 14 steps to launching an online business. Hey, are you thinking about starting an online business or maybe you already have and you've missed a few steps? You're gonna wanna check out this video because I'm gonna go through the 14 steps that you need to start an online business and we're starting right now. Hey, I'm JR Fisher. Thank you for joining me on my channel. I really appreciate it. Don't forget to subscribe. Hit that big subscribe button down there and don't forget to turn on bell notifications. All bell notifications, all of them. That way, you'll be notified as soon as I do a video, as soon as I go live. You'll know all about it. You'll be in front of the line, the VIP group called the Fisher Family. Thank you so much for watching this video. Now, I have been selling online since 2009 and I've sold millions of dollars of both digital and physical products. And I gotta tell you, when I started out, I made a lot of mistakes. This video will prevent you from making a lot of the mistakes I made that I had to learn on my own. So let's get going. Now, in addition to these 14 steps I'm gonna give you, I also wanna give you a course. It's below, it's a $97 course, but it's absolutely free. It's in the description below. All you gotta do is click and learn, no credit card required. Now, the first thing I'll tell you is, you gotta have, number one, is find a niche. You can't just say, I wanna sell stuff online and make money. You can't say stuff, okay? You need to find a niche, a particular niche. If you find a niche, you can sell all kinds of stuff to that particular niche. So for example, my niche is people who wanna make money online. So I have courses on Facebook ads. I have stuff on SEO. I have things on WordPress websites. I have stuff on finding products, on drop shipping. I can sell all those things to that niche. Those people who wanna make money online. And that's a pretty big niche. That's not as niche down as some of them could be. My wife has dog training. So she has people who wanna train their dog and who want to do positive dog training. So it's niche down a little bit more right there. So the number one thing you gotta have is a niche. Not a product, a niche. Number two, you have to evaluate the market, okay? So if you've decided on a niche, that's great. But is there a big enough market out there to support your niche? Let's say you wanted to do, I don't know, pottery ash trays. That was your niche. People who wanted to make pottery ash trays. I would say, and I haven't researched this one, but I would say that's not a good niche right now, okay? Smokers are not really thought well of anymore. People are trying to quit smoking. Not a lot of people have the time to make their own ash trays anymore. Though you may think it's cool, probably there isn't a big enough audience. Now I could be wrong. You could research this and find me wrong, but I don't think so. So you wanna be really careful out there. If there aren't other people doing what you want, it's not a sign that you're brilliant and you came up with a great idea. It could be a sign that other people tried it and it didn't work. So you wanna check that out and make sure that there is a demand for what you wanna do. Number three, once you figure that out, you wanna conduct market research, all right? So what you wanna do is if you do find some companies out there that are doing what you want, you gotta look at what they're selling. What products do they have? Do they have digital products? Do they have physical products? What are their sales? How long have they been around? What are the keywords they're using? All of these things are super important for you to be successful online. You've gotta conduct this market research. This is so, so important. If you conduct the right market research in the beginning, then your job's gonna be a whole lot easier later on because you know you're on the right path. Number four, conduct competitive analysis. Now this is where once we've figured out the niche and there's a market and all that good stuff, who are our competitors? I wanna know exactly who those competitors are. I wanna know what they're doing. I wanna know what they're selling. I wanna know what prices they're getting. I wanna know what their sales volume is. I wanna know who their customers are because maybe I can get some of those customers if I do that service or product even better. So conducting that competitive analysis is very, very important. And with the internet nowadays, that's pretty easy to do, okay? It doesn't take you a lot of effort to do this. Number five, learn online business laws. Now you may say, well, I don't know much about law and I don't know much about all that stuff, so there's not much I can do. You could learn. That's what you could do. You could learn. You wanna learn about shipping restrictions. You wanna learn about zoning laws. You wanna learn about trademarks. Are you infringing on somebody else's trademark by what you're doing? All these things are super important. You gotta know the laws. What kind of business license do you need for your town, city, state, federal? You know, what type of business should you set up? Should it be a sole proprietorship? Should it be a corporation? What should it be? So all these things are super important. You gotta know the online business laws. Number six, analyze your target market, okay? So now what we've done is we figured out our products, donation, all those good things, but we need to analyze our target market. So if we've got people who, let's say, like to color their hair and who are over 35, we wanna figure out where are these people located? Are they male or are they female? What kind of jobs are they in? What are their hobbies? What are their likes? What are their dislikes? Because you can target these people from many different areas. If you find single women at home who are over 35 who wanna color their hair are people who also play tennis at a rate of 80% of these people play tennis, well, you could actually target tennis players with your hair coloring products. So it's really important to analyze that customer out there and figure out where are they at? What are they doing? What are they thinking? Next up is source your product. That's number seven. Where are you gonna get your product from? Now, if you're doing physical products, maybe you're gonna be doing drop shipping. Maybe you're gonna use AliExpress. If you're gonna be making your own products, who's the manufacturer? Who's gonna do this? Who's manufacturing that product for other people right now that could get you a good price? So sourcing your product is super, super important. Are you gonna warehouse that product? Are they gonna ship it out? What's gonna happen? Number eight, choose the right e-commerce platform. Now, I see this time and time again where somebody will get an idea to sell something. It's watches or sunglasses or whatever it is, which is not a niche, by the way. And they will build a website around it. And it's the worst thing you can do. You do not want to do this. You want to test the product first and then build the website. So how do you do that? How do you sell products? We don't have a website. You use something like Cartra. I will put a link below. Cartra, you can build your sales pages. You can put your products there. Doesn't matter if it's a digital product, physical product. And you can actually put up these pages in like 30 minutes and send traffic to them, whether it's email or ads or whatever, and find out if that product's gonna sell. Now, if that product sells and it works out, then you go ahead and build your website. You add more products to it. You build your sales funnel. You should do all this other fancy stuff. But bottom line is you've got to find the right e-commerce platform. And the first one you want to start with is Cartra Barnon. There's a link below where you can actually watch and see how Cartra works. If you choose to get Cartra, you can actually get it for a $1 trial. So check out that link below. Grab yourself some Cartra. Number nine, you gotta launch your store. Okay, I mean launch it. I remember when I built my first website and I put the website there and I just looked at it and I'm like, well, there's nobody there. Nobody's buying anything because I didn't launch it. I just put it there. There was no launch to it. I didn't know how to get it in front of people. I didn't know how to make people go there. I didn't know any of those things. So you gotta actually launch, right? Your store, your website, your Cartra page. You gotta launch it. Number 10, you gotta drive traffic. Okay, so having a website is not like a store. You don't really put your website in an area where there's a lot of traffic. Like if you were opening a restaurant, you may go to a strip mall and say, well, this strip mall here gets a lot of foot traffic. There's this store and this store and they're all popular. A lot of people come in there. If I put my restaurant in the middle of it, surely I'm gonna grab some traffic. You can't do that with a website. Essentially, what you do with the website is you put it on the internet and there's nothing around you. Nothing, there's no traffic. And you have to push traffic there. You've gotta use social media like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram. All these things that can get out in front of people where there is traffic and then direct that traffic to where your store's located at. So you do have to drive traffic. Number 11, and this only applies to you if you have physical products, but you have to master small business shipping. Shipping is a nightmare, okay? Shipping is tough. Shipping is tough because, number one, it's very expensive. Shipping is really expensive. Now we sell survival food and we have some canned meats and they're super heavy. So it costs us a lot of money to ship to people but we had to figure out about shipping rates. We had to figure out how to package them. We had to figure out how to protect them so they wouldn't get dented, which we had a lot of damage in the beginning. There's a lot to shipping, okay? So if you've got physical products, you wanna master the small business shipping. It's super important. Number 12, measure your online success, okay? You've gotta learn how to look at analytics. If you're driving traffic to your site, if you're sending out emails, if you're doing social media, you gotta be able to look at the data. What happened? Did you get results? Did they go to your page? Did they opt in? Did they buy? Did they not buy? Did they take your upsell? What happened to these people? If you don't analyze this and you don't have the software to do it, you're not gonna be very successful. That's why I recommend Cartra because Cartra will do all this for you. Once traffic starts going to one of the pages, it starts looking at analytics. It can start telling you if things are working or not and like I said below, there's a link to Cartra. You can watch a video there. You can get a trial for only $1 so you wanna check out Cartra. Really super important to have that if you're gonna sell online. Number 13, you gotta scale your business. What do I mean by scale my business? Well, what I mean is I wanna grow it. I want it to grow fast. I want a lot of things to happen and there's several ways you can do that. One of the ways, of course, is if you're running ads, you spend more money on ads. If you get an ad that works, you're gonna spend more money on ads but you don't leave it at one ad. You try another ad and another ad and another ad. You try different platforms and you keep trying. Most of these things won't work. But you don't need too many of them to work because you spend a little bit of money figuring out the things that don't work and then the one that does work, you just start dumping all your money into that particular thing. Then what you do is you add on more products. That's a great way to scale your business is the customers you already have. Instead of them spending more on that product, you offer them more different related products. You get more money out of those customers because you're offering more to them. Now the next thing, and I think this is one of the biggest and a lot of people don't do is number 14, get insights from industry's top experts. Go to people who have already achieved what you want to achieve and talk to them. Now I have courses, I've been selling online since 2009. We've sold millions of dollars of both digital and physical products and people come to me and say, hey, I need advice on this or that and I give them advice. Now, do I charge for that advice? For the most part, yeah. You're getting some free stuff right now but I have a couple friends who will come to me and say, hey, I need advice on this. I have a friend who just started a YouTube channel and I noticed he sent out an email today and the subject line was how to migrate your sold business off of Amazon and then there was an email. Now I look at that and I think, well, that's the worst thing in the world you could have put because anybody who hasn't sold a business on Amazon who doesn't want to migrate that business off of Amazon is never going to open his email. It's just going to get deleted. It's going to go away. So, you know, I look at that and I say, well, I've got experience with that and I know that a subject line, like you're not going to believe what just happened, check this out, it would work a whole lot better or did you see this? You may need this, check this out. Those subject lines would work a lot better. So, he could come to me as an industry expert and say, hey, nobody's opening my email, why is that? And I could immediately look at that email and go because you got the wrong subject line, okay? This could save you a tremendous amount of time because you may not understand that a subject line is not a subject line. It's not to tell you what the subject of the email is, it's just to get somebody to open the email and then you tell them what it's about. That's how that works. And the email is not to sell them anything, it's to get them to click, to go to the page to sell them the thing or to watch the video or to opt in, whatever it is. But if you don't go to an industry expert, so you could come to me, you could go below, you could grab my course down there. It's a $97 course, you get it absolutely free. And you can say, well, this guy sold some stuff online, he may know something, okay, industry expert. And you could learn that, you could do that without a credit card. That's pretty cool. And then I have other trainings that do cost money, okay? And they're worth it because they work and if you apply the information, you get good results too. So that's my list of 14 things and I wanna hear your input. I wanna hear what you think of these 14 things and I wanna hear which ones work for you, what things don't work for you. Put it in the comments below. Also, if you haven't done so, make sure you subscribe, hit that big subscribe button there and turn on bell notifications. Turn on all of them, turn on all bell notifications. So that you get notified every single time I do a new video, you're part of the Fisher Family, the VIP group, that gets notified before anybody else, you're at the front of the line. Pretty cool stuff. Also, you'll wanna check out this video, it'll help you a lot. Thanks for watching this video and I'll see you in the next one.