So how do you get your Online business moving?

Wow – this is a massive question.

The first thing i’ll say about this is that you need QUALIFIED TRAFFIC finding your website and that until you have this everything else is just noise.

Note that I say qualified traffic….this is important!!

Most people will tell you to just get traffic, lots of traffic.  Buy it, spam for it, do what it takes to get a huge list. It’s all a numbers game, the more people on your list the more chance you have of more people buying.

NOT SO!!  Having a huge list creates problems all of it’s own.  You’re more likely to encounter problems with your service providers.  It’s likely to cost you disproportionately to the amount of sales you make from it.  The vast majority of that list will have ziltch interest in actually buying anything from you.  So you’ll end up investing loads of energy (and money) into something that’s going to give you very little return.

QUALIFY, QUALIFY, QUALIFY.

Your list should be well targeted.  It sounds obvious but the people you communicate your products/services to should be the exact people who have the want or need for those products/services.  This benefits you in lots of ways, the most obvious being that you have a quality list, the cost of managing and promoting to that list reduces, your communicating with the people who have the propensity to buy with whom you can build a relationship and continue up-selling to (again reducing the cost of your sale).

So where do you find quality traffic?

There are a number of steps you need to go through to get traffic to your site.  It’s a big subject that people attend whole courses on but here’s a basic outline for a fast compilation of qualified interest in your niche;

1. You can find traffic through Bing, Yahoo!, Google and any social networking sites via PPC (pay per click) campaigns. You need to train yourself in writing good Ads to make sure that only people with genuine interest in what your selling actually click on them, otherwise you’ll pay for people who land on your page and immediately go away again.  With Google, this actually hurts your campaign making you pay more and appear lower in the advert listings because they work out that your not targeting your search well.  Be smart and invest in your learning here or you can spend a lot of money very quickly with no return.
2. To do the above you need a key word list.  Again, this needs to be a very specific list.  No generic words.  Don’t pay for the big hitters that people are paying big money for.  The more specific the search term the more of a match our customer is an the lower the cost to you in advertising and servicing the list.
3. You can find traffic through growing an affiliate network to promote you. You’ll have to have something that appeals to their customers and either approach directly or register your product with an affiliate company.
4. By far the best way to grow a well qualified list is through syndication.  This means that your selling to people who have just bought from within your market and have a propensity to buy products where their wants/needs have not yet been fully met.  Once they make  a sale they promote you.  This requires you to network well and grow a mutually beneficial relationship with people who you may previously considered your competitors.
5. You need a system to capture any interest that comes from your campaigns that will convert them to an optin to your list.  That means you need a website….so a domain & a hosting company, an offer in exchange for their email address, an email management system (auto responder), and optin/email capture and Thank you page.
6. If you want Google to like you then you’ll need a Blog…just like this one ;0) with all the necessary SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) and the pages that they like to see indexed as well as your optin/email capture.
7. You need to post your Blogs with social bookmark sites to initiate them getting picked up on the web.  Other things you can post to get around the web are article marketing, video marketing, social networking posts, twitter. You’ll have to consider how much time it takes up v’s the resulting interest you get.

So……there’s a whole lot of stuff to learn here and each one is a topic in it’s own right.  There’s no right or wrong way to effectively promote your online business.  You just have to do what’s good for your market and your services. There’s a lot to do and the more you do with correctly targeted messages the better the return on your time.  Key to it all is building the list of the customers that are likely to buy.

If you’d like to know more about any of this stuff, or you’re thinking it’s all a bit much for you just take a moment to hear what I have to say about setting up your business by sending me your email in the form to the top right of this page.

:0)

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