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In the early stages of a business startup it is sometimes worth reminding yourself of the attractions of the field you have chosen and the reasons that led to the decision.
In online marketing luckily this is relatively easy to do. If you compare it with a physical “bricks and mortar” based business it seems there is almost just one big list of advantages.
For starters no spending physical premises is required, anywhere you can use a pc you can conduct this business. Therefore no rates, no long term binding lease to sign and no maintenance cost. Set up costs are also relatively low so risk is minimised from the outset.
Many of the products are non-physical and downloadable so no headaches with storage and stock control. This also means no carrier costs and the market is very large, often global!
Business is conducted mostly via a website and therefore is open 24/7 and is not dependent on your own personal input. Marketing can also be much easier, for example with Google adwords you can write an ad, publish it and start to see an effect within 10 minutes! All of the other traditional options can be used as well e.g. press advertising and direct mail if needed.
Secure online payments also avoid the need for expensive fixed and mobile swipe devices and the whole payment process including follow up and continuing communications to maintain a customer relationship can be automated. This is to name just a few of the benefits the list could go on and on….. No business is without downsides, of course, and online marketing is no different. The main ones seem to me to be:
· It is a very competitive market with a lot of people selling similar products
· A fair amount of technical and IT ability can be required
· It is highly reliant on technology and therefore prone to failure
· As it is a global market there could potentially be some tax related difficulties on profits
All of these can be overcome and, in my view, the benefits far outweigh the downsides, especially when compared with most other forms of business.
John
www.ObtainSolutionsLtd.com
www.TheGardenLovers.com
August 30th, 2007
Two to three weeks now after my online marketing seminar season it is dawning on me rather abruptly that making money in online marketing is not as simple as the gurus would have us believe.
The adrenaline rush that you experience after the gurus motivational spiel soon ebbs away when sat at your own pc flicking through your accounts and while the expense column grows the income column shows a big fat zero. Still, I continue to live in hope (and expectation).
If there is one phrase that is repeated time and again in this business it is ‘that you get out what you put in’ and I truly believe that to be the case. It is just that, unfortunately you don’t get it out straight after you’ve put it in!
I’ve been working mainly on three projects over the past few weeks, and I know this itself breaks one of the golden rules ‘complete one project before moving on to the next’. This is easier said than done.
You see, at the start just getting to grips with the basic building blocks of an online business is pretty time consuming itself.
The mounting expenses also make it difficult to resist having a punt at some of the seemingly easier income generation techniques like affiliate product marketing and google adsense. These also to a newbie, at least, are not that easy and a bit of a horse and cart situation can arise i.e. A good adsense site needs to be highly ranked and to get a lot of traffic, but to get highly ranked you can’t just load a site up with google adsense. These projects can easily become distracting sidelines and although I am not giving up on them, they leave me convinced that concentrating on developing your own quality product is THE most important thing.
John
www.ObtainSolutionsLtd.com
August 22nd, 2007
A 2 hour flight delay! This is not how a budding newbie internet marketers’ supposed to spend his time.
Still, thanks to the gadgetry that is my pda and the mp3 file format I have just spent an enthralling 2 hours listening to a tutorial from the google awords guru Greg Cesar. What an eye opener, the things that he can do with keyword and adwords is truly awesome.
The holy grail of internet marketers is to use ads to get a high click rate (click through rate) by using adwords that don’t cost a bomb. That is what he does and perhaps why he is known as the adwords dominator. He can take a niche market in any area and take on the big boys, getting to top spot in google ads for less than a tenth of their costs and he drives traffic to his sites through the roof.
Of course, I want to do the same. Still it’s gonna take more than one tutorial to get me to that level. So here’s looking to the next 5 tutorials (webinars) in the set and I’ll keep you posted as to how they go and possibly even share some of his secrets with you.
Anyway, now I’m on the flight to London and again thanks to my beloved pda, writing this blog. I’m off to a 2 day master class by internet entrepreneur Nick James to try to get my business kick started. I’ve been working my ass off for about 6 weeks with a hundred and one ideas for web businesses and not yet got a live site. I’m not saying I’ve been messing around, quite the reverse. It’s just that there is a helluva lot of stuff to get in place before launching the web sites that hopefully are going to bring in all of the dough!
4 1/2 hours after leaving home I’m sat being bumped the hell out of on an airport bus to my hotel. Memo to self: At all costs avoid physically travelling when possible and stay by the pc cozy and comfy at home.
Finally arrived at my hotel and within seconds had added 30 quid per night to my bill being unable to resist the executive upgrade. This involved a better room, wi-fi access and, of course, the compulsory late night movie 
The Friday night was a membership evening for Nick’s website. This was ok and it was nice to meet fellow members of the forum but it was a little light on content. Still off to the bar afterwards to network, had a few too many beers, a late night and was dog rough for the meeting on Saturday morning.
I was delighted to discover that that this hotel provided proper coffee from the Nespresso range of convenient “pod” ground coffee and it was freshly prepared double espressos all the way, which played a large part in reviving my spirits.
The meeting then kicked of with what is most fundamental in internet niche marketing, which is research your niche and ensure that there is a suitable market. There were two host presenters, firstly Nick James himself who has presence, calm and charisma.
He was a fount of knowledge and experience and presented things in a very clear way. The second presenter was a much less well known entity to many of us, and his presentational style was a bit in your face and OTT for much of the audience’s tastes. He was very well meaning and socially very pleasant though, it has to be said.
The research material included how to come up with potential product areas, such as from personal interests hobbies, magazines and then assessing market size using keyword search tools, google ads and hot web topics etc. Then it covered some further market research survey tools such as askdatabase.com and how to offset costs partially by affiliate marketing.
Lunch was provided as a perfectly palatable buffet, the coffee continued to flow and people gradually overcame their inhibitions and networked more as the weekend wore on.
The content continued with product creation and covered how to produce text based material, audio and video and what the correct tools to use are in each of these areas. Important marketing strategies were also covered including the price funnel of increasingly expensive products.
A key area for success in most of these areas is knowing when and what to outsource to preserve one’s own time for where it’s needed most which is business development.
Next up was membership sites and marketing product licenses. Then there was a fantastic session on writing effective sales copy by a chap called Raja Hireker and it was emphasized that this is a critical area to get right to maximise sales revenue.
Then marketing your site and traffic generation and unusually for a web marketing seminar a fair bit of time was spent on offline methods. These included newspaper and magazine ads and direct mailing through rental of mailing lists from hot buyers in related product areas.
There was only a brief time spent on google adwords and this was presented by a relatively successful forum member.
The meeting was wrapped up by a brief summary of material covered and some generous freebies with a usb stick full of material and utilities and a tape set of a previous seminar.
As ever I after such a seminar I am reeling with information overload yet buzzing with enthusiasm and impatience to get a site up and selling.
Still first things first. That is get back to my wife and kids, chill (but not for too long) and have an even nicer double espresso at home.
Now two days after returning from the masterclass I have worked my ass off trying to get the building blocks in place to run my own internet business.
Now it’s supposed to be inexpensive to set up an online business, and it is compared with a traditional bricks and mortar business. Still almost 5 grand into this arena for me in a 6 week period it certainly doesn’t feel like it.
Expenses include relevant seminars, registering domain names, web hosting, web design software, various software utilities, market research tools, outsourcing some product production design and copywriting, auto responders, shopping carts, some new hardware, setting up a limited company etc. The list goes on and on.
Then there is getting to know all the new software tools and reading various forums which a major time commitment. Not that I am saying it’s not fun but both the time and the money soon mount up. This engenders a deep seated desire to get some money flowing back ASAP.
Nothing is ever as simple as it seems (or as you are told) and what I am finding is that the devil, as ever, is in the detail I.e. The nitty gritty little details at every level. Such as what, if any, additional options to choose with a domain name, how to set up a clink bank affiliate and how to interpret all of your google ads research.
John
www.ObtainSolutionsLtd.com
August 21st, 2007
