How to make a lot of money online?

Offline - The Product

The first step to any business is to start the business offline. This will give you a chance to try out the business in real life, in actuality, to see if we will be able to attract any customers and close any deals or contracts. Start a storefront, a home-based business, an office business, a fruit juice stand, whatever your heart desires. For the sake of this article and to keep it simple, we will start a banana pudding business. It is one of my client's business success story. We will use it as our example, how they did it and how they are managing today. Their grandma makes the best banana pudding in the world!!! I know, I've tasted it. She makes it with simple and natural ingredients, sprinkle it with love and let it cool to the touch and voila, a delicious banana pudding. Everyone that taste it, says they love it! They always wants seconds...I have to agree. It is the best tasting banana pudding I have ever tasted. It is out of this world!

First, we need a mission statement:

We want to share with the people of planet earth the best tasting banana pudding you will ever taste in your life! We make each and every banana pudding with all natural ingredients then cook it with love and to perfection until it is warm and gooey and ready to be eaten. We want to share our banana pudding first with the local people by making it available at all grocery stores, restaurants and events. Then to the world!

At this stage in the business, we don't need or won't worry about any local or federal license to open this business. We will first test the business concept and see. A lot of people get hung up on licensing and jump right in to business application without testing out the business concept. We're going to try it out first and if it is a viable business, then we'll get all of the paperwork done and get properly licensed by the state and federal government. This is a simple process so it can wait. At this point, we are still working out of our house kitchen. Once we have a viable business, we will apply for a license at the appropriate time.

The Restaurants - Our Customers

Our initial business plan is to offer these banana puddings to select family and fine dining restaurants so they can offer it as a dessert in their fine establishment. We will place a placard on each table with a glossy picture of banana pudding along with offer and pricing. We will do this at our expense. Each table will have a picture of the banana pudding, along with pricing and selection of topping (if any).

Second, prepare a pricing plan for restaurants. The more they buy, the more they save. Here's the proposed pricing plan:

1-5 dozens = $30 a dozen ($2.50 each piece per dozen)
6-10 dozens = $24 a dozen ($2.00 each piece per dozen)
11-more dozens = $18 a dozen ($1.50 each piece per dozen)

We've prepared a flyer displaying our pricing plan. Made multiple copies - possibly a couple of hundred flyers. We plan to leave this flyer with each customer (business/restaurant owner) for their review and reference. It also makes a good presentation piece when discussing prices. In the back of the flyer is a 10% discount coupon for first time customers.

Another step is to bake banana pudding samples - in smaller containers to give away to potential customers as a taste test. This will give them the oppotunity to taste the product, to make a believer out of each business owner.

Obtain a Merchant Account

A merchant account will let us process credit cards, checks and debit cards when delivering products to our customers. This will help keep our customers current with their account and it will make life simpler when collecting payments. A merchant account will let us accept all forms of payment: Visa, Mastercard, American Express and Discover card. We will also add PayPal to the mix in case our customers and others uses PayPal as forms of payment.

The Restaurants - Plan of Attack

The plan of attack is to visit select potential restaurants and talk to each manager by offering the banana pudding as desserts. We are sure that the their customers will love it! This will not be an exclusive offer. We can do it as a trial basis at first, if they wish. They can even try the banana pudding samples, if they like it, great, if not, then we can move on. I doubt that this will be the case. If it works out, meaning the banana pudding is selling, customers will rave about it. Thereafter, we plan on signing the business on a long-term contract for one-year. We are considering for restaurants to NOT be allowed to mark up the pricing - they have to stick to our recommended retail price. In this way, the price is the same wherever the customers goes. However, we are hesitant because high-end restaurants would need to mark up the pricing to match what they are selling. We will get back to this later on. We might make exception to the pricing for high-end restaurants. We will provide the banana pudding, the advertising on each table, and support. The advertising will consists of a high-resolution picture of a freshly baked banana pudding, along with pricing and order for one person.

We will visit each signed restaurant on a daily or every other day depending on sales: 1) to replace the banana puddings that have been sold, 2) sometimes to get payment; and 3) to talk to customer on how we can improve the product and service. We will bill each restaurant on a weekly basis or bi-monthly basis whichever they prefer. That is the extent of our offer. We do not want to offer any kind of long-term payment plan - like monthly, because these sales can add up and the payment can get pretty high. We do not want to be out of pocket for that much money. So, a one-week payment plan is the best and longest we will hold an invoice. It is always preferred to receive payment on a weekly basis.

As we service each restaurant, we continue doing research. We learn and noted what they like and dislike about our products and services then update your business plans based on your customer's feedback. Solicit feedback as much as possible on a regular basis from regular and new customers. Speak to them at length as to what and why they like/dislike about your product(s). Speak directly to diners and ask them what they like about the banana pudding. Apply what you learn from customers (business owners) to your business then watch your business grow at breakneck speed.

Online - Start an Online Business - Build a Website

Now that you have learned from your customers offline and have applied what you have learned to improve your products, it is time to promote it online. Now that you have mastered how to service your customers offline, we now need to learn how to apply it online. Learn how to treat your online customers the same way you treat your offline customers, with dignity, respect while treating them fairly and justly.

Build an Ecommerce Website - Website Design

Our primary objective with this website is to cater to our existing customers, the restaurant business owners. We want them to be able to login and look at their current and past orders, place new orders, review billing and account information, etc. When logged in, they can update their account information, address, phone, email, etc. They can also view any messages from us, the banana pudding company, to see if we have any alerts, notices and/or messages.

Our secondary objective with the website is to cater to prospective restaurant business owners, who are not yet our customers. They can read about our delivery schedule, pricing plan, and sign-up offer. They should be able to get answers to any questions they have about our program. They can also sign-up online for first order and delivery; request a meeting, etc.

Our third objective is to direct any and all other online traffic to our restaurant owners selling our product. This is to help increase sales in our restaurants so our restaurants can order more.

Obtain An Online Payment Gateway

An Online Payment Gateway will allow us to accept payment online via our website. An Online Payment Gateway is an additional feature to the Merchant Account. It is part but separate service of a Merchant Account. An Online Payment Gateway will also allow us to accept checks online. An Online Payment Gateway is what we will need to process credit cards via our website.

Obtain an Online Shopping Cart

Our website developer will install an online shopping cart to handle any and all online orders, including taxes and shipping fees, if any, for their review before checking out. An online shopping cart will keep track of all ordering process, taxes and shipping, and will securely pass the information onto the payment gateway when finalizing the order. With an online shopping cart, we will be able to customize customer orders anyway we like - to include any special toppings, fillings, sizes, weight, etc. Orders can be customize based on customers choices and preferences.

Obtain a Web Hosting Account

A web hosting account is required when displaying and storing website pages online. A web hosting account will store and deliver the files to be viewed by visitors requesting such pages on our website. So when a visitors clicks on a link, it will deliver the page that is associated with that link to our online visitor/viewer. A web hosting account also handles all of our email accounts. We can create email accounts, view messages, delete and store messages.

Dedicated IP

This is not necessarily required for any ecommerce website but it is better to have a dedicated IP than not having one. It basically identifies your website under that unique and only IP address in the world as a Banana Pudding Company. That permanent and dedicated IP address is specifically for this Banana Pudding Company. With a dedicated IP address, we will not be mistaken for another and will allow us to protect anything and everything over and under that IP address, fully and securely.

Online Marketing - Search Engine Optimization and Search Engine Marketing

If we want to get traffic to our new website, we will need to conduct online marketing at some point or another. We do not need to do an extensive marketing campaign, just enough to be found on search results. Remember, we're a business to business kind of company. Our target is not the public, it is private owners of businesses, restaurant businesses to be in fact, and we will get in touch with them directly. However, we will get traffic that is not necessarily restaurant owners, so we will make sure that those traffic are converted into customers for our restaurant owners.

Website Management and Maintenance

We will need website management and maintenance since we're not all literate in computer science. It is always best to leave the technical stuff to the professionals so our website remains valid and accessible online. Our online reputation is the biggest challenge of all. We want to make sure that we control the narrative about our company. Suppress any bad comments, if any, and exploit any and all good comments.

WebsiteCenter.com.ph will manage the updates on our website codes on a regular basis. Codes are changing and being updated all the time and it will be hard for us to keep up with the changes when we're running a banana pudding business. This is best left to the professionals. To keep our website running at optimum performance, website updates to HTML, CSS and Javascript are all done automatically by our website professionals. That lets us sleep at night a lot better.

Closing Statement

Overall, our banana pudding business is booming due to the high number of restaurants that we are servicing. With our website up and running, it has doubled our number of restaurants and expanded our area four-folds. We now have restaurants in four different counties and we're already increased our production capacity twice. We now have two processing locations.

The journey so far has been a lot of fun!! There was never any doubt to the business plan and the execution of that plan. It was just a matter of time. Sure enough, as soon as we launched our website, it has made a lot of difference in our business operation. We run so much more efficiently and organized in a way I could never imagined.