Starting your own online business can offer many benefits. You can run it as a full time project, or it can be something that you do in your free time as a side business. The internet never sleeps so profits can keep coming in at any hour of the day, even when you’re sleeping or on holiday.You don’t have to be a technical expert to start your own online business. Here are the 5 steps to follow.1. Decide On Your Marketplace Before you start your own online business you have to decide the market that you want to enter and who you are going to sell to. The more focussed you are on a specific your industry or niche, the greater chance you will have in selling to your target audience. If you try to sell everything to everyone you will almost certainly end up selling nothing to anyone.2. Sort Out What You’re Going To SellOnce you have decided on your market you need some products or services to sell to that market. You can either create these yourself or you can sell other products produced by other businesses. This is one of the great things about starting your own online business. You don’t have to produce your own products or even buy stock from manufactures. You act as an affiliate of the product and you get paid a commission when you make a sale.3. Build A WebsiteA lot of potential entrepreneurs are put off the online business world because they don’t think that they can build a website. But there are many software programs available that make the whole process easy. Or, you can outsource the web building phase for somebody else to do for you.4. Get People To Visit Your WebsiteThere are two main strategies to get people to your website. You can buy website traffic in the form of advertisements that appear on other websites or on social media. Or you can generate free website traffic. This can be done by fully optimizing your website so that it’s picked up by the search engines or uploading good quality content to social media with links back to your website.5. Build An Email List Of CustomersWhen a website visitor first comes to your site, it’s unlikely that they will buy anything from you there and then. So you have to build that trust and relationship with them. The best way to do this is via an email capture box on your website. To get the emails of your prospects you will need to offer them something of value in return that is connected to your business. This could be a free report or eBook that provides useful info to your customer about your products or services. Once they give you their email you can then remain in contact via email to tell them more about the benefits of your products and services.