I want to start an Internet business, now what? 

Make sure you are willing to commit time and effort into your business set-up.  Don't jump into this thinking, "I'm going to make a million dollars a year."  Can it happen - YES!  Will it happen -  Probably not.  Can money be made - Absolutely!  Don't kid yourself, it will take a sincere effort on your part to realize a profit.

We want you to succeed with your Internet business.

Here are some Do's and Don'ts

DO'S

Decide what kind of business you want to operate

There is a whole world out there.  What do you want to offer on the Internet?  This is a difficult task and should not be taken lightly.  We offer some ideas and will add to them on a regular basis.  After some disasters we purchased Instant Internet Empires and set up our first web site, a1success.com back in April 2001.  Since then we have branched out to various successful websites and businesses and have redesigned a1success.com on several occasions.

Visit other similar sites and see how they are doing it

There is no sense in reinventing the wheel.  Many offers give permission to legally copy information for your personal web pages.  This saves time and for the novice offers a great starting point.  Eventually, you should reach a point where you can make changes and improve your web site.  It is always good to look at the competition and see how you stack up to them.

Research and Read about it

There is no substitution for due diligence!  If they say it retails for $10,000.00 and it is on E-bay for a buck something just might be amiss - Ya Think!  It does not mean toss the item, it might have some worthwhile information.  For example, Instant Internet Empire is way outdated, made some outlandish claims and there was even some criminal prosecution for fraud.  However, the information is/was tremendous for a newbie.  We offer it for FREE and I even tried to update the old information.

Determine your business structure

Since we are from Pennsylvania we used their Open for Business Website to obtain a wealth of information.  Even if you are not from PA, this link gives a pretty good basic overview of the various business structures.  See our Do It Legally section. We decided on a Limited Liability Partnership, which gives us the flexibility to grow but does not treat income like a corporation. If you have no idea what I just said, relax, visit the link and read about it. When you finish you will probably know more about it than half the adult population in America. After all, it will be your business.  It should take you less than 30 minutes to read about the most common structures which are a Sole Proprietorship, Partnership, Limited Liability Company and Corporation. There are advantages and disadvantages involved with each especially with regards to legal and tax considerations. Again, this will be your business and your personal needs are paramount. At this stage it is important to take care of yourself first. The descriptions at this web site are provided for informational purposes only, and are not intended as legal advice. If you are unsure which business structure is correct for you, seek legal advice.

Develop a Business Plan

A business plan defines your business, identifies your goals and is your business' resume. It should describe the products and services you will sell, the customers to whom you will sell them, production, management and marketing activities needed to produce your offerings, and the projected profit or loss that will result from your efforts. The business plan should provide answers to: Who are you? What are you going to do? Where are you going? How are you going to get there? Completing this plan forces you to examine all decisions of management, marketing, personnel and finance issues in an objective and organized way. Another important benefit of the planning process is that you will project the amount of financing needed for your start up and the early stages of your business.  This document is ever changing as your business grows and branches out to other endeavors.  Again, you may want to seek out technical assistance to develop your business plan.

Understand what you are paying for

Make sure you are getting what you think you are paying for.  Many times it is spelled out in an obscure sentence after the hype.  You spend the money only to find out you paid for a link that asks for more money to continue.  We found this over and over again.

Ask questions

We cannot stress this enough.  Throughout every step of the process ASK QUESTIONS.  If you are not sure of something - ASK!  Ask questions until you are satisfied that you understand exactly what it is you are paying for, how it works, how it makes YOU money and if there are any other financial investments necessary.  Understand the downside as well as the upside potential.

Decide your Company and Domain name

This is unique to your business and should be related in some way.  Why did we lump both of these together?  Because you might have a great Domain Name only to find that a company already exists with that name.  You cannot just call yourself whatever your want.  The name has to be available.  We researched the company name first in the state of PA  by going to their Open for Business web site.  After that we were out getting the domain names.  The price and services offered vary greatly.  We found a couple of domain registration companies we feel offer quality for a good price.  We also found one that we thought was way overpriced and from our own experience offered poor customer service.  We DO NOT recommend verisign.  Here are three we recommend, they all have great tech support and customer service, registrydomains.com, godaddy.com, and Omnis.  If you want to see our top 10 selections so you can do more comparisons, click here.  You can become an affiliate and get an ever deeper discount - We will talk more about this later, this is the getting started page.  For now we need to concentrate on our Business Name and Domain Name.  When choosing a Domain Name, try not to make your web address any longer than it has to be.  Remember, you will be providing this information to customers, sometimes over the phone as well as in person and it may appear in advertisements as well as your business card.  If you make it too long or confusing you may lose the sale.  Definitely try to leave our those dashes and even though our site has a number, they are not always a good idea.  Imagine telling someone your website is, I-2-likehockey.com.  Even our other website getebooksnow.us could be misread as GetEBookSnow.us instead of GetEbooksNow.us but you are benefiting from our past mistakes.  If at all possible, choose a .com extension or a .us.  By extension I mean .com, .net, .org, .us, .gov, etc.  The .com is the best since people are familiar with it.  You always hear them say, www.blahblahblah.com or just blahblahblah.com.  The up and coming extension in the United States is the .us.  It is not anywhere as familiar as the .com but we feel it will eventually become close.  For now, stick with the .com.  I know it almost sounds as if we are saying do as I say, not as I do but again you are learning from our mistakes.

Decide who will host your business

This is very important and like the domain registration, the price and quality varies greatly.  We based our recommendations on customer service, price, and value.  In the beginning you might want to start with free sites and there are MANY.  Because they are free, you may have their advertising and will be very limited to what you do.  They are GREAT to practice on before you are ready.  Just do a Google search on free domain hosting.  When you are ready to pay for hosting decide what it is that YOU want.  We use pagematic.com,the 12.50 a month package.  Pagematic has great tech support and those auto responders are fantastic.  Omnis offers a free domain name with their hosting paciage.  YAHOO has a great starter plan, STARTLOGIC has a great overall package, bluehost is an up and coming company offering great value, and there are many, many more, click here for our top 10.

Decide how you are going to be paid

How are your customers going to pay you.  Before you jump into this full steam ahead, you should research what the various companies have to offer.  After hours of researching, weighing cost vs return we decided to go with PayPal.  Eventually, we may branch out and offer our own credit card acceptance.  For now PayPal accommodates our needs and has great customer support.

Promote your site

This is the key to a successful business.  How do I get visitors to my site?  Google explains how they rate a site (Click Here).  Then there is the pay per click.  You actually pay when someone visits your website.  It can be costly but I'm told it is effective.  We do not use this method.  Another way is to advertise through an Internet Promotion Company.  These vary in price and some are better than others.  For the do-it-yourselfer, there are software programs available.  If you are not ready to promote your site, that's fine but you must realize that advertising in today's market is a must.  You can use word of mouth and emails to friends as a starting point.  We have a whole section dedicated on site promotion.

Do it legally

Wow!  We found a lot of offers left out this very important step.  If you are serious about making money on the Internet there are certain procedures you should take.  We do not have all the answers but we are giving you the information we found to make our business legal.  Since we are  from Pennsylvania we found a multitude of information offered for free by the state.  I'll walk you through what we did and then recommend strongly that you contact an expert in this area.  After leaping into this without any knowledge we hit many pitfalls.  After finding our state website we got back on track and steamed forward.  Your state might have something similar, if not, the PA Open for Business site is one I highly recommend visiting.

1.  Before we named our business we developed a business plan.  The state of PA had an excellent site that helped:  http://www.paopen4business.state.pa.us/paofb/site/default.asp

2.  With plan in hand, we decided on a business name, AFTER checking the availability through the domain name and corporate name search within our state, we became Hathaway Technologies, LLP, registered in the Commonwealth of PA.  There are companies out there who do this for you but we found them to range anywhere from $35.00 - 200.00 plus the state cost to set up.  We did it for FREE.    

3.  Since we were selling items we needed a state tax ID which cost us $100.00.  This opened up more avenues than you can imagine.  A tax ID allows you to purchase from wholesalers who will not ship to retail customers.  We branched out to honestsolutions.com and were able to purchase items wholesale for resale.  That site is currently under construction and we hope to have it up for the Christmas shopping season.  We are in the process of updating all our web sites since we now know more about this from experience.

4.  To open up a bank account in the company name we needed our federal tax ID number.  You either need an Individual Taxpayer Identification Number (ITID) requiring an IRS Form W-7 or a Federal Employer Identification number requiring Form SS-4.  Both are available FREE from the IRS - Yes FREE.  There are companies charging up to 35.00 to just send you an electronic version to complete.  We completed the SS-4 form since our business structure is an LLP.  To see if you need the W-7 from the IRS click here.  To see if you need the SS-4 from the IRS click here.  BOTH ARE FREE! 

5.  lmost there, you need to check on your residential zoning.  You can do this by calling your local government agency (city hall, township building, etc.)  Since we live in a R-1 residential area we had to apply to the township for an occupancy permit allowing the use of up to 10% of the house for a business.  They came looked at the computer room, complete with fire extinguisher, and said come pick up your permit next week - Cost $75.00.

6.  The rest is history!  Could we have skipped all those steps and just opened the site?  Perhaps, but we wanted to make sure we had a business plan and most important that we were legal.

DON'TS

Don't try to get started before you are ready

We did this and it was very costly.  Before we knew it, we had 4 domain names @ 35.00 a year (OUCH!) and no idea what to do next.  We were shelling out money on just about everything and anything we thought would get us started.  We finally said STOP, went back to our business plan, remember that thing, regrouped and got back on track.

Don't get caught up in the hype

Again, another pitfall.  We got caught up and started sending cash to tons of "money making offers" and realized many were money making schemes.  Then we found out about the additional charges to really make it work, more on this later.  In almost every case the offer will be there tomorrow.  Research, and ask questions.  It they are unwilling to give you specific answers it is probably a bad thing.   

Don't be overwhelmed

After wasting around $2,000.00 of our hard earned money we finally started going in the right direction.  We were absolutely overwhelmed and thought we would NEVER be able to do any of this.  We almost gave it up on several occasions.  As you can see, we made it! 

Don't do anything you think is wrong

Some of the "offers" seemed morally wrong, basically bilking people.  We are not saints, but this is WRONG.  We will not be a part of dishonest money making schemes.  Aside from the moral issue some of these "schemes" are illegal.  Be honest, if you think the claim is outlandish, say you think it is outlandish.  Also remember just because they claim you can become a millionaire without any work does not mean the information is of no value.  State that you think the claim is bogus and explain why you are posting or selling the information.  Instant Internet Empires makes some pretty outlandish claims.  Put putting that aside, it has some very good information.  I learned a lot from that eBook.  We sold it for 4.77 which was 90% off their suggested retail.  Why?  That is the value we placed on the information, not the money making scheme.  We stated that we were selling it because of the informational value at what we thought was a fair price.  Now we offer it for free at getebooksnow.us.

Don't be afraid to ask questions and do further research

It's your money, not theirs!  Ask questions!  Don't pay a dime until you are sure.  Would you buy a house before you looked at?  Of course not!  Would you buy a house that the owner wouldn't let you look in the basement?  Again, Of course not!  Make sure you fully understand what it is you are paying for.

Don't be discouraged

We did not know what a domain name was when we started.  If we didn't waste a lot of time on get rich quick schemes, we would have been up and running months sooner that we actually opened.  Then because of all that misguided information, we opened before we were ready and it seemed like we were always behind and would never catch up.  Then as soon as we thought we were finished we found broken links and other problems.  It does not happen overnight.  It takes time and commitment on your part.  If you need help, don't be afraid to ask for it.  Talk to friends and family.  If you want, send me an email:  George@Hathawaytech.com and I'll do my best to get you an answer or at least try and point you in the right direction. 

GOOD LUCK!

GO FORTH AND PROSPER
 

CONTACT INFORMATION:  George@hathawaytech.com