How to Build an Online Business 2

In our series about how to Build an Online Busi­ness we have started lin­ing out some basics. Now we need to lay down the busi­ness idea we want to imple­ment. Based on the Busi­ness Idea we will elab­o­rate a Plan and then Imple­ment the plan.

This series of arti­cles fea­tures a live expe­ri­ence in real time. I have no clue about the out come but I will use all my expe­ri­ence and know-how to bring the busi­ness to fruition using all the means at disposal.

I would like to cre­ate a busi­ness in a geo­graph­i­cally lim­ited area far from my home coun­try. I have iden­ti­fied local needs for prod­ucts and ser­vices and I am con­vinced that my prod­ucts and ser­vices are highly com­pet­i­tive in the selected market.

To build my online Busi­ness I tar­get South Africa, a coun­try where lib­er­al­iza­tion of com­mu­ni­ca­tion sys­tems and Inter­net is still in its begin­ning, pre­vent­ing thus locals from access­ing cost effi­cient solu­tions for the use and exploita­tion of the Inter­net. While coun­try wide cam­paign­ing may be too heavy of a charge, we may want to select a first tar­get area for the pilot project.

Prod­ucts will be within the global scope of Web Ser­vices with spe­cial focus on:

- web hosting

- domain host­ing for inter­na­tional domain names

- pub­lish­ing

- mar­ket­ing

- social networking

- online shopping

- online education

- cus­tomer care

To fol­low the above order we need:

1. A Web Host­ing Ser­vice for South Africa

2. Domain Host­ing for Inter­na­tional Domains

3. A Pub­lish­ing Network

4. A Mar­ket­ing Team or Partners

5. A Prod­uct Line for Pub­lish­ing and Advertising

6. A Social Network

7. Edu­ca­tion

8. Cus­tomer Care

9. A shop­ping area

The whole busi­ness will be ver­ti­cally and hor­i­zon­tally inte­grated. A Busi­ness site will serve as por­tal to access all ser­vices and prod­ucts offered.

The busi­ness will pro­vide free ser­vices to a wide pub­lic to develop Inter­net pen­e­tra­tion and to give access to a wide pub­lic to the ben­e­fits of the Internet.

Con­sumers will largely be able to access ser­vices for free; the busi­ness plan is to be financed by adver­tis­ers as well as by users who may need and pur­chase addi­tional ser­vices, whereas we will apply pric­ing cor­re­spond­ing to inter­na­tional stan­dards; our study shows that web ser­vices in South Africa are sold at 2–10 times higher rates than what we are used to in the global market.

Knowl­edge about the local envi­ron­ment are of para­mount impor­tance for the suc­cess of the busi­ness. It is there­fore nec­es­sary to acquire such knowl­edge, ide­ally by enter­ing local partnerships.

Once the idea in place, we need to bud­get the oper­a­tion and estab­lish a fea­si­bil­ity study where we will com­pare our means with our ambitions.