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How To Create An Online Business
By Derrick | June 24, 2008
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There are many ways to create an online business. Here are five key strategies that could help you to succeed.
Key #1: Choose the Right Market Idea
It’s expensive and time-consuming to create a new market. It’s also unnecessary. You should be searching out markets that already exist – product categories that people are already buying. Find a hungry crowd with money to spend, and you’re half-way there.
One of the indicators of a thriving market is plenty of competition. If you find a market where others are already making money, you can be sure that there are plenty of buyers. A good indication of this is the number of Adwords ads that appear on the Google search results page for your broad market keyword.
Here’s an example: type ‘comedy’ into Google. When I tried it, I got 304,000,000 results, and no Adwords ads. I tried ‘comedy dvd’ and found 8,280,000 pages, and something like 170 Adwords ads.
For ‘golf’ I got 560,000,000 results, and 8 ads. For ‘golf shoes’ I found 3,940,000 web pages, and over 300 Adwords ads.
Once you’ve chosen a market, you’re going to need to find a way to stand out – to be remarkable. Seth Godin calls this a ‘Purple Cow’. How do you do that? You could offer something no-one else offers, appear on the first page of the Google results, build a fanatical band of followers.
Key #2: Prolific product development
You need to develop ‘multiple streams of income’. It is better to have 10 products with monthly sales of $1000 each than to have one product with $10,000 of sales.
It’s useful to have inexpensive products in the $10 – $20 price range, which allow you to convert visitors to buyers. But you probably won’t get rich selling $10 products. You’ll need to have a range of offers, perhaps including $50 products, $100 products and $500 products. That way people can buy from you when their circumstances allow.
Technology makes it easy and quick to create information products. You don’t need to write a 300-page ebook. People are pushed for time, and a lengthy volume is not what they need. Shorter is almost always better. If you can’t cover the topic in one ebook, that’s good. Split it up into Volume 1, Volume 2 and so on.
You can create a simple video product almost in real time with screen capture software. Just show your viwers what you do, step-by-step, and explain it along the way. You can create software tutorials, Powerpoint presentations and product demos this way.
Other ways to create products quickly and cheaply include using voice recognition software to create ebooks and reports, interviews with people who know more than you, teleseminars and webinars.
If you want to create a product about something that you can’t do on a computer, like fly-fishing or real estate investing, use an inexpensive camcorder and shoot your own videos. As long as the information you present is fresh and different, customers won’t mind the imperfections. In fact they may prefer your less polished, down-to-earth approach.
Key #3: High Conversion Websites
You need to build websites that convert visitors to buyers. The way to do this has always been by creating web copy that sells. Every copywriter will tell you that the ONLY way to make sure that the copy sells is by testing.
But these days you can consider adding video to your page. Video lets you explain things in more detail, while building a relationship with your visitor.
Here are some ways to hone your copywriting skills:
1.Find sales letters that work – the sales letters for the top products in the Clickbank Marketplace, for instance. Or anything by John Carlton, Gary Halbert or Michel Fortin. Write them out long-hand, or type them into your wordprocessor. Or if you’re in a rush, read them aloud. The act of writing the words yourself helps you to understand the nuances and techniques used by top copywriters.
2.Find the hook in your offer. What is it that will grab peoples’ attention and pique their curiosity? Look at the tabloid newspapers and magazines like Cosmopolitan – “QUIZ: Are You Destined For Success?” “167 Ways To Have A Sizzling Summer”. See how the copy uses short, powerful phrases to create images in your mind and trigger your curiosity.
3.Write like you talk. There’s no need to get all high-falutin’ when you’re writing copy. Just explain things as if you were chatting to a friend.
4.The only truly accurate way to find out if your copy works is by testing. Again, technology makes this easy. You can even do multivariate testing, where all the elements of your sales page are tested simultaneously, for free using Google Optimizer.
Key # 4: Generate Targeted Buying Traffic
The number of visitors to your website is not nearly as important as the number of buyers. Here are three ways to get targeted traffic:
- Produce content. Blogging, article submissions and videos are all effective ways to share your original content with your audience.
- Paid advertising, such as Pay Per Click and ezine solo ads.
- Affiliates – You can leverage Clickbank’s huge affiliate network, or build your own network of affiliates. Whichever way you do it, affiliates need to be trained, equipped and motivated.
Key # 5 Create Systems That Do The Work For You
You’ve probably heard the cliché about “working ON your business, not IN your business”. Real businesses are profitable systems that can be run by anyone. You want to stand outside the business, looking in, checking that the processes are running smoothly, making sure that every task is performed consistently.
Big businesses like Macdonalds realize the importance of systems. Every task that needs to be done within the business is documented in such a way that anyone can do it.
Imagine building a team, without ever having to deal with the hassles of employees. Since Tim Ferriss wrote “The 4-Hour Work Week”, outsourcing companies have sprung up all over the place. Your team could be made up of people from all over the world, performing tasks that you define. You may not even have to pay them.
Your team can be trained with written procedures and videos, and their work managed by checklists. You can have team members whose job it is to check up on other team members. You need to end up with a system which runs with virtually no input from you.
Terry Dean has an excellent product which will teach you how to build a successful Internet business. He calls it the Internet Lifestyle Retirement System.
Topics: Online Business | 6 Comments »
June 24th, 2008 at 1:25 pm
Nice post dude.
June 26th, 2008 at 8:57 am
//Write like you talk. There’s no need to get all high-falutin’ when you’re writing copy. Just explain things as if you were chatting to a friend.
I’ve been doing a lot of research on this and I agree completely in a lot of cases. It might not be good if you are a bank or something similar but for most online business you get better results with a friendlier approach.
September 7th, 2008 at 8:28 pm
I think the title of your post says it all. It’s an online business and so many people think they can make money online without the steps that you outlined. This article is way more realistic than the fluff that other MMO’s feed you, so thanks.
PRs last blog post..Card Magic Tricks
December 31st, 2008 at 1:07 pm
It is very true that one should focus on markets that already exist, and not to create new ones. Creating from scrach is very difficult. I liked the idea of creating a simple video product, which can be done in a shoert time. Thanks.
January 5th, 2009 at 12:22 pm
Creating an online business is easy. But, promoting it is a pain in the a** !!!
Teenage Businessmans last blog post..Start Your Own Online Business: Outsource!
June 1st, 2009 at 6:03 am
Great post. I like the point about having 10 products instead of one making same amount. This way if the product stops selling or program goes down you still have other income and products to sell.