These past few months I’ve learned a ton about what it truly takes to become a successful entrepreneur. Although everyone makes a million mistakes along the way, I’ve begun to see a trend in those who stick it out and find success in their venture. Through this next blog, I want to take the time to briefly touch on these principles in which I’ve observed this past semester.
- Niche-Building: I’ve recently blogged about the importance of finding your niche, and I think it’s so important that it deserves to be recognized first. Through finding your focused niche, your finding that loop-hole within the market in which you can capitalize on. There are gaps EVERYWHERE and whenever there is a gap there is an enormous opportunity to provide those customers with the solution their looking for. FIND YOUR NICHE AND GAP IN THE MARKET!!
- Foster Authorship: When you’ve found that niche you want to start pursuing, the next important facet is to gain trust and confidence in the eyes of your consumer. Your website should reflect the image in which you want your customer to associate themselves with, and first impressions can be huge. When looking at the world of business, the ability to gain trust from your customers will go much further than any certification or degree.
- Automation: We live in present times where automation is becoming more and more accessible as well as usable for businesses. There many types of automation that can be set up through your website, manufacturing process, payment systems, or even customer solutions (regarding your product). It’s important to look to fill as many jobs as possible with an automated technology that will keep your business running 24/7, even while your sleeping J.
- Outsourcing: Outsourcing can be a great way to stay focused on the business your trying to build. There are many cost-efficient business that are more than willing to help you build yours. Take the time to consider your own strengths and weaknesses and begin developing business solutions through outsourcing options. Depending on your business, outsourcing can be used for a variety of solutions even in departments like database management or webhosting.
- Linking and Connecting: Staying linked in and connected to what your customers are saying about your product or service is absolutely necessary in the success of any business. Take advantage of blog comments, product reviews, and discussion boards to streamline solutions to potential product or service problems. Keeping this tight relationship with your customer will allow you to see and fix problems before they become devastating to your business.
- Scalability: Learning to deal with increasing demands is something every business much deal with. Prepare yourself to deal with growing and how you plan to meet a higher demand from your customer. Automation can be a great to implement when dealing with the strain of growing as a business.
- Find Sustainable Means: Times are always changing and gaps within the market close and open much quicker than you may think. Although you might have found a great niche to capitalize on now, successful entrepreneurs are constantly looking ahead to the future in order to fulfill upcoming customer problems. If your niche is extremely stable, there are always ways to innovate and improvement your current process!
In conclusion, I’d like to say that starting an online business can be much easier than many perceive. Every idea isn’t great, but there are many great ideas to fill many gaps in the market. Look towards personal interest and invest your time into fulfilling a customer need that you have a passion for. When passion is involved than most of the time everything else can fall into place. Happy venturing!