Starting small business on the Internet is your best protection in these troubled times. There are two overriding advantages to such a business. First, you can start it without leaving your present job. Some small business ideas for doing this are provided later. Second, all the tools for putting your business on the Internet, and promoting it among prospective customers, are available on the Internet. You don't need any HTML or other technical knowledge for doing these.

We mentioned about small business ideas. Let us take a look at some. Drop shipping is one idea that would save you the trouble of stocking up goods. You just pass on the orders received at your site to a wholesale 'drop shipper' who will execute it in your name. You can fix a price that includes a markup over the price you pay the wholesaler. Another idea is explained at this website on social business. Or you can start an affiliate business where you promote the products of other merchants. An excellent affiliate programme is available at SiteSell. You might come across many other business ideas. Be forewarned however that there are many scams on the Internet. So do try to assess the soundness of the ideas.

How exactly do you go about establishing your small business on the Internet? Here is a broad checklist (don't be scared - there are tools to do the technical tasks involved):

• Identify a product or business idea;
• Register an Internet domain name related to the above selection (if you plan to add more products later, try to have the name cover these also);
• Identify your prospective customer and prepare a sales copy that would highlight the benefits of your offer to that person;
• Convert this sales copy into a presentation that would do two things:
  • Rouse the interest and persuade your prospect to buy; and
  • Come up in the first few pages of the search results when a customer searches for your product in search engines;
• Add pages for taking orders from visitors (shopping cart) to your web site and accepting their payments by credit cards (payment gateway);
• Find an Internet server to host your domain and upload the above presentation and other pages to that server (web-hosting);
• Submit your site to search engines and start other promotional activities to bring visitors to your site; and finally
• Start accepting orders and executing them!

There is one product SiteSell Buildit that will attend to most of the above things. They will help you prepare search engine friendly and sales effective copy, register your domain, host it, submit your site to search engines, and help you increase visitors to your site. Just add your hard work and persistence to this resource, and results will come!

Business on the Internet is something Else! Results depend more on Persistence than Personality!