8 Steps to Starting Your Business from Zero

 8 Steps to Starting Your Business from Zero

How do you go from zero to business? When it comes to starting your own business, you can’t skip the first step in your journey to success: planning. If you don’t plan properly, you risk wasting time and money on your business before it even gets off the ground, resulting in discouragement or worse, failure. Luckily, there are simple steps you can take to make sure that doesn’t happen! Follow these eight steps and your startup will be up and running in no time.

Step 1

Choose a business model - The first step in starting a business is deciding what kind of business you want to launch. 

It’s important for every entrepreneur to take an honest look at his or her personality, strengths, and weaknesses, so that he or she can choose a business model that best complements those strengths and offsets any weaknesses. 

Some entrepreneurs are natural-born leaders with strong communication skills; these people might be great candidates for launching their own company without having to work under someone else's management. 

For others, though, it may be easier (and more profitable) to start a company by serving as an employee with another company before moving on to striking out on their own later down the road. Entrepreneurs need to consider all of their options before they begin any steps toward starting a business.

This is because there isn't much room left to maneuver when choosing from several preselected choices like choose your business or start your small business. 

Search engines understand that How to start your small business has a different meaning than Choosing how to start your small business, and thus shows appropriate results accordingly.

Step 2

Narrow Down on a Topic. Once you have several topic ideas, it’s time to pick one based on your target audience and your desired keywords. 

If you plan on selling products in addition to writing an ebook, make sure your keyword is included in your title. For example, if you wanted to create a how-to guide for losing weight and also sell a corresponding eBook about healthy food choices then your final topic might be something like How To Lose Weight Safely by Eating Healthy. 

This way Google will not only show people who search for those phrases relevant information but will also increase the chances of people clicking through if they are looking for that specific product or information.

Step 3

Launch Day! Now that you’ve built up a content calendar, it’s time to get down to business. Here are our top tips for successfully launching your content marketing strategy and turning your idea into reality.

6 Tips for Launching Your Content Marketing Strategy: Planning is vital, but nothing is more important than having a thorough plan of action ready on launch day. Remember: 

a mistake now could cost you far more later in terms of lost credibility and setbacks in conversions, so do everything possible to ensure smooth sailing right off the bat! Use these six tips to give yourself an extra edge on launch day and make sure everything goes according to plan:

Step 4

Calculate your score. For each topic, divide your score by 6 (that is, a score of 1 becomes 0.2, 2 becomes 0.33, and so on). Then add up all six of these numbers. 

This will give you an average and a standard deviation for that specific topic area. You can use your standard deviation to track improvement over time in order to gauge how much work it takes to produce a high-quality piece of content. 

The higher your number, obviously, means more work! You’ll want your total score to be at least 5 in order to confidently claim competency in writing about that specific content type.

Step 5

Know your audience and demonstrate it in your writing. It’s important for any blogger, but particularly for a business blogger. Be sure that you know how to speak directly and effectively to potential clients or consumers. Know what they want, when they want it, and how best to provide it. Never talk at them — 

talk to them . In order to do so, research is key. Use Google Analytics (or another comparable analytics tool) to find out who visits your site, where they came from, what terms they used to find you, etc. You may also use tools like Alexa or SEMrush to track where people go on your site after clicking through from one of your posts and which social media platforms are driving traffic as well as engagement.

Step 6

Get started. When it comes time to actually begin your business, it’s tempting just to sit down and get started, but take a step back for a moment first. Doing so can help ensure that you know exactly what you’re getting into, and give you a chance to make adjustments.

 Running through these tips can help prevent you from making common mistakes . Don’t jump in headfirst without giving yourself some time to plan. Some people recommend 90 days; others suggest starting slowly with testing or consulting clients before diving into full-fledged startup mode. Either way, be sure to take some time before committing yourself fully to a new business—and be prepared if things don’t go as planned!

Step 7

Write a One-Sentence Summary of Each Article . Write an overview of each content idea in one sentence. If you can’t describe your idea in a sentence, then it is too complex.

 Keep at it, and eventually you will be able to boil down your ideas into manageable chunks. Here are examples for our three content topics: Write a professional blog post based off the following description: How to Start a Business: A Step-by-Step Guide Learning how to start a new business from conception to execution.

 Write a professional blog post based off the following description: 7 Ways Small Companies Can Beat Big Companies 7 ways small companies can beat big companies with limited funds. Skip The Sugar: Sugar makes our hunger cravings fluctuate quickly, meaning we end up consuming even more calories over the course of the day.

Step 8

Find an office or work space : Once you’ve found a business name, registered your DBA, and established an online presence, you can begin looking for work space. 

Because most startups begin small—think cubicles in shared office spaces—this step doesn’t have to be prohibitively expensive. Start by asking friends and family if they know of any affordable offices available; many times, local businesses will make their empty offices available for just $100–$200 per month.