How To Start A Small Business: In 10 Easy Steps
By: Baazar Live
Tags: Small Business, Grow Your Business, Onlinebusinessmagazine, Smallbusinessbiz, Small Business Marketing

Photo by Tim Mossholder on Unsplash

You dread your monotonous 9–5 job, you are tired of being at the beck and call of your boss, your desk moans every morning that you sit on it and your heart yearns to have a better life, as you realise that your dream job was not really ‘the dream’.

In times like these, entrepreneurship or ‘being your own boss’ comes as a knight in shining armour, as an oasis amid a dull and dreary corporate desert.

But the moment you decide to quit your job and start a business of your own, the process seems so daunting that it scares you right away. Will your business do good? Who should you sell? And what should you sell at all?

If you still somehow push yourself to take the risk and give it a try no matter what, you are met with new hurdles- there seems to be a new industry fad almost every other day. There’s Instagram with its endless influencers and then there’s Facebook with its million ads. What should you follow? Who should you pay your attention to? What’s a treat and what’s trash?

Woof! That’s way too much work. Worry no more, folks! We are here to help you. To save you all the work, we researched every little detail and created this 10 step guide to take you by the hand and walk you through the stages of building your business from scratch, one step at a time.

Main Content

How to Start a small business

Brainstorm On Ideas | Answer The Question ‘why’? Identify The Problem: Provide The Solution Niche: Your Place In The Market Determine Who You Want To Reach Know Your Competitors Create A Brand Identity. Learn The Law Follow Marketing Techniques. Open Your Online Store Collaborate with Small Business Curators

How to Start a Small Business

Increasingly, organisations are turning to internet channels to expand their reach in the digital age. When the world economy was hit by the Covid-19 Pandemic, small company owners’ working styles have undergone a dramatic change.

The online world gets bigger every passing second and provides you with a wide audience waiting for your service. It is your time to stop fretting and putting things into action.

If you want to know everything about starting your amazing business online, read the report till the end!

1)Brainstorm on Ideas | Answer the Question ‘Why?

The first step is to brainstorm on all the possible ideas. Figure out who you are. As a person, that requires some serious thought. But as a business, asking yourself these three simple questions will do:

If I were to describe my enterprise in three words, what would they be?

What difference will my business make in the industry?

What do I want to be known for?

Take a moment to reflect before deciding on an idea for your business. Think about all the things that keep you up till the wee hours of the morning, as well as the things that keep you motivated to achieve them. Yoga, literature, clothing, dogs, movies, or anything else you adore is fair game!

Once you’ve agreed on an idea, the next step is to use tools like Keywords Everywhere and track down the volume of searches related to your idea. This will help you realise how much your idea is in demand. You can also make use of Google Trends to determine the current trends in your industry.

Make a note of the top three most popular keywords and yourself the question- Why? Why will it matter to people if I go on to providing them with a service related to these topics? If you can’t think of an answer, you need to rearrange your list of ideas.

2) Identify the Problem: Provide the Solution

Almost every other business is driven by the desire to provide something unique, something different to the market. While bringing something new does feel exciting, what they are forgetting is this fact- this world is full of simple people, with simple problems, looking for simple solutions. In a scenario where everyone is trying to ‘make this world a better place’ by providing something new and rare, you should focus on making one life better.

Think about your target audience not as a bunch of people but as a person. Create a customer persona: What is my audience’s age? What is their gender? What are their career goals? What is their income? What keeps them awake at night? Once you answer all these questions, you’ll have a better understanding of what your audience really wants.

Thanks to the digital era, you’re able to come across your target audience and their problems in just an easy click.

Go through social media sites and run a search for your target audience- what are they talking about? What do they like or dislike?

Check out review sites like Amazon for comments about products like yours.

Join social media groups on Quora, Linked In, Instagram, and Facebook and participate in the discussion.

Scroll through comments on industry blog posts, relevant videos, and articles.

3) Niche: Your Place in The Market

Your niche is where you belong. It helps your audience to identify and relate with you better and lets you stand out from a pool of businesses and marketers. You have already thought of your business idea and that is work half done. Now you need to dive into the deeper details of providing the exact solution that your audience is looking for.

To figure out your niche, answer these few basic questions and see where you land:

What is/are my products or services?

How will my services be a solution to my audience?

What is the connection between my products/services and my potential customers?

If there is a need for the service you’re providing to the market, you will surely find a way out.

4)Determine Who You Want To Reach

Before taking any further steps you need to decide your target audience. Research about your audience, by this, you’ll be able to serve them better. Search for people who are interested in similar things just like your services or products. For example, if you are selling some homemade skincare products then you should target people who are interested in buying skincare products and their sellers too, therefore, they are more likely to buy your product or service.

Another way to define your audience is to categorize them demographically like based on their:

Age

How old are they? (18–25,26–35 and so on)

Generation groups

Interests

Pages and hashtags they follow

Their Social media activities

Posts they share

Posts they like or comment on

Gender

Each gender has its different likes and dislikes.

Are they having characteristics of a Male, Female, or third gender?

Device They Use

If they are using a phone, tablet, laptop, public computer.

If they are android users or ios.

Location

Are they having a good stable internet connection at their place?

Knowing these few characteristics about your target audience can help you work according to their needs and interests that can help in the growth of your business. See, it’s that easy to find your target audience.

5) Know Your Competitors

Your competitors are not always your competition. They can prove to be helpful in many ways for your business. You just need to know-how.

Search and find out what businesses dominate your market. Learn from them. Know the services that they are providing, discover their downfalls and try to improve them, realise the solutions that they provide, and see if you can provide better. While conducting your research, make sure to check these points:

Who are my competitors?

What problems do they tackle?

What solutions do they provide? How can I provide better?

What are their customers like?

What is their customers’ response to their services?

6)Create Your Brand’s Identity

When it comes to small businesses there are plenty of online stores out there so you need to outshine in that.

The next step is to give your brand identity, make people reach your brand.

Compare your brand’s position to that of your competitors.

The Internet allows you to keep an eye on your competitors. It is a huge platform and it makes customers confused when they decide to shop for something. Social media will provide a better marketplace with which you can take over your competitors.

Stand out from the crowd

To make people understand that you are different from your competitors you need to introduce new things in your brand which are different from others, maybe a new flavour or new design?

Learn from examples

Let’s take an example of BMW, a very well-known European car manufacturer brand’s website where they are giving voice to their tagline “The Ultimate Driving Machine” which makes them distinct from ordinary.

7) Learn the Law

Be it a physical or an online business that you want to start, you must always make yourself fully aware of the rules and regulations before starting any venture.

Make sure to keep yourself fully aware of the legislation and save yourself from any unwanted legal issues.

Do not make a mistake to violate any of the following laws:

Privacy and Security

Take care of your own privacy by paying attention to how you search, send and obtain data online.

Copyright and Digital Right

Make sure that the content you post is 100% original and free of any copyrighted material available online.

International Sales

State your terms and conditions as clearly as you can for your own good and the customers’.

Online Sales Tax

Charge your customers the correct amount of sales tax and route the tax collected back to the state.

8)Follow Marketing Strategies

Marketing strategies are a set of strategies for promoting and selling a product or service. Talking about large businesses they can afford traditional marketing techniques so they go with that which turns out to be beneficial.

Now coming to small businesses can’t use those traditional ways because of limited finance. So they can use available resources like:

Social Media

You all will agree with me when I say that social media holds a superpower. Social media marketing is only beneficial if you make a full-fledged plan and implement it in the same way. It requires a good management team and enough time.

Display ads

There are plenty of options available online to display ads. You can display your product’s pictures or videos on different platforms providing necessary pieces of information about it because just one click can help you in getting great website traffic and increase the number of customers.

Newsletters

Newsletters are a great way to update your customers with new developments For example: if there’s a new launch of your product you can inform your customers about it through the newsletter. However, newsletters can also be used to entice customers to visit your website. Introduce new articles and blog posts on your website with summaries that redirect to the full articles and blog posts on your website. You simply use GoDaddy’s Email marketing for that.

Business blogs

Blogs are a great way to connect with your audience. Blogs will allow you to gain their trust and also relate to your business. You can start by writing a blog on how you started this business on your own, what kind of difficulties you faced, let them know, and connect with you. Whether it’s a private relationship or professional. Trust always played a very important role in both. When you’ll interact with your users or followers it will give them a sense of confidence in your brand.

9. Launch Your Store

The way you present or design your store results in making a positive image of your brand and you, Just like a shopkeeper keeps his/her shop well managed and accessible. Let’s say you have an Instagram store so the benefit here is that this platform includes users not only from one state, one country but from the whole world, and it also lets us connect with them very efficiently so this indicates that your product/service will reach almost everyone who’s using social media. Interested customers can simply contact you.

But for that, you need to make your page (Online store) look presentable. When someone sees your page, they should not leave without making a purchase.

Your website, especially for an online business, is the best representation of your business and needs to include all the necessary information regarding your Brand, Workers (to build trust), Products, Pricing, etc.

You can also add a feedback column that will help gain trust easily. This will also result in better customer engagement, because of good engagement with customers, you can get repeat buyers and stable customers who’ll prefer to buy products from your specific brand only.

Social media marketing has proved to play a very vital role in this engagement.

10)Collaborate With Small Business Curators

Online Businesses not only provide you with great opportunities but also a big number of people to reach out which was not possible earlier. Now you can simply connect with your customers with a few clicks and if you don’t want to do that alone you can take help from Business curators who provide a platform to businesses like yours.

They build a strong community of different businesses which also helps customers to buy better products at better prices and not only this but with their support, you can reach a bigger audience, which is a great way to grow your online business rapidly.

One such small business curator is BazaarLive- an online shopping platform that promotes homegrown underrated brands like you so that more and more people get to know about your amazing stuff! And the best part — we do this for free!

Closure

So, these were some quick steps to help you start your business from scratch. I hope this article cleared all the doubts and questions you might have in your mind before starting your own online business.

If you still have some queries or suggestions you would like to share, feel free to reach out to us in the comment section below.

All the best with your new business!