be assured for sure you have the product the way you want it to be.  The do-it-yourself approach allows you to maintain complete control over every aspect of your content.  Your particular expertise or research will likely be most effectively communicated by you.

However, many times it is hard to develop the product on your own because of the time constraints, expertise, etc. If such is the case, you have to hire someone inorder to have the work accomplished. 

Whether it is developing a software product or writing an ebook, you can find them all on the web. Some of the top freelancer sites include http://www.elance.com, http://www.scriptlance.com, http://www.rentacoder.com, http://ww.guru.com, http://www.getafreelancer.com/, http://www.getacoder.com, http://www.procopywriters.com, http://www.online-writing-jobs.com, http://www.copywritersboard.com, http://www.writerlance.com,

I could be adding more site names, but wanted to keep my article short J

Here are few things you need to consider before hiring a ghost writer

• What is their experience:  If you hire someone with limited experience, it could mean the difference between good content and great content
• Do they have reference:  Successful freelancers will be more than happy to provide you with an extensive list of satisfied customers
• Do they have a portfolio: Read samples of their work and ask questions to make sure they are indeed the author of there work.  .

Selling service through your website: 

Providing service through websites is getting very popular as well – Internet related services such as web hosting, web designing, software development, … are reaching its peak.  Just looking at the market, there is still lot of scope to provide value-added service in lot of fields.  Just dig into a market and you will find lot of unique service niches. 

Offering service through your web site – you need to be more organized and should plan your resources well to ensure sustainability. 

• Build your reputation by providing good service and keeping up to your promise
• Identify your value drivers and always offer more than your competitors
• Make sure you have adequate resources in place to fulfill your promises
• Provide quality service and maintain consistency – this will be your key success factors 

Before getting into a service offer, make sure you have adequate experience/knowledge in the field.  It involves setting up a physical office setup as well, so mistakes could prove to be expensive.  Make it professional by following best management practices and stick to your core value drivers – things will be far much easier to work with.

Providing information to your visitors

Most cases people browse the web just looking for information.  Information is said to be gold on the web – now-a-days there is so much information available on the web that people are facing what is known as information overload.  People are increasingly complaining about poorly written articles with zero information – these things are absolute time wasters.  While developing information-based site, try to have your content precise and have them neatly organized.  Provide valuable information/content to your visitors – this is what the users are looking for and this will be your success factor in the long run. 

Summary of products for online business

• Developing your own product for your online business will allow you to earn maximum amount of profit with minimum effort
• With today’s development of web/technology, developing a product for your online business is not as hard as it sounds
• People browse online looking for information