Many people say that they would like to start their own business, but they simply haven’t got an idea yet. This is some sort of a rubbish really. We have got plenty of idea, they need refining and working upon, that’s true. Yet the issue is that many have a stumbling block of not enough confidence to make a first step. If you make this step, do a test, what’s most negative thing that can happen? It won’t work? Well, successful entrepreneurs have tried, failed, learnt their lessons, but then found their success. This long read is actually about starting up with or without new product ideas. You can start your own business whilst having no major product innovation. 

Before we begin 

Successful people say you need to play on your strengths and benefit from your unique skills, experience and talents. Some also deem the old saying ‘Do not put all your eggs into one basket’ as no longer valid. They insist that you will be better off by putting your eggs in one basket, but start watching it very carefully! 

What is it for you? 

It means that anyone can (and, dare I add, should be) a master of their own life. This principle goes a long way when setting up new ventures and businesses.It is all you – you would need to use your experience, risk a little bit, and build the way you want to live. Focus on the things that matter. 

Powerful stuff, don’t you think? 

This post is also me as it is based on my 15+ years of experience managing affiliate marketing, running affiliate websites, creating e-commerce pages and working with some incredible people who managed to get to a point of profitability from a level ‘0’: it is basically a game to grow your sales from 0 to something that you want that figure to be. 

You will be different from every other reader who will encounter this post: some of you have never thought of it, some are trying to develop ideas based on the strengths and passions, and some are already starting up. Regardless of the stage, you need to know why you are doing it and have a lot of perseverance to deal with rejections, occasional issues and serendipity. Yet the rewards would be much greater – the main one is your freedom, is it something you want to waste? 

Many would say that you need a product or at least a service to sell to be considered ‘in business’. Generally speaking, it is correct as physical products like hi-tech and tangible services, i.e. plumbing, are those things that you may offer to your customers. Yet when you look at comparison websites, blogs, club or membership websites, you realise that they are intermediaries – what they provide is their advice, easy to use and navigate information, but in a nutshell they sell third party  products and services; and so can you! 

It means that as soon as you realise what are your major strengths, valuable experience and stuff that you simply love doing (hopefully all in one), simply try to imagine what you can do with it. An insurance professional can always start an information portal on different services and provide a niche service selling other company’s policies; an adult who has realised that his passion is in wine and not with anything else can start writing the blog hoping to grow the readership to open his own store. The list goes on and on. 

It can frightening to start up from nothing, yet some entrepreneurs added that it simply should scary – in a way it shows that you have a right idea. This idea will be your magnet and a thing you will strive to create. When stakes are that high, you will fear to fail. Yet again, do you really want to gamble with your dreams? 

We start with your dreams, interests and strengths, so many of you, who are at a very early stage, can think about the direction they want to go. It then goes further to explore more traditional businesses where you actually dealing with physical products or services. For the ones who determined they can add value to somebody else’s shopping or browsing experience by being an affiliate then please read on the next chapter where we discuss startups with no products. 

Can you see it is already shaping up to be very realistic and doable? To reassure you further, there is a ‘Next Steps’ afterword, which will get you thinking about how to getting your first sales in, grow your business and persevering on this journey. 

Good luck and hopefully this will inspire you for action. Afterall, if there is no action, your idea will not materialise! 

Business ideas 

Hopefully you have already got a clearer idea of your capabilities, what you can use from your previous work experience, passions for specific markets or products, knowledge about it, financial assets, connections and your everyday commitments. 

First of all, let’s start with something brand new: sourcing inspiration from unfamiliar. It is a great way to stimulate your thinking process. You should seek stimulus material in the form of pictures, visuals, audio (connected to your chosen interest). Simply find some new things to do, it will get your creative juices flowing. 

Next stop is to determine what is your field of expertise. Try to imagine a perfect conversation when you are confident about the subject and enjoying talking about it for ours. What is it? 

Note everything – you will use it for idea generation. 

When exactly you felt inspired? Think of several subjects – these could be the initial ideas. Write them down – this is so called low hanging fruit, something obvious. You can then work and dig deeper from these points. Your aim here is to move beyond what staring you in the face. 

Try the inspiration game: think about someone who inspired you. Who is that? What do they do? Think about your own achievements. Would you be able to write a short article describing your success? This will help you to find out what exactly makes you inspired. 

Make a long list of those daring and bold ideas. Go for a large quantity. That is what people call a ‘brainstorm’. 

After you get a good list of ideas try the following exercises to work with them and form something new and meaningful to you. Do not worry if some of them sound too unrealistic or just silly, you need a lot of them now! 

Try a role-playing game: imagine yourself as a chef. Think about an idea and then add something to it, then remove something. Change its colour, shape, size and design by varying and re-arranging the ‘materials’ (components of your idea). Continue thinking about a chef’s job: substitute components of your idea, combine some of them together. Something isn’t working properly? Adapt it or eliminate. Can you put some elements to other uses? What other things chefs do? They learn more about their passion in front of the others and then share it. Based on the ideas you’ve already taken, and your identified passions, can  you think of what is not shared? Could it be your niche? 

Now, get ready for a ‘Mix and Match’ exercise. De Bono suggested that you can use some hobbies or interests to increase attractiveness of others. So what you are going to do is to choose a hobby (say, fashion) you want to base your business idea upon and then try to increase its attractiveness by adding other hobbies or interests (i.e. sport) to it. What are you getting? 

Can you try and check how one idea can be merged with another to create even a better one? Try merging them until  really stuck. What do you get? Make a list. 

Get cozy on your sofa and try to reflect a little bit. How exactly do your hobbies and interests link to existing businesses? Are those businesses successful? Can you think of how to make one (or several) of them better? It is sometimes as simple as  being able to execute better! 

Let’s move forward to something even more powerful. There is  a big opportunity in harnessing the power of doing good.  Research has shown that most people are becoming increasingly happy when doing good to strangers. Think about your hobbies and how useful they are to other people. Can you make them useful? It is an interesting challenge how to turn your passion into something meaningful for other people. That is exactly when they start buying things from you! 

As you can see there are plenty of practical and also fun exercises for you to get your creative juices flowing and get to  develop your idea to something more or less formed. 

There are plenty more guidelines for ones generating their ideas from scratch in ‘A Quest for New Ideas’ book, which focuses solely on idea generation and composed in a form of a graphic (even sometimes comic) non-fiction. You can find ‘break and build’, ‘rugby and human contact’, storytelling exercises along with useful information on managing restrictions, using innovation triggers, employing relevance crossing and networking, playing a dream game and more. It is available at www.eatwineplay.com following this link and also on  Amazon. 

Let’s move forward with your product, service or an area where you want to start your business – the next couple of chapters show you that it is all you need really as even without a product you can be in business by selling somebody else’s products just being an affiliate! 

E-commerce stores 

Let’s start with a more traditional option – you’ve found what you want to do and it is a physical product or a service that you can sell online. 

You would need to create a store for it. Unless you want to develop something entirely from scratch (I will not go with that route unless you are creating a competitor for Apple!), you will want to use one of the existing e-commerce solutions. 

I have searched and evaluated dozens of various e-commerce software options. At the top end you get bespoke solutions which will cost you thousands of pounds for your startup, but also charge some fees based on your turnover. Smaller DIY packages could be very cost-effective, but so difficult to set up requiring quite a robust technical knowledge. I have come across some simple solutions that you can buy for under £50 as one-off payment, but they have either very limited functionality (i.e. WordPress e-commerce plugins) or indeed  very difficult to set up. 

My advice is to go with Shopify.com solution. You can literally start your own shop in a few minutes, selecting a theme for it, adding some details and selecting your plan. Let’s go into a bit more detail about the whole process of setting up an online store. 

Name your store! 

Assuming you already have some options in mind, I advise you check whether a domain name is available for it as well. I recommend using Bluehost and checking the availability there, so if it is not registered yet then you can to buy a domain name for your store. Do not compromise on it, because you will be investing heavily in it as a brand, so select it carefully. If your needed domain name is not available, you may want to try and find out whether you can buy it as a premium domain (it can cost hundreds if not thousands of pounds), but I recommend tweaking your domain name a bit or brainstorming a few more options to get to a needed result – a brilliant name that is still available. In most cases when you are hunting for a .com domain Bluehost will help – they provide a brilliant service and a very good customer support. Yet if you are considering only a UK operation (think carefully, would you like to be able to sell Internationally?), you may want to check whether your preferred name is (also) available as a .co.uk domain. You can use UnlimitedWebHosting.co.uk, which is a very good UK based hosting provider that I also use for some of my local domains as well. 

Create your e-store account. 

After you have sorted your domain you can register an account with Shopify and link your domain to your Shopify account. There is a step-by-step instruction how to do it, so it would be a piece of cake for you. 

You will have 14 days to test Shopify features and become familiar with the software as they offer a free trial for that period. It will help you to understand which plan you want to buy from them as they start at $29 only plus card processing fees (unavoidable anyway). If you will require more features and lower transaction fees because you anticipate a bigger turnover, it is worth looking at their more expensive professional packages. 

What I love about this software that it is already integrated with their own card processing service, which is competitive in terms of transaction fees and you, again, do not need to integrate any third party solutions (i.e. Worldpay, which I also found quite difficult to use, very bureaucratic and some hidden fees on top of that, so needed to cancel my account asap!) 

How to make it look like you want to? 

Everything is very customizable and easy to find at Shopify’s admin interface. You can start by selecting a theme for your store, that is a template you can then make prettier and like your own. You can use of the free templates for your trial, just to check everything out. Yet they also offer their own and third party premium themes. You can get a very professionally looking storefront for just under $60! 

That is basically it for you to start trading – isn’t that beautiful and so easy? 

I have created a simple store from a free template just by adding a logo and customizing the colours that suit my business. It does not look at robust as Amazon, but it is clean and very easy to read. Perfect for a startup. 

Add some important pages. 

You will be extremely busy with adding products to your store, taking and publishing pictures, setting up prices and delivery charges. Do not forget to publish such pages as Terms and Conditions, Privacy Policy and Refunds Policy – they are obligatory on every e-commerce site, and again, happy days, Shopify has got templates for those pages so you can easily edit some information about you there and you are good to go! 

Custom design and web development solutions. 

Many people have already got some ideas how they want their store to look like: logo, colours and layout. You need to think about those things, but leave it in the hands of seasoned designers (I sometimes use freelancers who bid for your project – i.e. at www.elance.com) or webmasters to help with your layout and some additional features that you want services! 

Additional customisation with plugins. 

Your Shopify store can be easily enhanced by their useful plugins (some of them developed by themselves, but many by third parties). If you go to their plugin directory and check, you will clearly see the cost and also what exactly that plugin does. I have found some useful ones, which allow me to integrate my store with Facebook and eBay, automate my email notifications, cart abandonment and many more. 

Promote your store. 

One of the key components to succeed on your journey to grow the store is SEO. If you know what Search Engine Optimisation is, you definitely have an advantage; if not, do not worry – Shopify comes as search engine optimised tool, but also have additional functionality to run your own blog at your store and that content will be indexed by Google and other search engines, which would mean you get those visitors who are then can buy your products. 

There are much more digital marketing initiatives and strategies that you may want to explore, try and test how they work. There are dozens and hundreds of books and tutorials exist to teach you how to do either search engine marketing (considered advertising on Google?) or social media ads (fancy advertising on Twitter or Facebook) and so on. 

There are so many important aspects on running your store, starting from naming to branding, getting your sales in and customer service. When I asked a friend of mine, who has spent 6+ years creating and developing her online store dedicated to children’s clothing about her journey, she added a few more pointers. 

“When selling a physical product, it is important to get your merchandising right. In digital business it means to get your imagery in the best way possible. It just starts with the logo and branding, but all your product images should be clean, attractive and stimulating a purchase. I used professional services first and then realised it costs quite a bit, so I learned photography and Photoshop to be able to do it myself, save on costs, and experiment with the images as many times as I want.” 

“Another important thing is to choose your platform right – for a non-techy person it would mean a lot of sleepless nights trying to perform the simpliest of tasks should you pick it wrong. I have just started a new project on Etsy: it is called MomsCanFly. It also provides you with a cost-efficient way how to get your products visible. You can also consider Amazon. Yet in a long run you should consider running your shop on your own domain – you will be investing heavily in promotion and why to do that when your products are just on Amazon?”

You are a few steps away of launching your business if you have figured out which products or services to sell. Start today, experiment, afterall you are risking only not acting on your passions. Make a little step forward and you simply won’t notice how quickly time flies when you love what you’re doing! 

Next chapter focuses on the scenario if you haven’t got an idea about a product or service. 

No product? No worries! 

I wanted to start my own business since graduating from my first Uni. Yet I had a stereotype in my head that I needed to develop a product or at least to provide a service (i.e. consultancy). My first startups were web development agency and an information portal for mid-Senior managers. They are both failed for many reasons, including my failure to monetise those projects well, but should I know more about affiliate marketing and a power of partnerships back then, maybe things turned out for much better for me. No regrets there anyway. Let’s go back to affiliates. 

Who are they? 

Affiliates are individuals or companies who act as intermediaries between a customer and a seller providing purely information services, i.e. price comparison, product reviews and other in-depth information. 

We all know comparison websites in the UK: they compare prices on insurance, broadband, travel and hotels. You also can compare dog sitters, restaurants, poker rooms and casinos – virtually almost everything you can buy online. 

If you have a passion for a particular industry, say sports or wine, solar energy or children’s clothing, you can start your own affiliate website, write about your topic of interest and monetise your project together with the growth of your audience by placing affiliate links and banners. 

Another benefit of it is that you will be working in that industry without a need of being employed! Further down the road it will increase your chances to brainstorm and develop a successful product or service. 

You will hence become an affiliate marketeer. 

What they do well is providing value to the readers – reducing their time to buy a product, compare prices, explain difficult product concepts, or create a fully-fledged customer communities for the given niche. 

I will give you a very easy example. I am writing for www.IBlameTheWine.com, which provides advice on organic wines in the UK: where to buy them, what to buy or avoid, detailed wine reviews and more on the happy and healthy wine lifestyle. I am passionate about wine and decided that a people need to know how and what to drink to feel happy and healthy, so we are looking at wines from a health perspective (both physical and mental). 

Without going into too much detail about how I enjoy writing about organic wines to excite and educate people, let’s get straight to the point where the commercial side starts. 

Let’s discuss your initial costs. 

I bought a domain for just over £10, used my hosting account at Bluehost, which starts at just under £5 per month for an unlimited hosting account. You can get the domain there as well and receive additional perks.I then got a WordPress installation on it (free), bought a premium wordpress theme (under £30) and asked a freelancer (or webdesign studio) to adapt it for my needs. The latter can vary from £100 if the tweaking is minimal or more if you have a lot more to add to it. It is possible that the premium theme will be sufficient, so this additional cost is totally optional. You can see now, your costs are really minimal here and you are good to go – write away! 

How do you earn money? 

This is what I meant earlier by monetisation. You have a variety of options here (placing adverts, pay-per-click ads, sponsored posts or fixed price adverts, etc), but if we are really talking about a niche site then you need to rely primarily on affiliate links and banners. It means that you now need to think about products or services to promote. In our case with IBlameTheWine it would be wine. Yet, and it is a good example of how you should approach this decision, there is a difference between promoting a low value / low margin product, i.e. 1 bottle of wine will give you £10 * 5% commission just 50p profit from that sale, and higher value product with £100 cost of a case of wine you will get £5 per sale with the same commission rate. Thinking more about it, you are also interested in getting this as a repeat commission, so what about wine clubs? You guessed right, by focusing your efforts on membership wine sites you are getting yourself a more sustainable business. 

In addition to that, it does not need to be just wine – I have created wine travel, organic food, entertainment and well-being pages, which are focusing on wine related issues, but open up more industries and thus much more products for you: if you sell a wine travel package worth £1000, your 5% commission will be £50 and that will cover your costs from the get go. 

Isn’t this incredible – no stock, no warehouse, no product costs, no potential theft or delivery problems, it is opening up a wealth of opportunities for your to benefit from. Challenge me with your niche area of interest if you are not sure what to promote! 

Commission plans: what’s available? 

The example of an affiliate commission plan above was based on a revenue sharing method, where the merchant simply pays you a percentage of the sale amount each time this sale occurs.  Other options include: payment per approved customer, per registration, per lead, per sign-up, and more. 

Want to know more? 

Where you get more information on various affiliate programmes, commission rates and so on? You can start by looking at merchants in your chosen sector, they will have links to their affiliate programmes (usually at the bottom of their websites). Sometimes it saves time and effort when you have a look at affiliate networks, which are basically platforms that encompass hundreds if not thousands of programmes. 

In example, the most popular generic affiliate networks in the UK are Affiliate Window (good all-rounder), TradeDoubler (mostly retail), Rakuten Affiliate Network (very good for fashion and cosmetics) and Webgains with a dozen more respectable ones and hundreds of niche networks (i.e. have a look at niche networks working with gambling, luxury and travel programmes). 

It is a combination of your chosen niche and what is actually profitable to promote. Using an example discussed earlier, it is clear that a commision of 5% of a wine bottle would be significantly less interesting than a cost-per-acquisition (CPA) commission of around £100 for a casino player (check out Gambling programmes here). 

What is an affiliate programme anyway? 

An affiliate programme is your tool how you can promote products of other brands and by using a tracking link, get the  sales remunerated accordingly. 

How can I get paid? 

You are getting paid based on your performance, be it a fixed commission per sale, or a percentage from a sale amount. Affiliate programmes and networks have their own set guidelines how they process the payments, but it is usually on a monthly basis, provided you’ve reached a minimum payout threshold, usually more than £100, and to your preferred method – bank transfer or an electronic wallet as PayPal. 

Be alert on legal Terms when joining affiliate programmes. 

I advise that you do not simply accept and close Terms and Conditions when applying for affiliate programmes as those contain the details what you can and cannot do – i.e. whether you can bid on keywords when advertising on Google, whether you can send incentivised traffic or not (i.e. you’ve decided to offer something in return for your visitors if they buy that promoted product) and much more including payment options, terms and termination clauses. 

What about web design? 

For the most cases when you are starting up you will be just fine with a standard design, potentially just buying a premium theme for your blog and ordering a logo design (I have done that through my preferred suppliers – it-inventors.co.uk, but you can also do that through elance by posting a job and receiving bids from freelancers). 

There are many books and online guidance on digital marketing – how do I know what I really need? 

First of all, I recommend that as soon as you start writing you also start looking at who is visiting your site, where from and which channels are the most popular. That can be done by placing a code of Google Analytics onto your website. If you were working with the freelancers for your website, they will know how to do it for sure; if you have purchased a theme for your blog there should be a place where they prompt you to copy the code and it will be on every page automatically – have a look at it. 

Typically Google Analytics will differentiate all your visitors according to the channels: Organic Search (or SEO), Paid Media (PPC), Referrals (Media buying), Social media, and Email. You can then go and buy books to learn more about SEO or Social Media, some of them are available free as tutorials and guides. 

I think your priorities would be with organic search and social media. You may excuse me for generalisation, but as long as you are to create a content, you simply need to ensure people can find it and then share. That is how you start building your audience and they come back for more. 

A word on SEO. 

Organic search needs your careful efforts about keywords – if I write about wine and health, happy and organic, then keywords like ‘organic wine’, or even longer like ‘choose organic wine’ would be one of my priorities. 

Your content then should be rich with those keywords, but without loosing its charm, usefulness and your unique style as nobody wants to read a text where you simply paste your keywords here and there. 

Some other tips as for SEO include signing up for Google Webmaster Tools and uploading a site sitemap. I use a free plugin to create a sitemap, which is automatically generated and then indexed in Google. The more indexed content you have, the more chances are for your to get noticed and appear in search results. 

It is not all rainbows and unicorns though – it is a very hard work and a bit of a battle with Google for your place in the Internet. 

Experienced marketer, who manages MySocialTrader.com warns you: 

‘Affiliate marketing looks easy on the outside. Create a few links and instant traffic, but it’s not and here’s why. It’s simple, Google hates you. Google sees you as an un-necessary source of unpaid advertising that it will try to stop. 

The only way to appease the Google gods is for qualified content writing and natural link building. This takes time, effort and know-how. Getting hold of this know-how is usually done over years rather than months, and there is no clever online seminar with a magic answer. 

Ask the experts and they will tell you that content is King, and link building is Queen. Both demand constant attention and undying dedication. Affiliate marketing is not a post it and forget it cure’. 

Everyone is talking about.. 

Social media channel will need your attention as you need to ensure you share your content and other useful stuff through some chosen social media (i.e. Twitter, Facebook and Google +) and ready to engage in conversations as some people will start replying to your posts and subscribing for more. 

I personally use a software called Hootsuite to manage all social media in one place – there are similar ones for your to shop around and decide which one you like the most. 

Learn how to let go. 

I have been talking to David, who manages MyBingoBonus.com for more than 5 years now. He says that you should be working hard, but also learning when to let the steam off and rely a bit on the partners. 

‘Once your basic affiliate acquisition work is done and the traffic has been generated, there is a moment when all control is and must be handed over to their conversion/retention team. This is the moment when the question of trust or competence comes into play. No matter how many times I go through this process I still always ask the same question, “can the affiliate team convert the traffic that I send into players?” 

Quality of your traffic is important, but so is a good well run affiliate management team. Understanding and accepting that is a massive step in the right direction. 

As you can see, a lot of hard work, learning new things and experimenting with landing pages, keywords and content are needed; yet as long as it is your passion, you will be determined to make this work. Are you ready to start this journey? 

Next steps 

After you are in full speed with your new venture it is time to sort out the basics and think whether you will form a limited company or stay as a sole trader, make decision whether to outsource accountancy and deal with tax forms, opening new bank accounts and liability insurance. These decisions are very much dependent on a type of a business you are creating, so please seek a professional advice on these matters, some of the regulations change, so you may want to source the newest editions of startup books. Have a look on my review about the best startup and idea generation books here. When picking a book on legal advice and regulation, do not forget to check that it is a UK book, as there could be loads of US startup books available as well. 

At the same time your first and biggest priority should be getting first sales. It doesn’t matter if those are visitors who are buying your own products or affiliated ones, you need to ensure that your website traffic is converting into buyers. 

Google Analytics will help you to understand whether it is your newsletter that is driving the sales, or content or even twitter messages. 

Ask you social media connections to test your site, spread the word and get some of them to try it – you need to know the process is flawless and error-free. The rest is your persistence and integrity – watch your niche positioning and keep up with good work. 

A final word on perseverance 

Depending on your chosen niche it may very well be that you need to wait till your project picks up to the point you can call it a business. Some industries are more difficult to enter than others and some are just overly competitive. Yet if you are doing a great job and differentiating yourself from others, you are on the right track. During your journey you will have days when you simply want to give up – whether you do not know what to write about, or your traffic is not growing as fast as you’ve imagined, etc. 

Yet you are on the entrepreneurship journey – do not stop, and just do it! 

Don’t forget to get in touch, follow my projects on twitter (@dim4ik) or directly email me.

Good luck and enjoy!