This post was inspired by research about children, especially teenagers, keen to learn how to start their own online a business and make money as kids. The post is intended as a guide for parents about skills and knowledge needed to establish an online startup. Because all children have different level of knowledge and confidence in navigating the internet, your active involvement and supervision in researching the concepts together with your child is critical.
Parents or carers are strongly encouraged to do the research together with their children.
If your child has entrepreneurial talents, you may hear questions like “How can I make money fast as a kid”, “How do kids become entrepreneurs”, “How can a kid start an online business”, etc. Then, naturally, the question you may ask yourself is “How do I teach my child about entrepreneurship?”
Well, most principles of starting a business for kids are similar for online and offline enterprises, and involve the knowledge of marketing concepts I teach in the entrepreneurship course for kids "Online Marketing Course For Young Entrepreneurs". From identifying a gap in the market and coming up with an outstanding solution, to analysing competitors and developing effective sales pitches based on product benefits, it is important to have a big picture about how marketing works. Therefore, learning about key steps of starting a business is important to ensure your investment of time and effort is paid off.
Once you are familiar with general principles of starting a kid business, you can explore unique differences and skills required to run a successful online business of your own.
Discoverability
You may build a great website or create amazing listings on marketplaces. But without quality traffic, or buyers looking for products like yours, having a website is similar to building a perfect store in a desert.
To have people come to your shop (and we are not talking about shop browsers, but engaged customers willing to try your product and perhaps return for more regular purchases in the future), you need you learn about SEO – search engine optimisation. SEO is basically how search engines rank your website pages and show them to potential customers when they enter their queries in the search bar. These queries are called keywords. The higher the page quality, as assessed by search engines, the higher your page will appear in the search results, the higher chance potential customers will click on your page.
Thus, having your website or listing easily discoverable is very important to generating sales.
Quality
We’ll talk in more details about SEO and keywords below, but I cannot overestimate the importance of creating valuable content on your website. Unique and engaging content that helps your customers in solving their problems makes your pages stand out and rank higher. Thus, quality of your copy, website structure, visuals - all contribute to the customer journey in navigating your online store and deserve careful work.
I’d say this is the number one thing to research further if you want to start an online business.
SEO
SEO drives organic traffic to your website. When you do your research of popular keywords, include them in page titles, subtitles, image file names, but don’t overdo it as the content has to offer good quality in addressing customers’ objectives and be easy to read in the first place.
This is another concept you’ll need to know about and how SEO works in driving free traffic to your online store.
Keywords
There are many ways to research which keywords customers type in when searching for a similar product. For instance, some people may search “fall recipes” while others may be looking for “autumn recipes”. By assessing the volume of keywords, you may decide which of them to use on your website. Keep in mind that more volume may mean more competition as other companies may also compete for the same keywords, and vice versa.
Make sure you develop good understanding of keywords, how to choose them and how to incorporate them into your website.
Visuals
Generally, online businesses heavily rely on visuals to connect with customers. In order to illustrate the point or have good representation of your product, it is worth learning about basic graphic design to be able to resize images or create banners and other visuals to provide maximum information for your customers to help with buying decisions.
Copywriting
Creating a business overview, product descriptions or blog articles (that include your keywords) is also very important in running a successful online business. This is where your persuasive writing skills you’re learning at school may give you great help. Develop your own style and remember to be authentic. Simple language as if you’re talking to a family member is often preferred by customers as it is easy to follow and shows your human side.
Logistics
If your business offers virtual classes or instant downloads, you don’t need to worry about packing and sending products to your customers. In case you sell physical goods, you’ll need to think how the products will reach your customers, within what timeframe and at what additional cost that you may want to incorporate into the product price or feature separately.
Remember to learn about kid entrepreneurship in more detail to have a round idea of what a business involves. It takes dedication and knowledge of the key marketing principles I teach in the business course for kids “Online Marketing Course For Young Entrepreneurs” before you embark on your own entrepreneurial journey.
Once you build your knowledge, it will be a good platform to start learning in further details how to start an online business for kids.
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