Online Store Missing

It's the American dream -- build a business of your own and live life on your own terms. Even in today's world where it seems every politician is talking about giving every American free college, many of us still dream of opening our own store or business. Increasingly however, opening that store means doing so virtually, by creating an online presence. So what exactly do you need for an online store to succeed anyway?

A Good Website

Gone are the days when you could type up a few bits of text and maybe throw in some grainy pictures in order to build a professional website. These days, it's all about parallax backgrounds, sliders and all the other cool bells and whistles that make up a modern website.

Sure, content is still king, and you can't really build an online business empire without solid content. However, even if you have good content, nobody will look at it if you end up putting it into a website that looks like a high school project from the 1990s. The good news is that you don't necessarily need to hire someone to do it for you. If you are mildly technically minded, you can use page builders to put up a pretty sweet looking website all on your own.

Or, for a more polished look, spend the money to hire someone. A solid web designer isn't insanely expensive anymore and you can easily find someone to build your site and create the content for it for under $5k.

Traffic

With estimates of thenumber of websites in the billions (yes, that's billions with a b), your site may as well not exist if it doesn't get some traffic.

How does one drive traffic? Well, there are really two basic ways, and both have costs: free and paid.

Free traffic can be awesome because people find you because they were genuinely looking for what you have to offer. This means that the people visiting your site are there because they found you through search or were referred by a friend on social media.

The nice thing about this free traffic is that it's likely the best quality -- if someone found you because they sought you out, that means they genuinely want to be on your website. The bad news? It's hard to get free traffic and you 'pay' for it with the time it takes to build your rankings.

Paid traffic by comparison is relatively easy but can be expensive. Plus, if you don't do it correctly, you could easily lose your entire advertising budget and then some on the cost of paid traffic.

Which is right for you? Probably a mixture of both. When building your site, look for someone who can help you build traffic as well and you'll get the best of all worlds.

Shipping

Finally, if you plan on selling physical goods, you need to consider shipping. Now it's not enough to try and see if there is a post office near Ann Arbor or wherever it is that you happen to live. You need to ensure that you are getting the best quality shipping service possible because after all -- your site's reputation depends on it.

Too many lost or late packages and you won't be able to sell anything. So make sure to choose reliable shipping services at every turn in order to make your business a successful one.