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12 Steps to Creating a Business Online
"E-commerce" A word pervading our society, making headlines around theworld, and causing the stock market to rise and fall withstartling ease. It seems every business news story centers on sometechnology company's "DOT-com" or "DOT-bomb"! With all the positive and negative hoopla, business ownersof any size company can throw up their hands and feel the"E" world has left them behind. Every business owner, salesperson, or professional asked oneof two questions in the past year, either "Am I using e-commerce correctly?" or "How do I effectively get involvedin e-commerce?" You can buy hundreds of books and pay thousands inconsulting fees to analyze and debate the answer to thefirst question. To answer to the second question just follow these 12 steps. Step 1 - Buy a domain name (your own DOT-com). Go towww.NetworkSolutions.com and research names. Can a customereasily spell and remember it? Step 2 - Write down your online goals and prepare a time andmoney 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 anddislike. Learn from others' successes and mistakes by takingthe best of what their sites offer and adapting it for yourown use. Step 4 - Design your site on paper. Define elements, look,feel, colors etc. Step 5 - Hire a professional to set up the graphics andnavigation, but with the intention of you or your staffmaintaining the site's day to day operations, communicationand updates. Step 6 - Invest in a digital camera and web publishingsoftware such as Microsoft Front Page or Adobe Acrobat tokeep up with the site's maintenance. Step 7 - Maintain, change, and update your site at leastonce a month. (The one exception to this rule are those one-page, sales letter websites. Once you have one of those thatperforms well and makes sales, don't change it!!) Step 8 - Promote your site at every opportunity. Tell peopleabout it. Put your web address on your business cards and inall your ads. Some companies even advertise their webaddress when they put you on hold on the telephone. Step 9 - Give people a self-serving reason to visit yoursite. Coupon savings, discounts, special incentives, freeinformation, and free newsletters represent excellententicements for attracting visitors to your site. Step 10 - Concentrate on obtaining an email address fromevery customer and potential customer. Obtain permission to send periodic, value-added malings toyour database. Use a list server to organize and maintain your mailinglist. Step 11 - Always look for and use the simplest solution oroption. Whether adding a shopping cart, database or other option toyour e-commerce operation, seek out and use the simplestanswer for your needs. Step 12 - Become educated and stay current in the world ofe-commerce. Learn the marketing and sales techniques of the onlineworld. About the Author: Jim Edwards is a syndicated newspaper columnist and theco-author of an amazing new ebook that will teach you how touse fr^e articles to quickly drive thousands of targetedvisitors to your website or affiliate links... Simple "Traffic Machine" brings Thousands of NEW visitors toyour website for weeks, even months... without spending adime on advertising! ==> http://www.turnwordsintotraffic.com
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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 wantto show theirs to the world. (Of course they don't necessarily need to be commercial offers, they can be sites devotedto hobbies, charities, private or group obsessions etc. But they all want to SHOW people something ratherthan SEE somebody else's offer.)Does anything positive result from this fact? And, to pose a much broader question: does the marketertrying 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 thoughnot without importance, like the fact that marketer usually is much more exposed to contact with offersfrom online businesses.Marketer also has some needs that can possibly be satisfied by buyingthings 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 offersthan an average person, more used to it and understanding it better, marketer would probably buy morethings 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 absolutelytrue. If you're able to quickly find new promotional tools, opportunities and/or informationon Internet marketing, you will be in position to sell (more or less directly, we will notplunge here into discussing downlines and referrals) these information - for after all it isexactly information! - to other marketers. I personally see no reason why marketers should beless receptive to this sort of information than average person. In fact they are probablymuch more receptive, as they know perfectly well how much in their personal lives depends onthose tools, information and opportunities.It is probably not true that whole 95% of people trying to earn online is not earning any money, butit must be obvious that most marketers still have not found their way of doing business online andthere'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 muchavailable information, potential chances and risks, and so little road-signs that can be fullytrusted, 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 spendyour time in front of the monitor with uncertain result, would you?), people who still haven'tfound 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 Americanscall "the mentor". (There's this old joke about some American children asking their parents topay them tree-climbing lessons, but Internet marketing without qualified help is a dreary andvery 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. Thisfact has some further interesting effects. For example this that by attaining success as N marketeryou're becoming a Guru, or "almost a Guru", and this time I'm using this term without irony. WhatI mean is simply that you've become an accomplished expert in your field, which of course isInternet marketing. While if you attait even the biggest success in selling widgets online, youwill be a "Great Expert In Selling Widgets Online". Which means that you will be generally seen asa crossing between "widgets expert" and "marketing expert". Nobody will be certain how good you arein any of those two parts of your activity! Effect of which will be that your success will bemuch harder to duplicate! You will have much more difficulty in teaching people your tested businessmethods. If they are not going to sell widgets like yourself, nobody can be completly sure it's thebest marketing practice that you're teaching. And the widget niche may be too small to accomodate manynew players. It will be a totally different matter with general marketing knowledge that you obtain practicingN 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 withoutconstant 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 twomain parts: the Lead Generating Module (more often multiple Resources) that are constatly being sold by something thatcan be called the Selling Module to the leads they generate. One program that I remember that worked like that wasCommisionSpyder. In another, more advanced, version is probably best represented by the new "Explosive" ebook byStephanie 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 thewhole 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 assumethat this statement is true, we can say probably risk an opinion that X marketers have greater chance of publishinga competent book on topics related to their chosen niche they know lots about, while N marketers seem to have muchgreater chance of publishing purely marketing ebook, "viral" ebooks, and ebooks of the sort mentioned in previousparagraph included. Which seems to be another advantage of N marketing. So after all Selling to Sellers may notbe so stupid idea, wouldn't you agree?
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