Trial By Fire in Online Business
As self-publishing on the web becomes easier, so does starting an online business. Hundreds come and go every day, but what’s surprising to me is how many people throw in the towel not long after starting.
“If you build it they will come” does not apply here. Just because you build it doesn’t mean anyone can find it or even wants to find it. Having a good product is not enough. It takes time to have a thriving business, few are successful overnight. Recently I came across a gentleman expressing his woes in beginning a homeopathy business. He lamented that though he’d sent out many test products, none of the testers or his friends were interested in signing up for his mailing list. He believed internet marketing was a complete failure.
That immediately tells me he dove in head first without any business plan or clear direction. It’s often the most unappealing part of the process, but during the business plan you may realize you need to move your product in another direction or that your original ideas might not work. It’s absolutely crucial to start this way, and plan how you intend to get your product to it’s market. If you can get through the nitty gritty of getting your tax id, business license, and all other government papwerwork required to legitimize your business then you’re definitely serious about this pursuit. Otherwise, perhaps you should reconsider.
If you are relying largely on your base social network for clientele this is a problem for two reasons. First, unless you’re famous, this simply isn’t enough people. Second, if your friends are unresponsive, perhaps this is not the right product for them. Is it something they need, something they are interested in? What incentive are you giving them for supporting you besides being friends?
If you plan on doing testing, this is a research expense. Your testers have no further obligation to your company, and if you expected to have them as return customers you should’ve more carefully considered your initial investment. You can’t run a business on guilt.
The same goes with promotional materials. If you have developed marketing collateral, flyers, business cards, etc. You cannot expect a 1:1 ratio of return. This too is an expense you have to be prepared to not initially recoup.
If you aren’t generating enough interest, are you casting your net wide enough? Is your site positioned so people can find you? Does have old garbled code which is difficult for search engines to read? Do you have enough content with appropriate keywords for your product? Have you done any online networking or joined relevant groups and communities to your consumer base? There’s many inexpensive ways to advertise on the internet, Google and Stumbleupon are just a couple where you can invest as little as $25 and see tremendous results.
The internet is the best marketing tool you have available. If it isn’t yielding the results you’ve hoped for, try considering the following:
- Is there a need for your product?
- Who is your product’s target audience?
- How are you reaching that audience?
- What incentive are you giving them to buy from you and not a competitor, what is your unique selling point?
- Have you advertised in the appropriate venues?
- Have a web professional do an audit on your site.
Beth, that sounds like a lot of useless work. Making websites is easy, even my neighbor’s junior high kid has one.
Why would we pay a “professional” lots of money to look at our site when we already had our marketing intern do our site 3 years ago? I took a 2-day web marketing SEO seminar, I know what I’m talking about.
What we need is a web 2.0 high keyword-density user content generation capable ad banner enhanced Flash-based social media application. And we’ll get it for free by having a contest at the community college!
Ahahaha. I’m all for personal publishing on the web, but when it comes to business people still think the d.i.y. approach is okay and it just isn’t.
Because of this all the new content management tools and blogging platforms available to people are a double-edged sword. Now people can have full featured hideous websites instead of just a hideous website. A problem people don’t understand is when they try to add on to these out of the box systems is that the extensions aren’t also one click, they require some technical know how.
Now to a normal person this should send up a flag “perhaps if I really cared about my online business I’d invest in a real, well planned site” but no. Instead it just means more broken crap floating around the web.