Making a living online | Part 2: Establishing an online presence

Please note that this is the second part about making a living online. You can find the first part here in case you missed it!

Establishing an online presence

Now that you know what service or product you will offer, it is time to let people know about your product or service.

FaceBook Page

This is the fastest way to get an online presence and it can be used to attract clients for most ventures. The drawback of this is that you will not get traffic from search engines, and you have a smaller space to present your services. For that reason, it’s best to use this in combination with a website. To create a Facebook page (not to be confused with a Facebook profile) you will need to have an account, and then just follow these simple steps. Once you have your page make sure to add a profile picture, background image and fill out all the information for the page.

You can find some great tips on how to make your page look attractive and engaging here.

Freelance marketplaces

This is a quick place to offer your services. The most trafficked freelance marketplaces are Fiverr.com and UpWork.com. Make sure that you stand out from your competition by having a better profile page, better prices, or a unique service. On these types of sites it is very important to reply as fast as possible, because people normally contact many different service providers at a time. It’s a good idea to set your prices cheap to begin with to establish a reputation, as this will create more confidence in your profile and ultimately help you increase your sales. It is certainly possible to live off these services, but I do recommend having a main website to get clients directly from the search engines.

Your Own Website

This is the best option for getting your online business going. It is the most difficult of all the options, especially if you know nothing about websites. But not to worry, there are plenty of services that make it a breeze to set up a nice looking site. Below you will see the different resources you can use.

If you have no technical skill you can still get set up quickly. A very good service is Wix.com where you will be guided through the steps of setting up your site. There are plenty of professional themes to choose from and they even include a domain and hosting (where your site is stored) all for free.

There is no integrated online shop, but you can start by displaying your services and let people contact you by email, phone and social media. If you already have some experience in making websites, here are some recommendations to get your website up quickly.
Firstly, you need a domain name for your business, and a place to store it. You can get both of these at GoDaddy.com. They often give a discount for combining the two services.

Next, you need a platform to maintain the content on your site. I recommend Wordpress, which is the most popular system of its kind, and also free. It can be a little complicated to install, but with GoDaddy you can actually install this with just a few clicks.

You can see a quick guide on how to do it here.

Now that you have your site and content platform running, you need an attractive design and possibly an online shop depending on what service you provide. There are plenty of free designs and systems out there, but I recommend choosing one that has a lot of users so that you can get support and updates for your site. One of the best places to buy themes is ThemeForrest.net. On ThemeForest, you can find many stunning WordPress themes that fit the image of your business. A lot of them include fully functional shopping carts and other useful features. Once you have purchased your theme it will include a guide on how to set it up, and it is quite easy to do within the administration section of WordPress.

Thank you for reading the second part of a multi part series that will help you get started with your own online business. The next post will be about promoting your venture, so follow us and stay tuned for the next chapter!

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