My work has always been with widely scattered small business clients and I often work with them in groups so that they can share the cost. We all ended up traveling. I used to fly somewhere almost every week to visit clients and run workshops and many of my clients were remotely located. While it was very lucrative it was exhausting and at the same time my small clients were asking me if we could work online. I gulped and said yes but it will take time. Then I started asking around and searching the internet. I was offered help at $100,000 per module - so I said no. It took me a year of completing multiple online courses before I fitted all the jigsaw pieces together.

So here is the secret. There are four critical steps you need to take to put your business effectively online.

1. Find your clients and this is easier than ever before with a range of free marketing tools like article marketing, social networks, video marketing added to the long established tools like speaking, networking, publicity and the paid avenues like adverts and advertorial all aimed at driving traffic to your website and building trust with e-zines and teleseminars.

2. Make sure your product is what your clients want and delivered in a way that your clients can handle. Before you put a lot of effort and expense into finalizing your product you can research your target market using of the marketing tools listed above. You can use articles and social media to gauge the response to ideas. Check to see the response. If you are not creating interest you need to experiment with variations that are more attractive to your market. Where you might have paid huge amounts of money to market research agencies in the past, you can now do this same research online by yourself and prevent very costly product to market mistakes.

3. Autoresponders can put your business on auto pilot. You will find that autoresponders are really useful for delivering fully digital products. This can be done immediately using an autoresponder linked directly to your shopping cart. A twelve week training program can be set to deliver small bite sized pieces of information each week so that all you need to do is enroll your clients into the auto responder on the start day and run a weekly teleconference, knowing that as your clients paid upfront, they received an automatic receipt and welcome message telling them they would be contacted on the set date to commence the course.

4. Have easy methods of collecting money - upfront before you deliver. The total opposite to many offline businesses who invoice after completing the work then wait to be paid YOUR money.

Just how hard is that? There are literally only four critical things to master and they are all very straightforward. What a change to give up chasing overdue invoices and know that you are being paid very much higher fees per hour than anything your offline business managed.