The only investments required for a successful online business are dedication, commitment, patience, knowledge, and an extremely small amount of money. This article discusses a five steps strategy for acquiring the foundational knowledge before you start your online business.



1. Find a niche. The niche you choose depends on what you like and your passion to learn more about the niche. However, there should be some reasonable demand for information and services in your niche. If only a very limited number of people are interested in your niche, you will not be able to generate good revenue from that niche.

A second aspect of selecting a niche is the competition. If lots of people are fighting in the same niche, it is a dog eats dog world and it will be extremely difficult to succeed.

So, how do you find a niche that has reasonable demand and little competition? Learn about your niche first and than do keyword research using the techniques described below.

2. Learn about your niche. Even if you think you have lots of knowledge about your niche, you should first get more insights and knowledge about current events related to your niche. This will also help you create a list of keywords relevant to your niche

Start with Wikipedia and than move to Google news and blog search. Spend at least a week end reading and book marking enough materials for an in depth grasp of the subject. Write down any related keywords you come across in this learning phase.

For example, let's say you want to create a niche site about golf ball. Search "wiki golf ball" in Google and the first listing is the Wikipedia page about golf ball. Use the same technique to search Google news for some recent newsworthy articles about golf ball.

The goal in this learning phase is to broaden your knowledge and collect related keywords to your niche.

3. Start keyword research. Finding the right keywords and phrases is crucial to starting your web site. The first step is building a list of keywords to determine their search volume and competition.

Use a keyword tool like AdWord keyword tool or Wordtracker. For example, when you use the keyword "golf ball" in the AdWord keyword tool, you will see a list of keywords with their search volume and advertisers' competition for those keywords.

Start grabbing keywords that have at least 1000 searches per month and the advertisers' competition bar not completely filled in. You should have at least 20 keywords in this early phase of your keyword research.

4. See what competitors are doing. Once you have a selected a few dozen keywords related to your niche, start your competitive intelligence research. Enter the keywords you collected in step 3 in Google and create a list of sites that show up on the top listings of the search engine result page.

Visit each site and get yourself familiar with those sites. Copy the title and meta tags of each site in to a spreadsheet. Now use the AdWord keyword tool to check what keywords they are using in their web pages.

Use your competitors' keywords to generate more related keywords using the AdWord keyword tool. You should have a large number of keywords to move to the next phase.

5. Once you have a list of keywords, go to godaddy domain registrar to find an available domain using those keywords. Click on the bulk registration link and you will land on the bulk registration page.

The bulk registration has a text box where you can enter up to 500 domain names for checking their availability. Paste all the keywords you have gathered in your earlier research in the bulk registration text box.

Don't worry about spaces in the keywords; the godaddy domain name checker tool will take care of it. When you click the go button, it will display all the domains available for registration. The domain you select should be short and easy to remember. You should also make sure that you register a domain with a com extension.

Prior to starting any online business, you should execute the five steps described above thoroughly. If you neglect these foundational steps, you may regret latter.