[Written by Arman Anaturk, illustrated by @Camille Bossel]

How To Set Up Your Online Business in 10 Steps

Want to build a business you can travel with? Here's everything you need to do and every tool you need to use to set up your business online in three days tops. Seriously.

1 - Determine Your Purpose

The first step towards setting up any business is, of course, determining what the business does. Hopefully, you have an idea of what you want to do; (consulting for startups, blogging your travels, building a cool product, designing websites for others, etc .) so make sure to get it all down on your super simple business plan . Unsure of what you want to do? That's totally okay, research what others are doing, figure out what you're good at, see what you can charge others for, find your niche and come back to this article when you're ready. No rush. 🚶

2 - Register Your Domain

Cool, you know what you want to do and you're itching to get started 👍Now it's time to pick the name of your business. If you've already got a name in mind, great! Head over to Namecheap to buy a relevant domain. Stuck on picking a name? Use Name Mesh to come up with one using keywords and see which domains are available to buy.

3 - Get Organised

Sweet, that name is 🔥. Now head over to Trello to start organising your work and listing your to do's. Are you starting to feel like you're not making the most of your time? Let's quickly follow these techniques to work smarter, not harder and become a productivity machine.

4 - Create Your Brand Identity

Great, now you have a kick-ass name, a relevant domain, plus you've organised yourself on Trello. Before jumping into anything else, you need a beautiful brand identity. Here's how to do it yourself with no design experience, save hours / days / weeks of ⏰ and a whole bunch of 💰:

1. Pick your brand colors on Coolors
2. Pick the fonts that best fit your business with Google Web Fonts
3. Find inspiration for your logotype on Dribbble and build your logotype on Graphicsprings [UPDATE: use Logopony, more powerful and completely free]
4. Find relevant resources on Freepik and get free stock photos with Unsplash
5. Use Canva to bring everything together to build your backgrounds, banners, social media profiles and documentation.

5 - Build Your Landing Page

Still with me? Breathe. Now it's time to host all your work on your landing page. You'll use this to outline your business / service / product / etc. and collect interested customers / clients / users information for later. Use kickofflabs , a quick, easy and powerful landing page builder that requires no coding. Need some inspiration of great landing pages? Check out the Lapa for some of the best examples. Oh and if you still have an embarrassing email like 'I iluvkats69@hotmail.co' now is the time to replace it with something a bit more serious like 'you@yourbusinessname.com'.

Remember, this is the last chance you have to win someone over. Understand what makes good copy on your landing page and how to build a high-performing one too.

6 - Find Your Audience

Sweet, you've optimized your time with Trello, you've built your own beautiful brand identity and landing page and you've just linked it all through your awesome domain. Now what? It's time to build an audience!

First, identify who is your target markets and create their marketing personas. Next, set up your Twitter account and add that fresh new cover photo that you just built using Canva 🙌. Finally, learn how to find your social media marketing voice and fill out your bio with an interesting introduction. From here, it's down to you to find out where your audience hangs out ( Facebook , Reddit , Dribbble, Instagram , Snapchat , etc.) and start getting active there too.

7 - Grow Your Audience

Cool, you're ready to start spreading the word about yourself 🙋Let's find some relevant people to follow using Crowdfire, just type in the keywords relevant to your business and get following! Great, but before you start spending unnecessarily long hours managing your socials, let's head over to Buffer and sign up for a free account to automate our posts. Here you can publish / schedule posts to your account, track how they do, find the optimal times to share and a whole lot more.

8 - Find Content

As for finding relevant content to post, the more choices the merrier. Sign up to Quuu to get suggestions of content that will appeal to your audience and automatically schedule them with Buffer. Also, make sure to do your research on influencers and bloggers in your field and add them to your feed on Feedly for daily reading.

9 - Make Content

The balls really rolling now and it's time you start producing your own content. Set up your profile on Medium to write and post articles without the hassle of setting up a blog. What should you write about? Anything that interests you and that would be valuable to others in your field. Stop! ✋Just about to post something? Let's check your grammar quickly with Grammarly and if it's all good than it's time to add a fresh photo, along with your post. Luckily Pablo , by Buffer takes care of this. Build an accompanying picture for your article and schedule it to post using Buffer in only a few seconds.

10 - Start Getting Traffic

You've done an incredible job so far but it's likely you have not seen much activity yet. Do not worry, that's totally normal. Your users / clients / customers are not just going to stumble upon you, its down to you to actively find them. Here are 130 different ways to get traffic , pick a few and do them regularly.

Guess what? You're done. 👏

That's the bare minimum you need to set up your business online, by following this guide you just saved weeks of time, a whole load of stress and a heck lot of money. Yes, it took a bit of work but it really was not that bad! Right? With everything set up, you can now focus on getting traffic, finding your first clients / customers / users, test and improve your business and start making 💰💰💰.

Oh, one last thing, back up everything onto Dropbox ! Now that you're running your own business, your laptop is the most important thing you own. If anything were to happen and you'd lose your laptop, your business will be lost with it. So go, now (!) And start backing up everything on there.

We've worked hard to test and pick the best tools so you do not have to. Time is your biggest asset and you should not have to spend it deciding between the 1000's of different options out there. If you enjoyed this article and also also benefited from it in any way, whether to set up your business, used some of the suggested tools to improve your current business, decided to quit your job and jump-start your new remote lifestyle or just enjoyed the read, please give it a ❤ and share with your friends.

Thanks for reading! Follow us on Medium, Twitter and Facebook for more articles, leave a comment if there are any other tools you'd like to add or tweet to us just to say hello 😊

Interested to read more, check out another one of our articles with even more great tools:

Illustration by Camille Bossel.

Written by Arman Anaturk

Knows how to cook a Ratatouille. Occasional writer. Co-Founder at OneRoof.Agency.

Connect with me on Instagram or Linkedin