Hello, welcome to LiftTraffic. In this post I would tell you how to start your online business in the correct way.

First Things You Need To Do Before Starting Your Online Business (Step By Step)

Before I go into listing these, I would like to let you know that your online business is a brand. Think big of it as any of the big brands you know out there, like Samsung, Yamaha, or whatever your favorite big brand might be.

It is very important that you take your brand as serious as this, in other words, take your online business as serious as those brands. You have to treat it as serious as you would treat a business. It is a real business.

Now, let’s go on to the list of the first things you need to do before starting your online business. These first things are very important to help you stay organized with a clear vision from scratch.

• Carefully Think And Make A Conclusion On What Your Brand Is All About.
• Find An Available Perfect Domain Name You Love For Your Brand.
• Check If The Available Perfect Domain Name Is Also Available On All Popular Social Media.
• Set Up A Gmail Account And Social Media Accounts With Your Domain name as username.
• Secure/Buy The Available Perfect Domain Name You Love For Your Brand.
• Host Your Domain Name And Start Your Online Business Website.

Just 6 steps, and you are done, your online business has been perfectly started. Each of these steps is very necessary if you want to start your online business in an organized way. Let’s explain these steps.

1. Carefully Think And Make A Conclusion Of What Your Brand Is All About

If you are starting out to create an online business, and you create your business without knowing exactly what you wanted to do, and plan it out, you are bound to fail when you meet obstacles along the way.

You need to summarize what your brand is all about, have a vision and focus on it. You will need to keep that vision and focus all the way to the top. It will be your source of motivation.

Think of purpose of your brand and the result you want to achieve with it.

Think of the people who are in need of the kind of service you are trying to render.
Think of what their worst problem is. This will help you come up with a better plan of how find and reach exactly your target audience, and how to offer truly valuable service to them.

2. Find An Available Perfect Domain Name You Love For Your Brand

Once you have thought out very well what your brand is about, what you want to achieve with it, and the type of audience you are targeting, then it is time to chose the perfect domain name for your brand.

Head over to namecheap.com, and in the search bar right there on the home page, type the names you think will be very suitable for your website.

A great domain name has to be short (at most, 12 letters), memorable or easy to remember, and closely related to what your brand is about.

Once you have found that perfect domain name you love, and it is available, then it is time to move on to the next step 3.

3. Check If The Available Perfect Domain Name Is Also Available On All Popular Social Media.

When you look above this page, you will likely see the names of all popular social media platforms.
You will need these social media accounts to grow your fan base and build a community of loyal fans who will in turn bring traffic to your website and possibly buy what you sell or promote.

Before you purchase or secure your domain name, you need to check if someone is already using the domain name as username for either his account, or page, or group.

It would be preferable if no one is using it yet. That would make a perfect branding.
However, if you find a domain name that perfectly fits your brand or website goals, but someone is already using that on their social media accounts, you can add some numbers to the name while creating social media accounts for business, to make a difference from the other account.

4. Set Up A Gmail Account And Social Media Accounts With Your Domain name as username.

Now simply set up a gmail account and social media accounts with your domain name as username. You will need to set up gmail account first because, when you go to create social media accounts for your brand, they will ask you to enter an email address.

This email address (gmail) is where you will be receiving all notifications about comments, replies, etc that happens on your social media account regarding your brand/business. It is very necessary to receive all them in one place so that you can easily keep track of them.

Of course, when you finally host and create your website, you will get a professional email address that ends in your domain name instead of @gmail.com.

For example, lets say your domain name is mybusiness.com, you will get an email that says, myemail@mybusiness.com, but I prefer to use this for professional contacts only, and then use gmail for social media and the likes. You don’t want people sending you spam in your professional email.

After you have done this, now let’s move on to the most exciting part 🙂

5. Secure/Buy The Available Perfect Domain Name You Love For Your Brand.

The very moment you secure or buy this perfect domain name you have found for your website, YOU HAVE STARTED A BUSINESS! Now you own a brand! It’s on you to make it as big as you want. You can be the next Facebook, Amazon or Ebay making billions from your website, business and brand.

Honestly, I do find securing the domain name more exciting than hosting it, although both are equally important.

There are two ways you can secure or buy your domain name.
1. You can either visit a domain name registrar and buy a domain name of your choice and then point the Domain Name Servers (DNS) to your web hosting company or
2. You can buy a hosting plan from a web hosting company, and get your domain name hosted there for FREE for the first year you run your online business.

I recommend the second option because it has two advantages.

a. You are getting a domain name for free for 1 full year.

b. You will have your domain name registration and hosting in one place, which makes you more organized, if you have to make some settings/changes in future, for example renewing the domain names and hosting.

Also, you will not need to do the extra settings of pointing your domain name servers to your hosting company.

So following the second method above leads us to the final step immediately which is,

6. Hosting Your Domain Name And Starting Your Online Business Website

Simply visit hostinger.com (This is website is hosted on hostinger so I can recommend that to you. ) . Scroll down and click on on select as shown below, to select the best hosting plan as a beginner.

Chose your platform. If you are trying to create a blog or an ecommerce website or even any other type of website, WordPress will be a very good fit for you. WordPress could be used to create almost any type of website.

You can choose to install WooCommerce immediately, or you can install the plugin later, even if you chose just WordPress.

After that, enter the email you already created above in step 4 as administrator email. You see, this is also one of the reasons why it is very important that you create the email as recommended in step 4 before starting your online business.

Because currently you don’t have any email that bears your domain name as you haven’t finished with the registration yet and can’t create that “myemail@mydomain.com” ,

but now, with this gmail you already created in step 4 using your domain name, and you also signed up on all social media accounts related to your brand/business with this same email,

now you will get all notifications, everything that happens in your business, in this email and you can easily keep track of them. When you create the official email for example, “myemail@mydomain.com”,

you will only use that for sending professional emails to customers who opted in to receive notifications/updates about your business.

So enter the email address you already created , in the field below as administrator email, then create a password for it. This password will be used by you every time to access the backend of your website. So it is very important that you keep it safe. Click on “Continue”.

You have 3 options. You can visit your WordPress Dashboard and log in with the email and password you just entered above, or you can view your website immediately, or you can visit your web hosting control panel.

If you are like me, you would want to choose the second option and view your website immediately to ensure it is live and working. But when you click on that, you might see this error message.

Don’t be afraid, don’t worry about that, just go and type out your domain name for example “mydomain.com” in a different tab, and you will see that your website is working properly. 🙂

If you were like me, you will be very happy at this point. You have successfully established an online presence. If you followed all the steps in this post, just 6 steps, by now you will have properly set up and started your online business in the correct way. Congratulations!

At this point, you can take a breath and relax if you want to. Bookmark this page and take note of where you stopped, so that you can continue when you return, or simply keep going if you are like me and wanna get started immediately 🙂

The very last thing that you should do after this, is to set up your SSL certificate. For example, when you view your website link after taking all these steps, you will notice that it says, http://yourdomain.com and on the left side of it, it says “Not Secure” .

When you look at other websites URL (link), you will notice that most of them have theirs saying https with a padlock icon beside it, showing that it is secured. It looks nicer and also adds to the security of your website and you would want yours to look like that too.

Hostinger offers you a free forever SSL certificate that never expires, so you will never have to renew it. Simply log in on to your HPanel using the email and password you created when registering on Hostinger and click on “SSL” from the top menu.

(As a new website without SSL enabled yet, you should have it in front of your HPanel dashboard once you log in, but if you don’t find it then click on SSL as shown below).
You will find “Force SSL” . Click on it and activate the SSL Certificate.

Now wait for few minutes or an hour, and reload your website again. Your website URL or link should be showing “https” with a padlock icon beside it.

Congratulations! once again, you have completely set up and started an online business properly.

Simply log into your WordPress dashboard install a theme of your choice and start growing your business. Here is a video that will teach you everything about WordPress so you can configure your website however you want it to work for you. You don’t have to watch the video completely, you can use it as a reference point anytime you want to make some tweaks to your website.

If you have any questions, comments or reply, please leave them below. I am here to help you.