Author: from TalkBiz News.
Welcome to Lesson One of “The Course,” from TalkBiz News.
The goal of this little beastie is to show you what it takes to create a successful business online.
You would be Better Off To Print This Page: 
Before I get started, I should point out that parts of this may seem basic to some people. The key to getting the most from the course is to remember that none of these things exist independently of the others.
Without putting at least most of them together, you won’t have a business at all. And that brings us to an important distinction. That’s the difference between a business and a succession of money-making projects.
Just so it doesn’t sound like I’m being academic, here’s a brief explanation:
If you’re doing projects and you stop, the money stops.
Immediately. If you stop because you’re sick or you have a family emergency, stopping the money can be very inconvenient indeed.
To put it bluntly… It sucks.
A business, on the other hand, can keep going with someone else at the helm, and the money can keep coming in. It’s entirely possible, with some models, for the business to keep generating cash automatically for months or even years, without any need for regular oversight.
Which do you want? A succession of projects, or a business?
‘Nuff said.
Please also keep in mind that this course is intended to show you _what_ you need to do and to learn. It’s waaaay past the scope of the thing to teach you _how_ to do every part of what’s covered. That’s for later.
With that introduction, we proudly present Lesson One…
“The Five Ingredients of a Successful Online Business”
As you probably guessed from the title of the article, there are five things you must have for a successful online business.
They are:
1. A product that delivers value
2. A site that communicates that value effectively
3. Visitors that already want what you’re selling
4. Leverage
5. Focus
Anyone who’s ever read Ken Evoy’s excellent manual, “Make Your Site Sell,” (http://makethat.sitesell.com/myss), will find the first three points quite familiar. As usual, I tinkered with them a bit, to help make them a bit clearer.
The last two are things that you won’t find mentioned in a lot of courses. They’re ignored by the majority of people who try to start a business online.
They’re also what makes for real success.
Before we get side-tracked, let’s go over each of them, in order.
“A Product That Delivers Value”
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This one is easy, as long as you remember that value is defined by your prospective customers. Not you.
I don’t care how “cool” you think widget-whackers are. It makes no sense to try and sell widget-whackers to people who have no idea what a widget is, or why it should be whacked.
If your product solves a problem that 100% of the people in the world have, and 0% of the people in the world care about, it’s not providing value. And if it doesn’t provide obvious value, it won’t sell.
Unpleasant Fact of Business #1439: You are not your market.
Get over it.
….
Value is defined as “what they want.”
Not what they need.
Not what you think they need.
Not what you think they should want.
Not what you’re sure will make them happy.
What they want.
The more powerful the want, the more you can charge for fulfilling it. And the happier they’ll be to pay you for it.
Whether you create the product yourself, or have it done to your specifications, you must make sure it provides value your market wants.
Find out what they want, and give it to them.
It’s that simple.
“A Site That Communicates That Value Effectively”
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Simple sales copy: What’s in it for them?
Communicate benefits. For those of you who are new to the whole thing, you may be confused about the difference between a benefit and a feature. That’s likely true even for most people who don’t know they’re confused.
Don’t worry, it’s a lot simpler than most people make it sound. In fact, it was the content of the shortest issue of this newsletter ever. Reprinted here, in toto:
“Myers’ #Marketing Maxim”
Benefits exist in the head and the heart.
Everything else is a feature.
Yeah. I thought it was an important enough point to make that the whole issue.
….
Keeping that definition in mind, remember: People buy for benefits.
They rationalize the decision with features.
You may think that doesn’t apply to you, or your market. If you think that, you’d be wrong. Like most things that have to do with human nature, this hasn’t changed in a Very Long Time.
When you create a product or write a sales letter, you should do so with one thing in mind: Giving people things they perceive as benefits. Things that make them feel better (the
heart) or that make them feel better about themselves (the head).
Everything else is fluff and mummery.
Your site must be built and written around the goal of communicating to your visitors that you have the answer to a question they’re already asking.
“How do I get this condition or this state that I want?”
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Side note:
There are two kinds of sales: Roses and aspirin.
A “rose” sale is something that appeals to their opinion of themselves, or that promises to make them feel good by making someone else feel good about them.
In short, it’s a “feel good” thing.
An “aspirin” sale promises to solve a problem that causes them pain. It’s a “feel better” thing.
A “rose sale” is fun, but it’s too easy. There are tons of people who can make you feel good about yourself, who can appeal to your ego. The money in a “rose sale” is sometimes as good, but it’s harder to get and it doesn’t inspire loyalty.
On the other hand, an “aspirin sale” means you’ve fixed a problem. You’ve removed pain. That creates a much more loyal customer. Someone who trusts you implicitly and wants to deal with you again in the future.
It’s also a bigger ticket sale, most of the time.
If you can communicate both – appeal to their ego AND eliminate pain – you’re golden. Try to do that in every sales letter you write, or have written for you.
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I strongly recommend that you learn the basics of writing effective sales copy, even if you intend to have someone else write your letters and ads for you. That way, you’ll have an idea of what’s needed before the writing starts, and how to tell if it’s good when it’s done.
If you understand how to communicate benefits, you’ll be able to explain them to your copywriter, and to “see” them in the finished copy.
“Visitors That Already Want What You’re Selling”
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Traffic. It’s the marketing equivalent of “abracadabra.” The magic word that opens the mythical door to riches.
Or so you’d think, if you listen to the people selling it or the people who need it.
Here’s a little secret about people involved in the “Internet marketing” field: One out of four would eat their own young for an extra 15 visitors a day.
Fortunately, the rest are really cool, so you’ve got decent odds of getting out of it alive. 😉
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If you think I’m kidding, watch the things some people will do to get you to visit their site, or sign up for their list.
Some are deceptive. Some give away the farm to get a glass of milk. Some beg, some borrow and some steal.
Some make a planned effort to only talk to the people who already want what they’re offering.
Who do you think is going to make more money and have more fun?
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Some people will tell you that any traffic is good traffic.
That’s nonsense.
I’ve seen businesses fail because they had too much of the wrong kind of traffic. More common are the businesses that fail because they didn’t have enough of the right kind.
I have never seen a business fail because they had too much qualified traffic.
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No matter what you’re offering, you need to have a plan to attract the people who already want it, and to get them to your site at a price that creates a profit.
That’s much easier if you create the product in response to an existing demand for which you’ve already identified traffic sources.
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Traffic is the place where your math skills will be most important.
You need to watch your “visitor value.” That’s the amount of income generated, on average, for every person who lands on your site. You need to know what it is for every traffic source you pay for. And you need to track it over time, to make sure it’s staying in the profitable range.
If you’re planning on working on only “free” #traffic generation, make sure you remember that your time has value.
Decide what value is acceptable as a return for that time.
If you’re concentrating on promoting affiliate products, you need to consider “EPC.” That means, “earnings per click.” How much money do you make, on the average, every time someone clicks on your affiliate link?
Basically, that’s your “visitor value” for a visitor you send to someone else.
The math is simple, but you have to do it.
This is why you’ll hear so much about testing and tracking. You need to know how you’re doing now so you can compare it to how you do in the future.
How else can you expect to improve?
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When you consider the value of traffic generation, you need to keep in mind that some traffic generation techniques pay over a longer time than others.
The worst kind of traffic technique is one that happens only once, and can’t be duplicated. This can be profitable, even very profitable, but it’s what I call “stunt traffic.”
This is stuff like press releases, articles that get printed in newsletters but not on web sites, etc. If you do that sort of traffic generation, make sure you have a way to get at least some of those people into your affiliate program or on your list.
This is not to say you should avoid this kind of traffic. Not at all. It can help provide the boost you need to make some money and get the staying power to work on other methods, generate other products, or pay for more consistent traffic.
If it’s effective at generating subscribers or affiliates, it’s worth making time to keep doing it. But it should not be your main focus.
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There are ways of generating traffic that keep working, long after you’ve stopped working at them yourself. Free (or paid) ebooks or reports that contain links to your site. Articles posted on other sites that contain links to your own. Viral systems that get people to spread the word about your site on their own.
Or an affiliate program. You pay people for every visitor to your site that does something specific and measurable. Signs up for your list, buys your product, or asks for information on your services.
The more attractive you make it for other people to send you traffic, the more traffic they’ll send you. And they’ll keep doing it as long as it’s profitable for them to do so.
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Paid traffic is another option. This includes various systems like pay-per-click, banner ads, CPA networks, and even more odd sounding items. The benefit of paid traffic is that most of it can be expanded. If it’s profitable, you can buy more of it.
That can be a very fast way to build a business, if you know how to properly measure and track changes in the value of that traffic.
It’s not for those with small budgets or faint hearts.
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The best traffic is that generated by your own subscribers and customers. They know you, trust you (if you’ve treated them right), and have a demonstrated interest in your subject.
The best way to build a solid base is to build a list of people who’re interested in your offers, and treat those people right.
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If there’s one thing you get from this lesson, it should be
this: Know who your perfect prospect is, know where to find them, and know what they want to get before they’ll give you what you want in return.
After that, it’s all about creating system to repeat the process.
“Leverage”
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Leverage is a simple concept. You arrange your strategy to get
more results from a given effort than would normally be
expected.
Leverage is one of the most talked about things in business,
and pretty much everyone gets it wrong online. Well, it might
be more accurate to say that almost everyone gets less of it
than they could.
Let’s take a simple example: You write an article and submit it
to various newsletters for publication. If it gets picked up,
you could get a decent amount of traffic from it.
Not horrible. But how could you get more from it?
* Write it as a 5-10 page report, and offer a condensation of
the report as an article. Then suggest that readers go to your
website for a report giving more details on how to do what
you’ve just told them they need to do. Give it as a bonus for
subscribing to your list.
* Include a link to your product, and give the article to your
affiliates to use on their sites or in their own mailings. Let
them put their affiliate links in where yours is in the
original.
* Same as above, but get people to subscribe, and track the
affiliate who sent them. Give that affiliate credit for ALL
sales of your products made to the folks they sent your way.
* Have a plan that allows you to use the same report as a
chapter in a product.
* Sell reprint rights to a branded version of the report, with
a link to your site or product. Also, include a link (not too
obvious or disruptive) that tells the readers they can also
distribute the report.
This makes the report an even better tool for your affiliates
to use to generate sales, since their version will be
distributed by the folks they give/sell it to.
* Make sure there’s something in every version that points
people to your list, and gives them a reason to subscribe.
There are other techniques. Lots of them. This is just to give
you the idea. For a list of the most important areas where you
should look to apply leverage, keep an eye out for the next
lesson: The 7 things you must include in everything you do
online.
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Leverage isn’t only a matter of which techniques you use. It
also means making the most of how well you use them.
You want to work at improving every step of the process.
Let’s say you have an article that you’ve promoted to 100
publishers, and 10% of them use it. Each of them has 3000
subscribers, and 10% of those click through to your site. Of
those, 3% end up buying.
That would be 90 sales.
If you can improve each of those things by 10%, you end up with
110 publishers, same 3000 subscribers each (you can’t control
that), with 11% clicking through and 3.3% ordering.
That’s 119 sales. A 32% increase.
Not bad. That sort of incremental improvement can make a big
difference in your income.
But it’s not leverage.
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Think about how this can build on itself if you make those
improvements part of a multi-channel process that re-purposes
that same content over and over again in different ways.
Hook it in with the examples given in the previous section, and
think about what leverage can really mean.
That’s just a glimpse of it.
Really.
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Before you create any content or promotional piece, whether a
simple banner or classified ad, think about how you can use it
in different ways to get more from your effort. Then think
about how you can make each of those ways more effective.
I promise you, you will be surprised at what you come up with.
Both in terms of ideas and increased results.
“Focus”
—–
You know what this is. You’ve been there. But you may not have
the words you need to repeat the process on demand.
Hopefully, this will provide you those words:
Focus is wanting something so bad that you measure every
action against the answer to one question:
“Does this move me closer to what I want,
faster than whatever else I could be doing?”
Focus is the thing that separates the successes from the
almosts.
It’s sometimes the hardest thing to get and keep. And it’s as
easy as knowing what you really want and gauging your actions
based on the answers to that one simple question.
This section is short. Please re-read it. Think about it. Tape
that question over your monitor.
Then do something with it. Right now.
….
Take some time and think about this. It’s the first part of the
foundation for your online business.
And keep an eye out for the second part, which you’ll get in a
few days. It will show you the 7 things you MUST include in
everything you do online.
Put the two together, and you can grow your business much more
quickly, and shave years off your efforts.
Until then…
Enjoy!
Paul
—–===(*)===—–>
Find this handy? http://www.Buy-Paul-a-Beer.com
“100% of the shots you don’t take don’t go in.”
Wayne Gretzky
TalkBiz News, 651 E 24th St, Erie, PA 16503, USA
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