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The development and expansion of the Internet has made business opportunities, once only available to the wealthy, available to nearly everyone. In the past, opening a business was a huge commitment in terms of finances and risk. Traditional business owners had to quit the their current jobs, obtain bank financing, and sign leases before they even made a penny. Its easy to see why 95% of them failed within five years. Today, business opportunities are available to anyone willing to put in the time and effort to learn about the world of e-commerce. Best of all, you can start an e-commerce business with minimal funds and very little risk. This guide will take you though the steps necessary to start your own e-commerce business.

Find Your Niche

The first step to creating your own e-commerce business is to find you niche. Examine your hobbies and interests for potential business ideas. If you love soccer, consider selling soccer supplies or team uniforms online. You may also consider opening a business that is similar to your current job. For example, as a nurse you may know a lot about medical supplies and how hospitals obtain them. You could start a medical supply business. Your contacts and industry knowledge could give you an advantage over a competitor who does not know the inner-workings of hospitals the way you do.

research The Demand

Now that you have a few business ideas, its time to research the demand for your products or services. If you plan to sell to the general public, youll want to find out how many people are looking for your products or services. As a small business owner, you will not have the marketing funds to create a demand for a product. The products you sell, must already be in demand. A great way to determine product demand is to see how many people are searching for a specific product. Overture has a wonderful keyword tool (http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/) that displays the number of searches for specific keywords. It will give you a good idea of which products are popular and the specific keywords you should target when building your website.

Scope Out Your Soon-To-Be Competitors

Before settling on a business idea, scope out your would-be competitors. Visit their websites and compare the following:

Professional Look & Feel

Products and Services

Search Engine Ranking

Page Rank (Available on the Google Tool Bar)

Keywords

Back Links (how many sites link to them).

Youll need to know your competitors websites inside and out. Spend some time exploring each one. This will give you an idea of what youre up against. Keep in mind, that your website will need to be equally as professional or better than theirs. Dont worry if you dont think you have the technical skills necessary to create a professional website. The use of professional website templates will be explained later.

While youre researching your competitors, check to see if the products you intend to sell are sold at large department stores such as Wal-Mart, Target, and Amazon.com. It is very difficult for a small business to compete with these large companies because the profit margins are extremely low. Youll need to sell products that are in demand, but arent sold by corporate giants.

Establish A Business Entity

In order to conduct business, you need to establish a business entity. Fortunately this can be as easy as filing a Doing Business As or Fictitious Name form with your local County Clerks office to become a sole proprietor. When you arrive at the County Clerks office, they will check their records to make sure your intended business name is not already in use. If its available, you will need to complete the appropriate forms and pay your filing fee. Each state has different requirements. Check with your state for requirements on becoming a sole proprietor.

You will also need a sales tax id. You will need to charge sales taxes in the state where your business resides. Contact your county office for details about sales tax IDs and any other requirements they may have.

Open A Business Bank Account

Now that you are a legitimate business owner, its time to open a business bank account. Take your court documents to the bank and open a business checking account. Most banks offer a variety of business accounts. Choose the one the best meets your needs. Its usually best to start with their least expensive account because it could be a while before you start earning revenue. You can always upgrade in the future.

Some banks require a business owner to wait specified amount of time, usually 90 days, after the court documents are filed before opening a business bank account. These rules are in place to help prevent fraud. Check with your bank to obtain waiting period information.

Choose A Domain Name

While you wait to open a bank account, you can start building your website. First, register a domain name. Names that end in .com are best. If possible your, domain name should include one or more of your target keywords. For example, if you are creating a yoga supply business, youll want to choose a name with the word yoga, such as yogacenter.com, yoga-supply.com, or yogastuff.com.

Create Your Website

One of the keys to successful e-commerce businesses is a professional website. Your website is the first and often the only impression your visitors will have of your business. A professional website can be the difference between your visitors viewing you as a home-based business operating out of your garage and a multi-million dollar business with hundreds of employees. Fortunately, you dont need to be a web programmer to create a professional website. There are companies that sell professional website templates. You can get website templates for free, but its much better to pay for a highly professional template. To find these templates, simply search for website templates. You should expect to pay $50 $150 for a good template with multiple pages and professional images.

Most website templates can be customized with common HTML editors and a simple graphics program. Templates can be edited without having to invest a lot of time and energy into learning how to code web pages.

Youll want your website content to target specific keywords. This can be achieved by creating articles, product reviews, product comparisons and detailed description of your products. Avoid repeating the keywords so often that the text becomes difficult to read. There is a fine line between good copy text and spam text. Spam text is designed to increase your sites listing in the search engines, but often backfires when penalties are issued and your website is dropped from the listing.

Host Your Website

Now that your website has been created, its time to find a company to host your website on their servers. You should be able to find a good hosting company for around $10 per month. This fee should include technical support and email accounts with your domain name. Domain name-specific email accounts are important for a professional image.

Your website files can be uploaded with a simple FTP program. The hosting companys technical support personnel can walk you through the steps to upload your files and launch your website.

Implement A shopping Cart

No e-commerce website is complete without a secure shopping cart. There are many shopping cart options. Many e-commerce business owners make the mistake of using pay Pal to accept payments, which immediately tells visitors that their company is very small and not professional.

A good alternative to pay Pal is a remotely hosted shopping cart. Remote shopping carts take the burden of maintaining security and credit card numbers off your shoulder and places the responsibility on another company. Remote shopping carts can usually be configured to look similar to your website. In fact, your customers may not realize that they have left your website to place an order. The remote shopping cart provider will give you the HTML to add to your website. When your potential customer clicks on the Buy Now button, he or she is taken to the remote shopping cart to enter the personal information and payment details.

Depending on your choice of a shopping cart, you may or may not need a merchant account to process transactions. Some shopping cart services allow you to use their merchant accounts for a slightly higher fee.

Stock Your Inventory

Now that your website has been created, its time to stock your inventory. The first step is to find the manufacturers of the products you wish to sell. You can find this information by reviewing your competitors websites. Some of them may list the manufacturer with the product name or description. Once you have the name, you can search for the manufacturer online.

Contact the manufacturer and tell them that you are interested in becoming a distributor. Ask for a wholesale price list and an application. The price list will help you determine if the profit margins are high enough to justify selling their product.

Youll want to ask the manufacturer the following questions:

What is the MSRP (Manufacturer Suggested retail Price) for the item?

Am I required to sell the item at MSRP?

What is your minimum order quantity/amount?

Some manufacturers will not sell to e-commerce businesses that do not have a brick and mortar retail location. If this is the case, youll simply have to find a company that manufactures a similar product and is willing to sell to an e-commerce business.

Promote Your Business

Now that your website is live and youre open for business, its time to promote your website. If no one knows that it exists, you will not receive any sales. Most website visitors originate from search engines. Before search engines can list your website, they have to know that it exists. Youll need to submit your website to search engines and directories such as Yahoo!, DMOZ, Excite, and others. search engine submission programs and services are available, but they not effective. Most good search engines require websites to be manually submitted. They enforce this by displaying an image with a series of letters or numbers that automated programs cannot read. The code embedded in the image is required to submit your website.

search engine algorithms are extremely complex. The ranking of a website in their search results depends on a number of factors, including keywords, density, back links, page rank, and other factors. After submitting your website to the major directories and search engines, the next step is to establish back links. When search engines crawl the web and find a link to your site, they count the link as a vote for your site. The more votes you have, the higher your site will rank (assuming other criteria has also been met). You can acquire back links by sending emails to other website owners and offering to exchange links. Its very difficult for new websites to acquire back links. Most people prefer to exchange links with established websites. In a way, its a catch-22, but it can be done and the results are worth it.

Starting your own e-commerce business is a lot of work. Making it successful is even more work, but the pay-offs can be rewarding. Thanks to the explosion of the Internet age, e-commerce business opportunities are now available to anyone with a computer, a few hundred dollars for start-up costs, some spare time and the desire to create a business.

Copyright 2004 ZIP Baby. All Rights Reserved.

About The Author

Danna Henderson started ZIP Baby in order to provide parents with comprehensive potty training information as well as a large selection of potty training products. For more information about potty training, or to browse the potty training store, visit the Toilet Time Targets for Potty Training.

As a regular commentator on the state of Disaster Preparedness and corporate healthcare responsibility in the United States as well as an ardent defender of healthcare professionals, their needs and their very lives, I was both honored and a bit taken back when asked by several medial journals to attend and review Michael Moores documentary "Sicko". I was the immediate recipient of much ribbing from colleagues, even receiving a prescription, just 32 milligrams of Zofran to be taken immediately before the movie; this from an oncologist who reminded me that Zofran is the drug of choice in preventing chemotherapy related nausea and vomiting, "if it can handle chemo, it can handle Michael Moore."

By total coincidence and an ironic twist of fate, I served federal jury duty the day I saw the movie and took an oath to hear all evidence before me without prejudice or preconception. Having being released from jury service by noon, I girded myself in that oath and drove to the theater. Plopping down my $7.50 for the ticket and $10 for popcorn and a large water bottle, I strode in air conditioned comfort to theater 8. The theater itself was virtually abandoned, despite the fact that I had chosen to attend the movie at walt disney Worlds downtown Disney AMC Theatre at the height of tourist season. I had expected the theater to not only be full but to be filled with people who are ardent supporters of Mr. Moore and his films. I must admit I would not be among them. Quite to the contrary, I had not seen a Michael Moore film in a number of years. I do enjoy the occasional documentary and own a copy of Super-Size Me which I still recommend to patients, but Mr. Moores story telling style is, well lets say it is not to my taste.

within the first moments I found myself confronted with an uncomfortable fact, Mr. Moores movie was attacking the same Heavily Mangled-care Organizations (HMOs) that were in large part the very reason that I had left private to practice. Everything that Mr. Moore said about such large organizations as Aetna, Cigna, Humana and Kaiser were true. Of course in invertible Michael Moore fashion he told only one side of the story, paying only passing homage to the fact that five-sixth of the US population do in fact have healthcare coverage and that out of 300 million people in the United States, most of whom have Internet access, he received fewer than 80,000 replies to his solicitation for healthcare horror stories. Still, Mr. Moore was actually making sense.

Unfortunately, also in an inevitable Michael Moore fashion, he quickly snatched defeat from the jaws of victory. The totally incomprehensible detour to a cold war era campaign by the American Medical Association to speak specifically against the evils of socialists and communists in medicine was juxtaposed against the Clinton eras attempt at Universal Health Care. Mr. Moore seems to have missed the fact that now New York Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton stated emphatically throughout her term as chair of National Healthcare Committee that Universal Health Care was not a socialized healthcare system.

Mr. Moore also seems to have forgotten the historical context in which the American Medical Association launched its anti-socialist campaign in those early days of the cold war. Communist fears gripped the nation for over twenty years and every respectable professional or fraternal organization did its part to combat the so-called Red Menace. The American Medical Associations campaign against socialist medicine was a political statement against socialism and communism not against Universal Health Care.

Although I am a physician I do have the unique perspective of not being a member of the American Medical Association. In fact, at the same time that the American Medical Association was actively attacking socialists and communists in healthcare; they were also attacking my profession of osteopathic medicine and therefore if anyone would support Mr. Moores attack on the American Medical Association it should be me, a member of the American Osteopathic Association. Just as I swore earlier in the day to objectively hear the case against the defendant in federal court I must now objectively evaluate the arguments made by Mr. Moore and in the case of the American Medical Association Mr. Moores arguments fall far short of any form of reality.

Returning to the main theme of the movie (corporate greed as the oppressor of the people) Mr. Moore next attacked the profits and policies of the pharmaceutical industry. The donations to prominent congressional members and others in government were enlightening and even entertaining in their presentation, but there was no new news here. The Food and Drug Administration and even Congress itself has decried these practices for years.

Mr. Moore then took a brief trip around the existing Socialized Medicine Programs in Canada, Great Britain and France. He went to great lengths to describe their advantages, speaking to Americans who thought that they benefited from a socialized medicine system in which they had no need for insurance and no need to pay copays. He also spoke with fully satisfied individuals living in Canada and Great Britain.

Mr. Moores interview with one British doctor was quite enlightening. On screen I met a physician whose entire education had been paid for by his government and his government was generous enough to pay him a salary equal as a family practitioner equal to what I make as an emergency department physician. Although, I am board certified in family practice as well as emergency medicine, I never made as much in US dollar equivalents as this young man makes now. This London doctor lives in a four-bedroom home worth twice as much as my home and drives a car worth four times as much as my car. He has these benefits not because a socialized medicine system works better or even pays better but because he was the beneficiary of socialized education through graduate school. I labor under student loan payments that almost equal my mortgage payment and will do so for a thirty-year period of time. If I had the benefits of free education, I too could live in a home worth over a million dollars, although I would still drive my Saturn because quite frankly I like it.

Mr. Moores tour then took an unusual direction clearly designed to draw publicity rather than make any specific point. Mr. Moore took several 9/11 survivors and delivered them to Cuba in order to receive treatment for 9/11 related injuries and illnesses. Mr. Moore claims he did this because he had found an American socialized medicine system at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba and just wanted 9/11 heroes to receive the same medical benefits as Al Qaeda. Why not take these heroes to a state prison in Florida? The almost every state correctional institution in the United States, inmates receive the same or better care than the detainees at Guantanamo Bay. Again Michael Moore missed the mark.

I find it curious that while in Canada, a country that is accustomed to American film makers and quite frankly Americans sneaking across the border to obtain free healthcare, Mr. Moore and his would be American patient for the canadian system found it necessary to flee canadian police at two separate clinics in order to avoid arrest, yet in Cuba, a country well known world-wide to embrace its tourists but to be highly suspicious of those with professional movie making equipment, Mr. Moore appeared to never encounter a police officer. In fact Mr. Moore was allowed to photograph throughout the state-run Havana Hospital, the very same hospital where Cuban leader Fidel Castro received his recent medical care. Further Mr. Moore was miraculously permitted to photograph in and around a Havana fire station, exchanging gifts and even souvenir badges with fire brigade members. I find it equally interesting that these badges were conveniently available.

Mr. Moore, who appears throughout the movie, to this point, to be very upfront with the challenges and special arrangements made in the production of his film seems to leave out the fact that he doubtless had special dispensation from the Cuban government allowing both for his film making and the care of Americans on Cuban soil.

Despite these glaring inconsistencies, I was thrilled when the Cuban doctors began to touch on the issue of the relationship between the system and the healthcare professional. I thought that Mr. Moore was finally going to disclose American Healthcares greatest shame, the total annihilation of the nurturing relationship between healthcare professionals and their corporate masters. But alas, Michael Moore again shied away from the issue why?!

An interesting conversation took place recently between a 45 year nursing veteran and her family. The topic of the day was the nursing shortage and the veteran nurse surprised all by announcing, There is no nursing shortage, there is a hospital nursing shortage.

She went on to explain that in the home health and non-institutional nursing fields, there is an adequate supply of nurses willing to work for employers who respect and value their services. According to this nurse who had worked in hospitals for much of her career, the problem today is that hospitals and other institutions see nurses and other professionals as replaceable rather than precious.

No nurse my age is going to work for some young supervisor who believes that you manage people by threatening them or their license. There are too many jobs out there to deal with that nonsense.

This veteran nurse struck on the key factor in any employee shortage, the relationship between employer and employee.

Healthcare has become a split marketplace with institutional care (hospitals and nursing homes) separated from non-institutional care. Nurses are gravitating to non-institutional care despite lower pay because of the factors that Intuit and others have come to appreciate. Employees care more about the relationships than the money. Veteran nurses remember being respected and appreciated for long hours and selfless dedication. It was not expected or required, it was given freely and accepted graciously. Even in a materialistic society people want to be loved and cared for, respected and valued.

There is no nursing shortage, there is a relationship shortage. This is the true problem with corporate healthcare in America.

All and all I will say that Mr. Moores film was an honest review of the current state of the Heavily Mangled-care in the United States. Greedy insurance companies take from doctors in the form of Malpractice Coverage. They take some patients in the form of health coverage; they raise profits through denials of care, restrictive practices, penalties against physicians who place patient care and safety ahead of performance numbers and by seeking to exclude those who most need insurance.

Sadly, the majority of Mr. Moores movie missed the point. American healthcare will not be served by the conversion to a socialized medicine system. Quite to the contrary most of the equipments seen in background of Mr. Moores movie was invented, designed, manufactured, or funded by the Americas private healthcare industry. American healthcare would be best served by rebuilding relationships with the most valuable resource in healthcare, the healthcare provider. All those Mr. Moore interviewed told stories of having a favorable relationship with a system which they respected and which respected them. Regardless of whether you are a healthcare professional or a healthcare consumer, the basis of the process of healthcare is a relationship based on mutual respect, the system delivering that healthcare must live by that standard as well.

Socialized medical systems certainly have their advantages for citizens of countries willing to live with different freedoms and different lifestyles than we prefer in America. A better system is out there, we need only have the resolve to find it.

Mr. Moore also falls significantly short in failing to make note of the reasons that so many Americans require so much healthcare. Even a man with only a high school diploma such as Mr. Moore must ask himself if five-sixth of the United States population have health insurance, then why do individuals in other countries live longer than we do. Perhaps it is because we also have an excess of food, an excess of cars, an excess of conveniences. United States longevity for its citizens and disease rates among its most vulnerable are so high not only because people put off necessary healthcare for fear of incurring debt, but because they chose instead to indulge in fast foods which are too high in salt and fat, drive rather than walk or bicycle for short errands, play video games rather than exercise, and finally watch movies about what others do rather than going out and doing something themselves.

As I watched the corpulent Michael Moore striding down the streets of London and France being passed by much thinner Europeans, I could not help but be struck by the fact that it is not our healthcare system, but our societal values that are truly Sicko. It is time we all put down our popcorn, take our water bottles and go outside to exercise with our children.

Dr. Maurice A. Ramirez is the founder and president of the consulting firm High Alert, LLC.. He serves on expert panels for pandemic preparedness and healthcare surge planning with Congressional and Cabinet members. Board certified in multiple specialties, Dr. Ramirez is Founding Chairperson of the American Board of Disaster Medicine and serves the nation as a Senior Physician-Federal Medical officer in the National Disaster Medical System. Dr. Ramirez has a new book: You Can Survive Anything, Anywhere, Every Time. His website is http://www.High-Alert.com