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<h1>Building an Online Business with a Shoestring Budget</h1>

Accepting Payments Online
 Whether you're selling services or products there are
multiple ways to get started. The easiest and simplest way is an
all-inclusive solution. Many companies offer turn-key solutions
which include a basic website template and a hosted ecommerce
store. Usually to cost varies from $20 to $30 a month with a modest
set-up fee to process your application. Monies you make are either
mailed to you by check or transferred to your bank account. One
popular program offering is Yahoo Stores.

Simple = The Home Grown Factor
 The pitfall of having an "all-inclusive-online-store
template" is that the end result is an online store or website that
does not look very professional. It could look down right ugly.
This wouldn&#8217;t matter if you had an inexpensive niche product
or service that everyone wanted to buy, but this is probably not
the case. Niche products and services are slowly disappearing as
more and more websites filling these voids come online. But hey!
you never know. Nothing ventured is nothing gained.

Pay Pal Offerings
 Let's assume you already have a website or even a Blog site
like Live Journal or My Space. Pay Pal offers a program where you
sign-up for free to accept monies online. They charge a very small
fee per transaction when money is sent or received. Millions of
people use Pay Pal this way. Simply sign up with Pay Pal (you'll
need to have an active bank account) and in 2 to 3 days you are
ready to go.
You need to have a minimal amount of web or HTML experience to
place a Pay Pal button in your website. Don&#8217;t have HTML
experience? Most city recreation centers offer classes at reduced
rates or you may seek out the help of a technical or college
student in your area. Most students are itching to get some
practical real world experience under their belts. Start by calling
the school&#8217;s director or person in-charge of student
internships. But remember, you need a website in which to paste the
code. Cost for a website may range from $500 to $2800 depending on
your needs and your budget. You might also consider populating your
information into a web template.
Web hosting plans costing $130 per year offer a free web
template builder. You simply choose the template you like and
populate it with your own content. Now you have a place to paste in
your Pay Pal code. Most hosting companies will do this for you
free!
We should also mention that Pay Pal offers an up line of
merchant tools that include a shopping cart for a more professional
store. But this will require a good deal of web development
experience for you to master.

Raising the Bar
 So you want a store with a shopping cart and product
thumbnails like L.L.Bean?
If you're ready to invest a little money into your business,
then it&#8217;s time to begin requesting RFPs (Requests for
Proposals) from professional web design companies in your area.
The difference between a very basic ecommerce store and a
professional store is the user experience. The look and feel of a
professional store has a well designed or even custom designed
interface with a variety of options for shopping such as coupon or
specials section, send to a friend function, displays similar or
optional shopping choices, multiple thumbnails or a slideshow of
the product, multiple shipping choices for next day, overnight and
so on.
You will also need to acquire a merchant gateway account and an
ecommerce hosting company. Most professional web design companies
can walk you through this process, even if you haven&#8217;t a clue
of what to do. Cost for a professionally designed custom ecommerce
website ranges from $3800 to $7500.
No matter which road you take, you have to do a bit of
marketing. You can&#8217;t depend on web surfer&#8217;s to come
stumbling across your website to do business. You have to market
yourself. Tell your friends, get a write up in your church
bulletin, and use every option you can think of to economically get
the word out about your website.

Naming Your Website
 Pick a website name (domain name) that follows 3 simple
rules:
1) Easy to spell 2) Easy to say 3) Easy to remember
If you are chatting among friends and you casually drop the name
of your website, you want people to easily remember what you said.
Good domain name: 
www.bigfatpumpkins.com Bad domain name: 
www.organicallygrownpumpkins.biz

Marketing Online
 You can go to chat rooms and talk up your website. You post a
few items or services on EBay and include a link to your main
website. You may also submit your website information to hundreds
of free directories over the Internet. You might also consider
setting up an affiliate program whereby you offer commissions to
people who resell your products or services. There are people who
make a living participating in multiple affiliate programs.

Take that First Step
 Set up your website and grow your online presence. The longer
your online store is live on the Internet, the greater the chances
are of being found. Most importantly don&#8217;t quit your day job
just yet. Building an online business at any level takes time and
patience. Six months may go by without one single sell. Don&#8217;t
get frustrated. Give the search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN
time to find your website and list your website. Talk to other
people who have similar products or services online. You'll be
quite surprised how helpful and friendly these people can be in
offering you some solid advice in growing your business. After all,
they have been there and done that.
 
 
Build it and they will come. Wait and they won&#8217;t.

<div>Author Info 

About the Author
 Rick Vidallon is President of Visionefx, a 
<a href="http://www.visionefx.net/clients.htm" target="_blank">Web
design company based in Virginia Beach, Va</a>. They provide
services to national companies as well as small to medium
businesses throughout the United States. Rick can be reached at
(757) 619-6456 or 
r<a href='http://mailhide.recaptcha.net/d?k=017zgrCUYiWMOOZH_l2VNJVw==&amp;c=FanyBZoshNBzugJ_C4ijbnisRYek3qwYEqUGY9ajcRA=' onclick="window.open('http://mailhide.recaptcha.net/d?k=017zgrCUYiWMOOZH_l2VNJVw==&amp;c=FanyBZoshNBzugJ_C4ijbnisRYek3qwYEqUGY9ajcRA=', '', 'toolbar=0,scrollbars=0,location=0,statusbar=0,menubar=0,resizable=0,width=500,height=300'); return false;" title="Reveal this e-mail address">...</a>@visionefx.net.
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