Singapore Web Hosting Blog

although i use “how to start online business” as title of this post, it’s really a vague question, still often asked by visitors and clients.

it will be a 500-hundred-pages-book’s content to answer this question in detail (well not in very detail yet). and one single person can hardly have expertise in all aspects of online business. i’m confident to say i have hands-on experience starting and running small businesses online and make it profitable, however so far i have not much experience in, say, legal issues, formal copy writing, manage bigger team that all work for same web site, etc. there might be many things you have to go through along the way.

in this post i’m going to share a few of my thoughts that you must consider before starting.

1)always do careful research before doing any other thing. what products or services to sell? which market? local or worldwide? adults or teenagers? is the market saturated (it does not mean you have no chance, but you have to plan for it.)? what’s your selling points?

i’m not MBA, i’ve never taken any business related course. i’m telling from experience, market research is extremely important.

do NOT fall in love with your products. do people really want it and would buy it online?

2)be realistic when you start. somehow people tend to associate online business with “make money quick” stuffs. not at all. online business is like any other business, you have to work hard, if not harder.

do not expect to make good money on your very first web site. if you do, well done. if you don’t, it’s ordinary. that is, if you work hard.

you have to spend time and money in your business, same for online businesses. i’m amazed receiving emails asking if we can bring his site to number 1 in google for 200 dollars. be realistic, no such good thing. in the real world, few people would ask TV station to run their commercial for 10 years for 200 bucks, in cyberworld, don’t think it’s possible either.

3)solid marketing plan. you have to think of how to present your great product or service to visitors. how would they find your fantastic sales pitch in the first place. it would not happen automatically.

if your site is supporting channel for existing clients and you do not intend to use web site as marketing channge at all, that’s fine. it can be profitable as well since you can cut cost significantly sometimes by making use of web site.

if you would generate sales online, you have to drop the “build it then see how it goes” mindset. you have to have solid marketing plan that would work upfront.

4)you do not have to have a perfect system to start. it’s rather impossible to set up a perfect system. on our web sites there’re still many things that do not work the way they should, i have to admit. but we have to start from somewhere.

i would suggest you do it now, do it quick. of course always do market research and plan well first.

one question that’s frequently asked by clients is, how should i go about setting up my email accounts?

here’s my step by step instructions, in layman’s words, assuming you have hosting account with us on our Unix servers.

you need to complete 3 steps: 1)point domain name to our server 2)create email accounts on our server 3)configure your email client software. details follow:

1)point your domain to our server. as mentioned in this post, you must have/own domain name AND hosting account in order to set up web site or emails addresses under this domain. and you need to point the domain to your hosting account on our server (in other words, “connect” the domain name with your hosting account).

if the domain name is registered through us, we should have setup this step (domain DNS) for you. if it’s existing domain you registered with another registrar, you have to update DNS yourself.

2)create email accounts on our server, under your hosting account. login to control panel at http://www.yourdomain:2082 , username and password is in order confirmation email we have sent to you. go to email management section by clicking on “mail” icon, then go to “manage/add/remove accounts”, you can manage email accounts here. to create new email accounts, click on “add account”, enter email ID, password, quota, as instructed, then click “create” button. done.

3)configure your email client software. email client software refers to the software you use to access emails. on PC/Windows, it can be Outlook, Outlook Express, Thunderbird, Eudora, etc.

now take Outlook Express as example, go to “tools” menu, select “accounts”, accounts setup window will pop up. click on “add mail”, follow instructions on screen. after account is created successfully, go to “tools” -> “accounts” again, select the email account you just created, click on “properties” and make sure settings are correct:

Mail server type: POP3
Mail server (for both incoming and outgoing): mail.yourdomain
Account name: your entire email address (note: entire email address)
Password: your password
Select “my mail server requires authentication” check box
Do NOT select “logon using secure password authentication”
Select “Remember password”
Unckeck “leave a copy of messages on server” under “advanced tab”

now, try sending/receiving emails, it should work. if it doesn’t, read this post again carefully, make sure you’ve done all 3 steps correctly. if it still does not work, please open support ticket with details.

just noticed an interesting thing, google sometimes gives multiple listings to the 1st ranking web site.

for example, one of my other web sites, About Video Editing, is ranking pretty well in Google. if you google “video editing hardware”, you may see this result:

what interests me is, the additional listings are with short, neat, extreamely accurate title, linking to most important inner pages of the site.

the title or description is not retreived from title or description tag of that linked page, for example, the listings of “hardware guide” and “software reviews“, more like retrieved from anchor text on home page.

it’s not all retrieved from anchor text on home page either, for example, the listing to “top 10 digital video capture cards“, again, it’s different from title tags of the page also.

then how does google choose which pages to list, and what descriptions to use? i’ve to say, both selections are accurate and smart, almost looks like it’s done by human editors. but i guess that’s my imagination only as google always prefer automation. it’s impossible for them to mannually edit results, there are way too many.

the bottom line is, google bot/algo understands the meaning of web pages to certain degree, otherwise the additional listings are hard to believe.

so again, do not try to fool them.