By Shenmeng Bei
There is so much marketing information, softwares, tips, tricks, widgets and seminars that it can seem confusing and overwhelming to someone wishing to start out a business online. There are emotions to deal with as well, from uncertainty, apathy & righteousness to joy, peace of mind, clarity and a burning motivation and desire to succeed. Let’s try to put together a step by step success blueprint.
Firstly, you need a business idea. This may be a something you have specialised knowledge about or it may be some kind of solution that you know is to a common problem, or simply you want to enter a niche and make money from something that was a hobby or pastime. Market research does not have to be a huge task in internet marketing. Provided you can identify that there is a hungry market for your product you can create a business out of it.
Step two is to build a website. There are plenty of templates that will do the job for you. You may first of all need to learn some basics of how to put up and edit a website or else hire a webmaster to implement your instructions. The important thing about your website is that is has quality content on it – value that your readers will get something out of, which will in turn make it more likely they will want to buy something from your website – you don’t get something for nothing – and it works both ways.
Here’s where you can implement some marketing strategies. Having a list-building component on your website – such as an autoresponder form which allows you to collect email addresses and names and to send out an ezine and announcements to your list. You can create a spinoff site such as a blog which cross promotes your site, your products and provides added value to your customers and prospects. Once you have a list of about 100 you can start a forum which will generate more content about your topic and encourage the formation of a community around what you are offering.
This is all by-the-by unless you have a product that people really want. You can start by having a page on your site that allows visitors to buy an ebook or an audio about your niche. Provided you are offering information that has a USP (unique selling point) – eg it is cheaper, more densely concentrated, more revealing or better in some other way from anything else your prospect has seen. You will then start to have what has been termed as a profit funnel.
A visitor to your site is great. But it is better that they sign up to your ezine, so you can follow up with them and give them quality content so that when you hit them with a subtle or not so subtle sales pitch or special offer, they’ll buy rather than unsubscribe. Better yet, you’ll generate an instant customer who buys your ebook outright. Primarily, generating visitors (traffic and prospects) and turning those visitors in to subscriber prospects and proven buyers is going to mean you are in usiness.
These prospects and buyer prospects can also be sold on higher end products and services too. At the same time, with a little encouragement, your people will help you to drive more traffic by referrals, adding content to your site (via a forum or other user-generated content such as reviews, comments, a back-link from their site etc). To get traffic in the initial stages, you can improve your search engine optimisation, submit to directories, submit articles and to get indexed and get traffic, use social bookmarking sites.
This article was written by Shenmeng Bei of http://www.successfulinspirations.com Check out one blog used for marketing right here: http://www.gratitudebook.com/blog And here is a site example http://www.goingfree.org.
