In today's digital age, the allure of Internet marketing and e-business opportunities has attracted countless individuals seeking financial freedom and success. However, amid the promise of quick riches and success stories, a prevalent problem must be addressed. This article aims to shed light on the truth behind the Internet marketing world and confront some of its misconceptions. Here are four areas where you must be careful: The Salesperson Trap: Most internet marketers, often self-proclaimed "gurus," have a vested interest in selling their products and services. While this is understandable from a business perspective, it can lead to a problematic scenario for aspiring entrepreneurs. As they promote these products, the focus shifts away from building a legitimate business and turns individuals into mere salespeople. Selling becomes the sole priority, while actual entrepreneurial skills take a backseat. Not all “gurus” fall into this category, but many do. So be warned. The Lack of Proper Guidance: Mentors and coaches who guide newcomers often don’t address the intricacies of an e-business process. Many "gurus" claim to offer insights, but only a few genuinely show aspiring entrepreneurs how to grow their ventures into fully-fledged e-businesses. The Mystery of Product Development: One crucial aspect of running a successful e-business is developing products or services that cater to a target audience's needs. Unfortunately, few marketing experts delve into this aspect, leaving entrepreneurs at a loss when creating something of value. Trevor Carr is an exception here, as you cannot go wrong if you take his Breakthrough Program. You can count on him to guide you in developing your products or services. The Elusive Money-Making Tools: While wealth and financial independence are enticing, finding genuine tools and strategies to achieve these goals is often elusive. Only a few internet marketers provide legitimate resources to help budding entrepreneurs progress to profitability. The Business Approach to E-business In contrast to the prevailing hype, this article emphasizes that venturing into e-business should be approached as a serious business endeavor. It is not a realm for dabblers or those seeking quick fixes. Building a successful e-business requires dedication, discipline, and hard work. So let’s sort out what is needed for you to succeed as a businessperson in online entrepreneurship. Solutions: Three Essential Elements of Developing Your E-business There are three things you need to know about developing a business. 1) you must work on your business, 2) you must organize your business, and 3) you must work in your business. 1. Work On Your Business: To establish a solid foundation for your e-business, working on the business itself, not just in it, is crucial. This means stepping back from day-to-day operations and focusing on the broader vision and strategy. Here are some key aspects to consider when working on your business: a) Define Clear Goals: Set specific, measurable goals aligning with your long-term vision. Outline the milestones you aim to achieve and the strategies to attain them. b) Market Research: Conduct thorough market research to understand your target audience, identify their pain points, and discover opportunities for your products or services. c) Competitive Analysis: Analyze your competitors to gain insights into their strengths and weaknesses. Differentiate your business by offering unique value propositions. d) Build a Strong Brand: Develop a compelling brand identity that resonates with your target customers. A strong brand presence can help build trust and credibility in the digital marketplace. e) Create Scalable Systems: Establish efficient processes and systems that can scale as your business grows. Automation and delegation can play a vital role in streamlining operations. 2. Organize Your Business: A well-organized e-business is better equipped to handle challenges and opportunities. Organizing your business involves structuring it to foster efficiency, productivity, and adaptability. Consider the following steps to manage your e-business effectively: a) Develop a Business Plan: Craft a comprehensive e-business plan outlining your vision, mission, goals, target market, and revenue generation strategies. This document will serve as a roadmap for your business's growth. b) Team Building: As your business expands, you may need to build a team of skilled individuals who can contribute to different aspects of your venture. Surround yourself with talented people who share your vision. c) Streamline Processes: Identify areas of inefficiency and streamline processes to optimize productivity. This may involve adopting new tools or technology to enhance workflow. d) Financial Management: Keep a close eye on your finances and maintain proper accounting practices. This will help you make informed decisions and ensure the financial health of your business. e) Legal Considerations: Understand the legal and regulatory requirements relevant to your e-business. Protect your intellectual property and ensure compliance with local laws. 3. Work In Your Business: While working on your business focuses on strategy and growth, working in your business involves executing day-to-day operations. As an entrepreneur, you need to strike a balance between both aspects. Here's how you can effectively work in your e-business: a) Product Development: Actively develop products or services that align with your market research and customer needs. Ensure consistent quality and innovation. b) Customer Engagement: Build strong customer relationships by providing excellent customer service and addressing their feedback. Engage with your audience through social media, emails, and other communication channels. c) Marketing and Sales: Implement marketing strategies to promote your products or services. Embrace digital marketing techniques like SEO, content marketing, and social media advertising to reach your target audience. d) Monitor Performance: Regularly track and analyze key performance indicators (KPIs) to gauge the success of your business initiatives. Use data-driven insights to make informed decisions. e) Continuous Improvement: Embrace a culture of continuous improvement, seeking ways to enhance your offerings and processes. Stay updated with industry trends and adapt to changes in the market. By understanding and implementing these three essential elements – working on your business, organizing your business, and working in your company – you can lay a strong foundation for sustainable growth and success in the dynamic e-business world. Note: Many people who get into this business are affiliates, sometimes known as associates. If this is you, that is ok, just know that you are not running an e-business. You are a commissioned salesperson. You don’t develop products but sell other people's products, and you receive a commission in return. You need to understand those products, review them, offer bonuses, and often sell them using the creator’s marketing strategies, e.g., emails, sales pages, images, etc. Some internet marketers are good at selling but not creating products or running an e-business. And that is ok too. E-businesses need strong and effective salespeople. One more point for you to consider is that there is a difference between marketing and selling. Marketing is all about educating your potential customers about your products. Selling is about closing the deal and adding value for your customers. When you run an e-business, you need to consider both functions. Conclusion That’s all for now. Running an e-business isn’t as easy as people will tell you when you first get into it. Many moving parts require agility, persistence, and focus. As you develop your e-business, you will gradually move to fill the boxes with people, whether they are on contract or directly reporting to you. If you want help planning and organizing your e-business successfully, consider our Bizwoli System. The Bizwoli System will take you to the next level of your e-business. You may wish to talk to me first before closing off the Bizwoli System, I offer a free consultation about the program. You can find it in the link provided. You can also follow our Scaling Up Your e-business podcasts. Thank you for reading, folks. Keep well, stay safe, and continue becoming the best version of yourself. Richard, Richard Fontanie
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What happens when you develop a product, get approval from JVZoo, Warrior Plus, ClickBank or put it on your website but yet to have made a sale? Or maybe you saw something that sells well in one market, so you try it in your market and nada. No sale. You think you have a good product, you worked hard at it and after all you got approval. But approval doesn’t mean that you make sales. So, what could be the problem? Well, here are a few hints. 1. Do you have an audience for your product? Contrary to public opinion people don’t buy for your reason’s they buy for their reasons. A corollary to this is ‘we don’t sell anything, people buy.’ Unless we understand why people might want our product, we won’t sell anything. We can market the heck out of it, but people will still not purchase. No matter how much we have invested both personally and professionally, if you don’t have an audience for your product you are not going to sell it. This can be an emotional let down but it will be a lessoned well learned as we move onto the next product. 2. Are you solving a problem that people want solved? I learned this many years ago when I had an excellent tool for measuring knowledge worker’s effectiveness along eight distinct processes. The product was tested worked well and I used it to assess over 200 individuals with specific reference to their openness to learning. I knew it worked. But when I went to sell it, I found some disturbing results. I didn’t sell one Profile. Not one. When I did a bit of research, I found that:
3. Are you using the right keywords? Keywords are words or phrases that people type into search engines to find what they are looking for. For example, if you were searching to buy an eBook on goal setting, you might type something like, ‘SMART goals,’ ‘aspirational goals,’ ‘personal goals,’ ‘goals that work’ ‘how to write goals,’ into Google or YouTube. Even though your phrases consist of more than one word, it is still considered as a keyword. 4. Are you presenting with emotion? People buy for emotional reasons. This is related to people having a problem that needs a solution. For example, they may be frustrated, stressed, discouraged, anxious, or concerned. These emotions point to ‘pain points’ so your copy needs to address ways that alleviate the pressures or the ‘pain’ they are feeling. 5. Do you appreciate the difference between marketing and selling? Marketing is about educating your audience about your product and what it can do for them. Selling is closing the deal. Often we don’t prepare the marketplace for the product and just expect that people will buy. This is particularly true when you are introducing something new to the marketplace. Number 2 above is a perfect example of this. I tried to sell before the market was ready for my ‘great’ solution. 6. Do you know the difference between relationship selling and transactional selling? The latter is straight forward selling, for example. “I have a headache (my problem) do you sell aspirins (solution)?” “Yes, they are right over there on the second shelf.” This is a simple quick sell. A relational sell is long term and a bit more complicated. Most internet marketers have a list that they have nurtured for a long time before selling anything. They have developed a relationship with their customers or ‘buyers’ even though they haven’t met them. In other words, they warm up their customers before selling a product. This is particularly true if you are selling using Facebook. Using Facebook is all about relationship selling and requires much preparation before attempting a sell, even then the call to action is often soft rather than a hard sell. My experience is that friends buy on Facebook only if I have known them before hand or I have become friends with people I never met after a lot of likes, loves, and comments. Really you can’t do ‘transactional selling’ on Facebook unless you are prepared to spend a lot of money on ads and even then it is iffy. 7. Have you done your market research? Here we need to clearly understand who we are marketing and selling to. Your product might be the best thing ‘since sliced bread’ but if you don’t have a market for it you won’t sell it.
8. How do you Brand your product? There are many things about branding that are important, but here are a few points that filter to the top.
9. Don’t get discouraged. Keep to your vision. Keep working on your goals. And, keep developing products based on lessons learned. There are very few internet marketers who have succeeded the first time and many internet marketers give up just before they find their own ‘secret sauce.’ Statistics show that 90% or more don’t make it. And many of those that don’t make it fail to realize that they are within an inch of making it. Again, based on my real-life experience, I have developed over 50 training products and delivered some of them once because a company wanted it. I thought ‘boy this is a good training program for others.” Unfortunately, they didn’t go anywhere. Yes, this can be discouraging but don’t let it get you down. Affirm yourself that you are on the right tract, continue to share your experiences with others and they will help you, find an experienced coach who will guide you. Build on your experience, tweak your product or begin another based on what you have learned. The bottom line, internet marketing as a solopreneur can be a lonely undertaking but it needn’t be because those with more positive experiences are willing to help. By the way whatever happened to that Profile product I tried to sell in #2 above. I regrouped. I did more work in preparing the marketplace, repackaged it, and in the meantime used the product in my own practice. Owners began to see how it could be used in their company and after a couple of years they began to buy. Funny how that works eh? If you wish to receive a free eBook on Branding CLICK HERE. As always, keep well, stay safe and become the person you were meant to be! Your personal growth and development matters. Thanks for reading, Richard. Thank you for reading articles from the FontanieMagazine. You now know that the e-Zine focuses attention on five broad areas:
Business Growth – wherever it is; LeaderManager Development- become the executive you were meant to be; Workplace Culture – making better workplaces; Skills4Success – strengthening adult knowledge skills for life; and Health and Wellbeing – nurturing your whole self. Presently all the articles are free for personal and company use as long as you identify the source of the article. You know that writing original articles take time and several of my associates have suggested I charge a subscription rate for my efforts. I have chosen not to do so as this is my way of giving back to those who believe personal growth and development matter. So, how do I support the e-zine? Well, there is a STOREFRONT with a growing number of items that people can purchase; there is a paid membership site FORTIS MEMBERSHIP which concentrates on eight dimensions of health, wellbeing, and training (all e-books and video training I develop are free to members); and there is FACSi Academy which has over 150 courses and training manuals for purchase and finally I provide Executive Coaching to select clients. If you have an e-Zine or equivalent here are a dozen ways to promote it. 1. The ‘Give Away’ Method Inform your potential subscribers they will receive a free e-book for subscribing. You could also include your e-zine ad in the e-book and allow them to give the e-book away or offer resell or master resell rights. This method is posted on the FM Welcome page. 2. Give ‘Private Label Rights’ Method Inform your potential subscribers that they will get the private label rights to the articles if they subscribe. People will be able to read and use your content as they wish. There is a huge demand for private label content these days. Mine are already free for users with the proviso that they identify the source. With PLR the source is not identified and can be used as the person sees fit according to the terms provided. 3. Use ‘Content As They See Fit’ Method Inform your potential subscribers that they can reprint or republish the articles or content if they subscribe. People will be able to read and use content as they see fit. You could include your e-zine ad under each article they republish, or in my case I stipulate they note the source of the article. 4. The ‘Future Goals’ Method Inform your potential subscribers the goals they will achieve when they subscribe to your e-zine. You could inform them how your content will help solve their problems, improve their lifestyle, or resolve challenges they face. 5. Goal ‘Non-fulfillment’ Method Inform your potential subscribers what they may not be able to achieve if they don't subscribe to your e-zine. You could inform them how not reading your information or content could cause future problems, safe them from making mistakes, or make their life worse. 6. The ‘Prize Promotion’ Method Inform your potential subscribers they could win ‘prizes’ by subscribing to your e-zine. You could inform them that you will randomly select a subscriber every week to get one of your products for free. To make it interesting you could include an action they need to complete in order to receive the prize. 7. The ‘Cash Card’ Method Inform your potential subscribers they could win a ‘Cash Card’ prize of $50. by subscribing to your e-zine. You could inform them that you will randomly select a subscriber every week or every month for the ‘Cash Card’ prize. You can make this a time limited offer by saying for the month of February, for example, receive a randomly selected $50. Cash Card from Amazon. 8. The ‘Subscribe Forward’ Method Inform your current e-zine subscribers to forward your e-zine to their friends, family, or associates. If they like it, they'll end subscribing and forwarding it to their circle of acquaintances. It's a virtual answer to word-of-mouth marketing. 9. The ‘Monthly Circulation’ Method Inform those on your existing list that they will receive articles that they may have missed during the past month. In the e-mail letter identify the ‘Prize Method’, ‘Cash Card’ Method or one of the other methods. Also identify other related ‘Ads’ in your email. We send out monthly ‘ You May Have Missed Articles’ and at the bottom of the email we promote two or three further items. 10. The ‘Weekly Circulation’ Method Send a weekly FREE article to those on your existing list. This gets regular exposure to the e-zine. Highlight a special promotional item and include an ad of one of your other products or services. We have done this in the past. It is an article posted as an email. 11. The ‘Play-it-Forward Bonus’ Method Inform those who visit your e-zine site that if they forward the e-zine to a potential subscriber and if the person subscribes, both those that forwarded the e-zine and the new subscriber will receive a bonus such as an e-book or one of the methods described above. With this method you will need to ensure you are capturing the email address of the new subscriber and the person who forwarded the e-zine. 12. The ‘Engage Them’ Method Inform your potential and existing subscribers that you accept article submissions. You’ll get people who will subscribe just so they can submit articles and see them published. Make sure you inform them that you will identify them as the author and will give a link to their website. You will need to develop a policy around articles you will accept. By using the ‘Engage Them’ Method you can potentially get a steady stream of content without doing all the heavy lifting yourself. By the way, if you are requesting potential subscriber emails, we found that asking for their first name works best. Make sure you also include a confidentiality clause at the bottom of your opt-in page, something like, ‘we do not rent or distribute your emails to others.’ And if you are going to send them promotional material it is also advisable to include a sentence that goes something like this: ‘By entering your email you agree to receiving promotional material and information about our products on a timely basis.’ Thank you for reading, Richard P. Fontanie |
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