How to Start an Online Business In a Day
Recently I made an e-commerce website in one day, I hadn’t known I was going to that morning.
I’m a Boston resident, and I took a walk through our Chinatown district two weeks ago, for the first time in years.. I was looking at all the kitschy and exotic souvenirs.. By the time I had got home, I knew I was going to make a website and brand where I sold oriental souvenirs in a cheeky fashion (mocking broken english and masquerading like it was a Chinese based company when really American.) By that night I had started Happy China Trading Co.
My system is simple: Get a domain name that is a descriptive or memorable key word dot com only, that is available for registration for $5-10. I often use DomainsBot.com to help get ideas. Then I. get web hosting (I already have an umbrella package I stuck it under, so it was effectively free), and for that I highly reccommend Bluehost..
I drew and scanned a logo, it’s amateurishness and campyness helped lend to my brand.
I used a Free, responsive e-commerce WordPress theme, I chose the one I did because I have used it on other websites, this saved time having to learn a new theme. The theme is free because it is the lite version, which I am okay with. The need for responsive is so that the site looks the same on mobile, tablet, and desktop..The
I joined a plugin called Viglink, an affiliate manager which allows me to sell almost any merchandise on my website as my own, namely Amazon, and I immediately put up categories of fun products like I had scouted in Chinatown.. Later I will add drop shipping.. The point is that I will sell many products, yet have to take zero inventory, so the business can be run anywhere, and set up in mere hours in one day.
To get the images for the business, I took photos of Chinatown with my iPhone, or used Google Advanced Image Search to search for public domain and free to use images.
I am doing my own writing, content marketing, and social media for the site, but if I didn’t know how to do those or have the time, I would use elance or oDesk to outsource them for $4-10 an hour.
Lastly, I use Zazzle where I will license the campy brand, and sell merchandise of it, which is not only revenue, but it’s like selling my own advertising. For social media, a lot of the content is automated by using a combination of IFTTT and Buffer, and an RSS feed made up of oriental feeds. This means I don’t need to sit around finding content to post for the social media accounts.