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You don’t have to end up in the endless loop of futile online marketing. Below we give you seven important steps to help you map out the earliest part of your business plan & get you started in the right direction. It isn’t everything that you need to know, of course, but it is a basic foundation to build your success upon.

Consider it your quick roadmap to internet marketing profits.

1. Choose a narrow target market

The biggest mistake people make when starting a business is that they choose a product they want to sell and then try to find people who want to buy it. This is backward! If that is the direction you have started from on your journey, you are going the opposite way from success. Smart businesses operate from a different standard: they pick a market with a need first and then they pick a product that solves the need. By flipping the traditional process, you already start with one very important piece of the profit puzzle: customers!

It is useless to start a business until you know exactly where you are going to get your leads from. Think about your targeted customers first. Then, come up with a product for those buyers. Would you rather have 1,000 hits a day at your site of a general audience OR 10 hits a day of people who are desperate for a solution & willing to pay to buy your products? As an intelligent business owner, you will wisely choose to target people who are ready to buy!

2. Develop Your Product

Next, you need to develop your solutions for this market. Don’t just jump on the bandwagon and copy your competitors when you come to this step. There are three major ways to selling a product online:

a. You create your own exclusive product.

This is the best opportunity with the most room to grow. If you develop your own product or create a brand new service, you can pick it’s price, set up an affiliate program, sell franchise licenses, etc. Tens of thousands of innovative entrepreneurs have used their own brand new products to get started. You can, too.

If you can, start with a self-developed product. Don’t just jump past this opportunity and copy solutions if you want the most potential profits.

b. You can buy the rights to a product.

You can buy successful products outright for $500 – $20,000. If someone else has created a product that you know your targeted market is interested in, offer them a large up-front fee for the rights to it. This way you get your own unique product & never have to pay royalties. You can also search magazines your targeted market reads & look for products people are selling. Then, give them a call and ask for the exclusive internet rights to their product for a certain percentage of the profits or an up-front fee. By buying a successful or promising product you can skip most of the product development stage and immediately start making sales.

c. Join an affiliate program.

If you are just starting out online, this can be a simple & good first choice. Keep in mind though that it doesn’t offer quite the profit potential that creating your own product or obtaining rights to one has.When choosing an affiliate program, make sure that it is something your targeted market already buys & needs. They absolutely must have it. Also pay special attention to the profits you receive from each sale and how your competitors are doing selling the same products. Keep in mind that hundreds or thousands of others are offering the same product so you need to stand out above them to get the sale.

If you are only be paid 5% commissions on the sales of $10 books, you will only be making 50 cents per customer. It would take 2,000 customers just to product $1,000 in profits. You cannot make much money like this online! Look for higher priced products and higher commissions…especially commissions in the 25% or higher range. Keep in mind that the affiliate sites you choose to work with may accept or reject your website so do your best to put your best proposal forward & get on board quickly if this is your strategy.

3. Create a USP

Create a Unique Selling Proposition for your product or service. Too many companies are just trying to be me-too companies online. You cannot offer the exact same solutions for the exact same prices & expect to make a profit online. If you try to take advantage, it is far too easy for your customer to go to the next website and place their order without the hassle or confusion. Your USP should first be unique. What separates you from everyone else? Why can they only get X service from your company?

Can you offer better guarantees, better customer service, more technical support, faster shipping, or lower prices. Think of something that will set you apart from all of your online competitors and explain this advantage again & again as your potential customers are shopping. Everything your business does should support your USP – without one, you’re just another business in a very, very full ocean.

4. Pick a Unique Domain Name & Hosting Service

The next step is to pick a domain name that describes your company, USP, and/or offer. Try to keep your domain name as short & descriptive about your business as possible. Avoid trying to steal a competitor’s traffic by using a similar domain. Unfortunately this just means that if you are able to become the bigger business, you’ll be losing business back to them just as they lost it to you.

For hosting, we choose to use Powweb & Crucial since they have reliable hosting, fast customer service & some of the best technical support in the industry.

5. Develop a Customer-Friendly Site

The next step in the process is to develop your website and launch it to the world. Whether you use Stack Digital, WordPress templates, or another designer & developer, you need to have an online presence to promote before online marketing can do you much good.   When designing your site, keep the customer in mind always. Make all of the content & steps to checkout easy to understand. Try to keep your site simple. Think like a customer, not a business owner.

Your customers are not nearly as interested in your business as you are. Make sure to put your USP front & centre. A large percentage of web surfers never drop down past the first screen full of information. So, you have to give them the information they need as quickly as possible. The rules for any type of business are Benefits, Benefits, and more Benefits. These benefits should support your USP. Remove unnecessary information and distractions.

6. Offer a Freebie or Giveaway

One of the keys to developing traffic and sales at your site is to offer some type of free giveaway as a drawing card. For example, we offer free reports, SEO & marketing tools and other free giveaways. You need to come up with a freebie or content upgrade no matter what type of business you are in. Create a free report and give it away. Give a free demo of your software. Create a tool or resource that you can give away for free on your site to draw in the visitors. You can even create PDF versions of your posts as giveaways.

7. Start Your Own Email List

Almost every full-time marketer has developed their own email list of some type. For most, it is a weekly newsletter they send out to their email subscribers. For others, it may be a Tip of the Day. Other people might just have a list that they send out important updates to including special offers, coupons, discounts, giveaways, contests & more.

You should be concentrating on building a list of loyal email subscribers. Very rarely do customers purchase from you the first time they visit your site. Most of them will get on your list, hang out for a few weeks or months, and then they buy from you. They have to get to know you before they are willing to spend their money with you. We call the interaction you have with these potential buyers as lead nurturing.

Conclusion

Start with the above tips to improve your online marketing. We all have to start with the basics no matter how advanced our marketing may be. Get the first few steps right and everything else should come much easier.