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12 Steps to Creating a Business Online
"E-commerce" A word pervading our society, making headlines around the world, and causing the stock market to rise and fall with startling ease. It seems every business news story centers on some technology company's "DOT-com" or "DOT-bomb"! With all the positive and negative hoopla, business owners of any size company can throw up their hands and feel the "E" world has left them behind. Every business owner, salesperson, or professional asked one of two questions in the past year, either "Am I using e- commerce correctly?" or "How do I effectively get involved in e-commerce?" You can buy hundreds of books and pay thousands in consulting fees to analyze and debate the answer to the first question. To answer to the second question just follow these 12 steps. Step 1 - Buy a domain name (your own DOT-com). Go to www.NetworkSolutions.com and research names. Can a customer easily spell and remember it? Step 2 - Write down your online goals and prepare a time and money budget. How soon do you want your e-commerce site up and running? How much will you spend? How many hours will you devote to the site and when? Step 3 - Surf the web to find other sites you like and dislike. Learn from others' successes and mistakes by taking the best of what their sites offer and adapting it for your own use. Step 4 - Design your site on paper. Define elements, look, feel, colors etc. Step 5 - Hire a professional to set up the graphics and navigation, but with the intention of you or your staff maintaining the site's day to day operations, communication and updates. Step 6 - Invest in a digital camera and web publishing software such as Microsoft Front Page or Adobe Acrobat to keep up with the site's maintenance. Step 7 - Maintain, change, and update your site at least once a month. (The one exception to this rule are those one- page, sales letter websites. Once you have one of those that performs well and makes sales, don't change it!!) Step 8 - Promote your site at every opportunity. Tell people about it. Put your web address on your business cards and in all your ads. Some companies even advertise their web address when they put you on hold on the telephone. Step 9 - Give people a self-serving reason to visit your site. Coupon savings, discounts, special incentives, free information, and free newsletters represent excellent enticements for attracting visitors to your site. Step 10 - Concentrate on obtaining an email address from every customer and potential customer. Obtain permission to send periodic, value-added malings to your database. Use a list server to organize and maintain your mailing list. Step 11 - Always look for and use the simplest solution or option. Whether adding a shopping cart, database or other option to your e-commerce operation, seek out and use the simplest answer for your needs. Step 12 - Become educated and stay current in the world of e-commerce. Learn the marketing and sales techniques of the online world. About the Author: Jim Edwards is a syndicated newspaper columnist and the co-author of an amazing new ebook that will teach you how to use fr^e articles to quickly drive thousands of targeted visitors to your website or affiliate links... Simple "Traffic Machine" brings Thousands of NEW visitors to your website for weeks, even months... without spending a dime on advertising! ==> http://www.turnwordsintotraffic.com
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And even the obviously important question of tangible vs. intangible merchandises doesn't seem to me more crucial. There are two main branches of Internet marketing. They are, as I will soon try to prove, very different but none of them is "absurd", "stupid", or by definition unprofitable. Of course, there are many more branches. Whether you're selling tangible or intangible goods is perhaps equally important. I don't know. In any case it's much more obvious and widely understood. (That's probably because selling of tangible goods is as old as the humanity itself, and in it the tested methods of the post-order selling still basically rule, though of course adapted to the virtual reality.) Let's now give those two categories some short, simple names for the use of this text. How about "X marketers" (from eXternal) and "N marketers" (from iNternal)? The X marketers will be those selling to the "world at large", and N marketers will be those selling to fellow marketers. Now, an explanation is needed. When you start your marketing career you don't usually "decide" whether you want to be X or N marketer. It's mostly determined by the promotional tools you have access to at the beginning. If you start without any investments, or only with little ones, you will be using opt-in lists, traffic exchanges, FFA pages and similar resources. Then, by their very nature you start promoting to people who see those ads, and who are those people? Of course they are other marketers using the same tools! You have become an N marketer without even giving this issue much thought. (It can be noted that you are an N marketer trying to sell to other N marketers. Selling to X marketers seems a much more difficult matter, for they don't use the same promotional tools, or at least not in the same extent. You will need to be somewhat of a Guru to start selling to those people! No doubt there's lots of common between those two branches. After all "the money is in the list", and the really big profits come from back-selling to people who have already bought from you, are satisfied, trust you and therefore are willing to buy from you more. This part of your business will be fairly similar, no matter if you send to marketers or non-marketers. There are also important differences of course. If it wasn't so our distinction would have little meaning and so the this article would have no meaning. But those differences are very visible. let's start with the language itself. If you are an N marketer and are successful, have a list of many thousands happy clients and so on -- then you will be soon called a "Guru". If, on the other hand, you're enormously successful in selling let's say 2' x 3' stainless-steel widgets (or ebooks on painless, well-fed & lazy slimming for that matter), which of course means that you are an X marketer, then, even if you have thousands of faithful clients with deep pockets, instinctively reaching for their credit Platinum cards whenever they hear your name... Well, you will of course be admired and envied, not to mention rich, but you won't be called a Guru! You might be called something like "a Great Salesman", which is not too bad of course, but it's not the same,is it? Another difference is that in N marketing you don't usually speak much about "niches". Selling memberships in credit based opt-in lists from some external point of view can be seen as much "niche marketing" as selling, let's say... polishing-wax for pet anacondas. Not true? But I personally have never heard this term used in this context. The most important differences are however in how X's and N's find their clients in the first place. Or sometimes how they let themselves to be found by them. This is not just a play with words, as search engines do exactly that -- they let people find your offer, don't they? There are of course many different types of search engines and similar systems ("normal" search engines, Pay Per Click search engines, directories etc.) but from the viewpoint of the potential client they basically do the same thing. And for the X type marketer they are nowadays one of the very few available means of promotion. Of course it's in large part because they are very powerful tools, providing you with highly targeted hits. If you're able to get high position on those search engines that really matter (and don't get bankrupt on the way, as they tend to be costly) you're almost there. Add some off-line promotion and you're on your way to become The Great Salesman. (Of course all other aspects of your business also must be done right.) If however you have decided that selling to sellers doesn't sound so absurd or pointless as it is often presented, then your options are much more numerous. Which is a good thing of course, though your competition also has the same options, so it's not an unmixed blessing. You must show your offer to marketers, so you need to show it where marketers are looking for offers. Why should they be looking? There are two main reasons. The first reason is that they simply are forced to look at your offers. How? Why? By whom? It's simply that many, if not most, of the methods of online promotion available today base on the principle reciprocality. Which in this context means: "I will take a look at yours if you agree to take a look at mine". Yes, of course, you don't always have to actually look at those offers. Often you can pay the service to show your offers to others and ignore theirs. Still, the people who will see your offer will be those who want to show theirs to the world. (Of course they don't necessarily need to be commercial offers, they can be sites devoted to hobbies, charities, private or group obsessions etc. But they all want to SHOW people something rather than SEE somebody else's offer.) Does anything positive result from this fact? And, to pose a much broader question: does the marketer trying to sell to sellers (N marketer in our terminology) have any advantages over the one trying to sell to non-marketers (X marketer)? My answers would be: YES and YES. Why? There are a few reasons. Some of them pretty trivial though not without importance, like the fact that marketer usually is much more exposed to contact with offers from online businesses. Marketer also has some needs that can possibly be satisfied by buying things online. Two sorts of needs in fact. Firstly, the same needs that everybody else has. Secondly, specific needs related to Internet marketing. By being rather more exposed to Internet ads and offers than an average person, more used to it and understanding it better, marketer would probably buy more things online. But the other type of needs is far more important here. Now for the second type of needs. Marketer will need marketing tools, resources, information... These things change and develop in an enormous pace. This is of course a truism but it's absolutely true. If you're able to quickly find new promotional tools, opportunities and/or information on Internet marketing, you will be in position to sell (more or less directly, we will not plunge here into discussing downlines and referrals) these information - for after all it is exactly information! - to other marketers. I personally see no reason why marketers should be less receptive to this sort of information than average person. In fact they are probably much more receptive, as they know perfectly well how much in their personal lives depends on those tools, information and opportunities. It is probably not true that whole 95% of people trying to earn online is not earning any money, but it must be obvious that most marketers still have not found their way of doing business online and there's no reason to believe that this situation ever radically changes. So it's not only information on new available services and opportunities that is sought after, and therefore sellable. In order to be successful in this sort of business, where there's so much available information, potential chances and risks, and so little road-signs that can be fully trusted, one needs to find their own way. Way of doing business online. Human life being as short as it is, with most often very limited finances (or you wouldn't spend your time in front of the monitor with uncertain result, would you?), people who still haven't found the right method and attained real success in online business will need a "recipe", or, perhaps better, a successful person to help them -- a teacher, or even perhaps what the Americans call "the mentor". (There's this old joke about some American children asking their parents to pay them tree-climbing lessons, but Internet marketing without qualified help is a dreary and very risky thing to do.) If you already are successful, then being the N marketer you have serious advantages. One of them, perhaps the most important, is that you only deal with one (big, that's true) issue: online marketing. As X marketer you would need to handle both marketing itself and the market niche you're in. This fact has some further interesting effects. For example this that by attaining success as N marketer you're becoming a Guru, or "almost a Guru", and this time I'm using this term without irony. What I mean is simply that you've become an accomplished expert in your field, which of course is Internet marketing. While if you attait even the biggest success in selling widgets online, you will be a "Great Expert In Selling Widgets Online". Which means that you will be generally seen as a crossing between "widgets expert" and "marketing expert". Nobody will be certain how good you are in any of those two parts of your activity! Effect of which will be that your success will be much harder to duplicate! You will have much more difficulty in teaching people your tested business methods. If they are not going to sell widgets like yourself, nobody can be completly sure it's the best marketing practice that you're teaching. And the widget niche may be too small to accomodate many new players. It will be a totally different matter with general marketing knowledge that you obtain practicing N marketing. One special advantage that N marketing has is something that I personally call "self-propelling money machines". So far they are not very numerous, at least those that work smoothly and bring tons of money without constant need for adjustments and pushing. But there are some, pretty successful. And their will be more. What are those self-propelling money machines? They are smart combination of promotional resources with selling. One could say that they are resources that sell themselves, automatically. The simpler form cosists of just two main parts: the Lead Generating Module (more often multiple Resources) that are constatly being sold by something that can be called the Selling Module to the leads they generate. One program that I remember that worked like that was CommisionSpyder. In another, more advanced, version is probably best represented by the new "Explosive" ebook by Stephanie L. Woolford, a very successful online marketer. (This ebook can be for example found on http://ebiz-guru.com.) Here one can three conceptual modules: the Lead Generating Module, the Selling Module, and an ebook (that can be either free or paid) that ignites the whole process. I'm not sure I managed to describe the idea clearly enough, but it can be understood when seen in action. Ebooks are supposed to be the almost-perfect business and in near future they may really become that. If we assume that this statement is true, we can say probably risk an opinion that X marketers have greater chance of publishing a competent book on topics related to their chosen niche they know lots about, while N marketers seem to have much greater chance of publishing purely marketing ebook, "viral" ebooks, and ebooks of the sort mentioned in previous paragraph included. Which seems to be another advantage of N marketing. So after all Selling to Sellers may not be so stupid idea, wouldn't you agree?
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