A lot of people ask me how I make money online with my business, and this is what I tell them. Making money online can be done but it is not an easy process. At first there are some initial costs, but depending on your needs, whether you are a service or retail company, you can get started fairly inexpensive.

The first thing that you want to do is purchase a domain name, and then a simple hosting package. Normally I get my domain name from godaddy and my hosting from hostgator. After that you will want to get a good looking website template. Normally I  will get one from sitesource101.com or from 99designs.com. Site source offers free templates, and 99designs gives you multiple templates to choose from, but you will have to pay a few hundreds dollars for some good designs.

After you get your site designed and the template in place, you will want to consider whether or not you need an ecommerce platform. Usually for a retail business, this will be a good idea. If you decide to go with an ecommerce platform, you can try free software like, oscommerce, magentocommerce, zencart or cubecart. You can also try paid ecommerce like 1shoppingcart, xcart, or volusion. Depending on the amount of customization you need you may want to stick with something like 1shoppingcart. That may cost a little more, but it will save you having to purchase a SSL certificate for secure transactions, and also having to pay more hosting costs for securely storing customer credit card info. If you need to do a lot of customization, you will probably want to get a opensource ecommerce platform and build from that. Once you have these things in place you are ready to go online with your business and start making money.