Starting An Online Business

Starting an online business is a great way to boost an existing off-line business or to start working for yourself giving you more money and freedom. This is a subject that is very close to my own heart as it is exactly what I did a few years ago and now I work from home, for myself and I earn more than I ever have.

Here is my story:

Hi, I'm Laura,

A full time mum, here I am with my baby girl taking some well deserved time out (up to my ancles in snow) after she was born.

This is my story of how my internet business came into existance, how it earns me an income every month, and how I was even able to take six months off work when my little girl was born without a drop in earnings.

I never really thought it was possible to make a living from something you loved unless you had a large business or were very lucky. To tell you my story I need to go back a few years.

My hobby since I was a young girl has been building and collecting dolls houses and I always wanted to own my own doll house business. I thought it would be fantastic to own my own shop selling dolls houses and miniatures. Collecting and building dolls houses was what I loved and what could be better than doing something you love every day. So when I left University I opened my own dolls house shop.

I called it Laura Anne Dolls Houses after me. To begin with I loved being in the shop, I got to build and sell dolls houses all day which was what I wanted to do. What I hadn't really considered when I had the idea of the shop was the amount of work I would have to put in. The shop was open five days a week and I had to be there serving customers plus on top of that I had to find time to check and order my stock, build doll house orders for customers and do my accounting and admin work. I ended up working over 60 hours a week and the hobby I loved turned into a endless job and when I did get a little time to myself I didn't want to spend it working on my own dolls house.

I found myself wanting to go back to enjoying dolls houses as a hobby and not having them as a full time business. I didn't think this was possible unless I went to work for someone else and the idea of that didn't really thrill me. I liked being my own boss and although I didn't like the number of hours I worked I didn't think I could go back to working for someone else.

One day a stumbled across a web site online that said you could build an information web site about something you love and are knowlegeable about and actually make money from selling advertising on it. I was very skeptical about this claim, I already had a web site for the shop and although I got sales through it I didn't see that it was possible to charge other people for advertising on it.

As I read further though the site seemed to make more and more sense. It said how if you have a hobby or an interest that you know a lot about it is very likely that the information you have learnt will benefit other people and that there are other people out there on the Internet searching for that information. That made a lot of sense to me. I knew an awful lot about dolls houses and customers were always asking me questions about them. If I had more information on my web site then maybe I could make some money off advertising on the site and hopefully also boost my online dolls house sales as well.

The site I came across with this information was Site Build It. They have a web site hosting program that sells itself as an all-in-one site-building, site-hosting, site-promoting suite of tools. It supposedly eliminates all the confusing technical complexities and exhausting manual labor involved in building and promoting a site, and leaves you with the fun part - creating content.

Site Build It boasted that with their program anyone could create web pages that would rank highly in search engines and get lots of visitors. I found this quite hard to believe. I had been running my web site for a couple of years at this point and had never ranked highly in search engines despite trying the advice of many Internet marketers who claimed they held the secrets to search engine rankings. I decided this couldn't possibly be true and went back to concentrating on working in my shop.

Months went by and I was still working 60 hour weeks and really considering giving up my business and going to work for someone else. All the time I kept thinking that there must be an easier way to make a living doing something I loved. My mind kept going back to what I had read on the Site Build It web site and eventually after six months of deliberation I decided to give it a go.

I changed the hosting of my web site www.ladollshouse.com to Site Build It in July 2004 and it was the best move I ever made.

My goal was to build an online business that would generate an income equal to a full time wage.

Site Build It comes with an ebook that takes you through a ten step process to building a successful web site. It took me a few months of fitting in an hour in here and there but I eventually optimised my web site pages and got them up and running.

I started to see results from the start. About a month after I transferred the web site it started to pop up in search engines and the number of visitors I was getting started to grow. My online sales went up as my visitors did.

The underlying philosophy is to rank high in the search engines for keywords that are in high demand and that way generate lots of traffic to our site and lots of clicks on the ads and click throughs to my affiliates.

In November & December 2004 just 4 months after transferring my site to Site Build It I made over £1000.

Since then the web site has gone from strength to strength and has done so well that I closed my shop to work from home on the web site. There was no sense in running a shop when I was making more money from my online business and could work from home with a lot less stress and work load. Dolls Houses have gone back to being my hobby. I write about them on my web site and spend my time building mine instead of building them for other people - I love my hobby again.

Today 100% of my income for my dolls house business comes from advertising and sales on my web site.

Since closing my dolls house shop I have also set up other web sites on hobbies and interests I have. I currently have six web sites in total and so far the highest income for one month has been £11,562. This was at Christmas time when dolls houses are most popular and was an astronomical figure, even so, my average monthly income is much more than I would earn in any regular job!

Anyone can build a successful web site about an interest or hobby. If you have the passion for something you love how easy would it be to just tell people about it. There is lots of information on this site about how to get started yourself or if you want to find out more about Site Build It, the tool that made my web site so successful Click Starting An Online Business or to read more case stuides from other successful SiteBuildIter's Click Here