 Internet Business
Laboratory For Entrepreneurs - First Test Then Invest In
Your Market
"Entrepreneur's Laboratory" - that's what the Internet
has become over the last 10 years. Yes, it's was 1993 when
Marc Andreasen launched the first ever point & click
Internet Browser (Mosaic, 1993) on an unsuspecting world,
and the Internet for everyone was born! No longer did you
need to learn weird programming languages to use a computer.
As long as you could wag a finger, and recognise little
pictures on a screen, you could get your computer to do
things for you, and start communicating with other people.
From the Internet's inception, a galaxy of material covering
a wide array of topics has made up the Internet. In almost
no time at all, the Internet has overtaken VCR, audio
systems, telephone, and even television in some ways.
But for the entrepreneur, its most compelling, and
potentially life-changing role is as an almost
instantaneous, very low cost medium for direct mail
advertising.
I'm not referring to corporate-style advertising seen on TV
that aims to win design awards and build brand image. I am
referring to advertising that calls you to do something, in
contrast to TV ads that leave you gently smiling and asking
"What was that all about?" This call might entail signing
up for further information, downloading an e-book, phoning a
customer center, or even supplying your credit card in order
to request goods & services online!
Magazine advertisements commonly cost hundreds or up to
thousands of dollars to set up. Then, the business has to
wait weeks or months before getting back responses. In
contrast, the Internet Entrepreneur can set up a small ad
for a little more than tens of dollars or up to a couple
hundred dollars and have the first visitor to his website
within minutes! Measuring the performance of an ad in this
manner is remarkable considering it takes only a few hours.
You will automatically know which campaign is profitable and
you're leaving behind risky ways of advertising that can
cost a fortune.
Is this opportunity just what your business is ready for?
Will your current business increase revenue upon adding a
new online sales process? Or is it a new online business
venture you're ready to launch?
When you consider that much of the ordering, payment, and
fulfilment processes can be automated, and for many offers,
the sales processes too, then the commercial power of this
amazing technological medium becomes awesome!
Even though stepping across this frontier requires a range
of skills - such as direct marketing, copy writing, and
computer literacy - only two fundamental actions are called
for:
1. You must attract the right visitors to your site.
2. Then, you must persuade these visitors to execute
the desired actions.
Simple? Yes, in principle. But in practice there are many
questions you need to answer on the way:
- who would be the "right visitors"?
- where can I find them?
- how can I get them to my website?
- are there enough of them?
- and once they get there, what should I be asking visitors
to do anyway?
- how many will do what I want them to?
- how can I improve on this?
To help clients increase their business's growth, the Direct
MO Marketing website (http://www.1dmom.com) applies
effective, simple solutions for determined online
entrepreneurs who want to attract the right visitors to
their business online.
How to Grow your Business with an on-line Revenue Stream
Ever thought of expanding your business by adding on-line revenue streams? Or creatng a new business on-line? If so, there are many "gurus" around who'd like you to pay them high fees for the intricacies of their expertise. Some are very good...However you'd better know exactly what kind of help you're going to need, or these fees will eat into your profits long before you're even close to getting a return on your investment.
Simply worded, building a revenue stream online entails
skills in two matters:
1. Drawing the right visitors to your site.
2. Persuading these visitors to perform desired actions.
Let's play out one example whereby:
- Your product sells at $100.
- Your website attracts 1000 visitors monthly.
- 1% of these visitors purchase your product.
Then your short term revenue is found according to the formula:
Product price x number of visitors x % visitors who buy
$100 x 1000 x 1% = $1000 per month
Thus, increasing your revenue based on the given product
price are broken into the following options:
- To increase your site's traffic flow.
- To increase the percentage of visitors who buy ~ the conversion ratio.
- To do both.
Bare in mind, conversion ratios and traffic are not
independent issues. Your conversion rate may well be hugely impacted by your visitor type and the resource that's referring your visitors.
So what options do we have when it comes to getting visitors
to come to my web site? There are probably only a few key
stratgies:
1. Buy Traffic
There are many ways to buy traffic. Some of these are Pay-per-click (PPC), Banner ads, leads, or off-line advertising. These are generally quick methods of getting visitors to your site. But they can be expensive, and complicated. Unneccessarily so, especially if you're inexperienced, and make some of the mistakes common among PPC buyers.
2. Build Traffic
This means optimising your web site to gain a high position
in the Search Engine Results. While this can be highly effective, and deliver significant "free" traffic, it takes time, experience, and ongoing management effort to acheive and sustain an envied placing on the first page. And your efforts can be quickly trashed by competition, or simply a change of policy by the Search Engine. Unless you already have the experience, in practice this means a steep learning curve, or paying an SEO consultant to do it for you. So much for "free" traffic!
3. Dig for Traffic
By this I mean using your own existing customer lists and taking them to your new offer on-line. This can be an excellent approach for those who have an existing list of customers right for the new proposition. But what if you don't?
4. Traffic to Bring In through Public Relations.
Promote your offer on radio and TV or in magazines and newspapers. Plus, put your website address on "advertorials", articles and press releases for readers to know where to find more about your topic. If you have good media contacts and if you're wise, PR is an effective avenue.
5. "OPT" - Other People's Traffic
There are literally thousands of on-line magazines and newsletters with editors hungry for good, relevant content. They may well have circulation lists with thousands of subscribers. You can probably find several related to your topic. If only they'd publish your article, or even your advert, with a personal endorsement, to their list, you might receive a tidal wave of visitors, which would soon fall back, until you do the same again to another list, or offer another article for publication.
But of course you can't do everything all at once! So what
sort of start-up sequence should you consider?
1. For a fast market test, buy traffic from a highly keyword -targetted source. Test the viability of your niche, your offer, and your advertising copy. (Of course, if your exisitng client base is good for your new offer, test first with current clients.)Provided buying traffic remains profitable, keep this as a key part of your on-going traffic strategy.
2. Do you believe your niche is viable? Have you
established your opt-in rate or conversion rate? If so,
you're ready to use "OPT". Bring your offer to your
preferred publishers and negotiate a deal that's good for
all involved, so that the publishers can carry your ad or article. You should be carry this out regularly over a long period of time and use a variety of publishers that touch different market segments.
3. Build your sales website following the key Search Engine Optimization rules. Your site should have relevant content, a clearly focused theme, growing in-bound links, and so on. As the site over time increases its visibility on major Search Engines, your traffic is bound to grow.
4. Report newsworthy news in a timely fashion to TV, newspapers, radio and so on for these mediums to carry it.
As a final point, repeat over and over as long as this
stream is profitable.
Copyright 2005 Riki Trafford. All rights reserved.
Riki Trafford is the webmaster of Direct MO
Marketing Inc
which offers low cost keyword-targetted web traffic.
1dmom.com has a free newsletter - DMOM Traffic News.
Signup at http://www.1dmom.com/
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