Online Business Truths with Matt

Top Tip Number 8 for Beginners to Online Business:

Formulate a Plan – And Stick To It

After your self-enforced learning period, decide exactly what you will be doing in your online business. Niche marketing? Reselling? Affiliate Marketing? Creating your own Product? Do not get yourself totally confused and overwhelmed by falling for a variety of sells that might take you down every one of those paths, and more.

Once your decision is made – select your target market. Note we use market in the singular? The only way to really get traction is to have a pure, driven focus on your selected market (you can start hitting multiple markets with different income components once you’ve become familiar, comfortable and successful with the online business process). Then the plan becomes:

Your Online Business Success Plan

1. Do Something – launch your carefully considered and planned online business.
2. See Something (as in a result, be it success or the failure that teaches you where you went wrong and how to get it right second time around). Understand that small successes at first can be the building blocks for large successes later.
3. Be persistent. Push that market and watch it grow. It doesn’t have to turn over $10,000 in the first month (that only happens in sales pages!), even $100 will do – as long as your persistence grows that income on a month-to-month basis until you consider the initial project a successful starting point.
4. Do it again. Once you have figured out how to make this work, feel free to pick another market, even another style, and launch a second project.
5. As I said a second ago, be persistent! Go back to Step 1 and start the process over and over again as your first project(s) provide the financing for growth. They can pay for Google Adwords campaigns. They can pay for outsourcing. They can feed your momentum until you really are earning the “kiss the job goodbye” money you wanted.

Beware The Traps!

Speaking of Adwords campaigns – don’t try to buy all your traffic, you’ll end up paying Google more than you earn, especially in competitive (high cost-per-click) niches. Adwords should be considered a supplemental traffic tool, bringing people to a proven seller – and therefore paying its own way. Monitor the cost effectiveness of any advertising and only stick with it if it is making you a profit (many people get caught up in the thrill of making their first few sales and let their ad accounts run wild in the background).

Okay, let’s go back to point 1, “Do Something”. Remember, it is based on your well-researched decision during the period that you didn’t buy into get-rich-quick schemes or fall for “anyone can make a fortune” sales letters.

Once you’ve made the decision, it might be time to buy things, but there’s a distinctive set of rules here too.

Rules For Spending Money

• Only download/join/buy 1) content that fits with your market choice decision or 2) tools, techniques or training dedicated to improving your site content or traffic. If the latter, do your research and be very selective – this is one area where the hype is through the roof!
• Don’t be in too much of a hurry to slap what you consider to be money-earning items all over your site. You need traffic before you can have sales.
• Start your site with content. Build a reasonable selection of meaningful content before you do anything else. The more meaningful and useful you make your content, the more valuable you make your “brand”. Throwing half-baked PLR and other third-party information at a site (without some real, meaningful and preferably unique and original content) might get you visits from search engines but typically won’t get you repeat traffic – the people that trust you and buy from you.
• Once you have the content, chase the traffic. (Yes, more on that, as with everything else we’ve summarised so far, later).
  Have some worthwhile giveaways (and add/change on a regular basis) so people come to value your site as a resource, not just see it as a money-grabber. If you give them something good, they are a lot more likely to also buy, or return (and maybe buy next time). And the freebie is a great way to build a list.
• When you have decent content and traffic, introduce the money-earning components (maybe that’s sales, maybe it’s advertising, maybe it’s both of those and a number of other related income-producing streams).
• Work hard to build a responsive email list – and don’t bombard your list with endless money-grabbing emails. If that’s all you do, unsubscribes will come thick and fast. Provide some useful information, links to free downloads, and scatter sales emails (that sell useful things – the “anything for money” approach will kill your brand!) in regular but not-too-frequent broadcasts.