First 4 Steps To An Online Business
Recently, a woman expressed a concern to me that she had “nothing going” and needed to rely on another person. She felt insecure to the extent she was dependent and asked me what I thought she could do.
The resources for a brick and mortar business just were not available and she knew enough about the online world to think she could get “something going” online. Undecided about specific niches in her broad general areas of interest, she “got going” by creating an online persona.
Her first 4 Steps were:
- Purchase a domain name and blog hosting and set up an email address for the persona
- Use the persona email address to obtain a Google user-name and password for the persona
- Use the Google account to create a YouTube account for the persona
- Create a Twitter account for the persona
This seems like the essential groundwork required to begin vblogging or video blogging. The technical requirements appear minimal, especially regarding media production with the technology getting simpler every year.
Producing a stream of content remains one absolute requirement. This one requirement shows up everywhere online.
Do not blog if you are not a writer.
Do not vblog if you are not a videographer.
If you can get past the 2 month hump, then you have the 6 month hump and the 2 year hump. You get past the humps by being productive.
The possibility of Jumping The Shark looms as a constant threat.
Being productive may include any activity that produces more value than went into it. Some people, for example, make money online by selling artisan food products.
The next step involves understanding and working with Key Words. Since I feel the topic of Key Words deserves its own article, I’ll leave that for later.
Significantly, we currently see 4 dominant methods to enjoy Internet Traffic.
- Pay for advertising using AdWords, Pay-Per-Click advertising, banners or any other method that involves you paying for traffic before you sell anything.
- Affiliates and Joint Venture Partners send you their traffic and their payment comes from a percentage of the purchasing customers they send.
- Organic Search Engine Traffic, notably from Google these days.
- Leveraging Social Media and Social Bookmarking sites.
In my mind, their relative desirability ranks in reverse order to my listing. One could start with Method 4 and never need to try anything else.
If you do your part with being productive, Method 3 should take off before Method 4 peaks. These two methods will give you the proof needed to interest useful Affiliates and Joint Venture Partners.
Until you can prove your production sells, useful Affiliates and Joint Venture Partners will not be interested. Once you prove you have a winner, Method 2 can increase your income dramatically.
If your product successfully sells online, then Affiliates and Joint Venture Partners will be interested. Paying for advertising may never become necessary.
With the above 4 Steps in place, you will be in the position to publish content online. Your content will create a following.
Once you have a following you will be ready for the next steps and that will take another post.
In the mean time
check out my article about:
- Mike Masnick
- Seth Godwin
- Trevor Reznik
and the articles by Yaro Starak
Leave your questions in the comments and I will answer them there or in a new post.
CwF plus RtB equals Serious Money
CwF + RtB = $$$$
This video spells out the somewhat cryptic title as meaning Connect with Fans and give them a Reason to Buy to Make Serious Money through an explanation with examples by Mike Masnick. A suitable subtitle might be The Essence Of Marketing Reduced To A Simple Formula.
It really doesn’t get any more straightforward than this. While the formula tells you what to do, it does not tell you how to do it.
The examples Mike Masnick gives here, and in an earlier video where he used Trevor Reznik of Nine Inch Nails fame as an example, indicates that giving away valuable free stuff is one way how to do it. This is the same advice widely offered for Internet marketing in general.
NARM (the National Association of Recording Merchandisers) 2009 Keynote Interview presents Eliot Van Buskirk (WIRED) interviewing Ian Rogers (Topspin Media). A long time innovator in the online media scene, he feels that real progress is most likely on the creative side rather than on the consumer side and hence his move from Yahoo to Topspin.
Seth Godwin coined the phrase Permission Marketing over 10 years ago. It is just one more attempt to explain something that should never require explaining.
Intentional system controls implemented by monopolies preserve artificial scarcity. Monopolies maintain their control in part by paying politicians to legislate barriers to entry into monopolized industries.
Globalization and the Internet make it much more difficult, if not impossible, to maintain some monopolies. With this freedom from monopoly controlled markets, consumers can choose who to give their money to.
Without monopolies everything in the market eventually becomes a commodity distinguished only by private label branding. The private label brands survive only by becoming recognized and trusted by consumers.
Only when private label brands cannot be trusted do consumers default to making buying decisions based on the lowest price. Any place you go you will find many people who would prefer to give their business to someone they know and trust even if that means paying more.
People only know and trust their friends. If you want loyal customers who will buy your offerings time after time, even if they are more expensive, then you need to make them your friends.
Of course, because they are your friends, you will want to offer value added products. You will see more limited and signed editions, lots of additional posters, patches and such, as well as the unique opportunities to spend more time with the artists.
In industries with low barriers to entry, such as music and marketing, financial survival depends upon becoming friends with potential customers before you ask them for money. No one views an attempt to sell them something first as an invitation to friendship.
Since making friends seems to have become a lost art, especially in the United States, here is the number one way to make someone your friend. The number one way to make someone your friend is to give them something they value for free.
Do someone a favor, that is, help them out or solve a problem without setting a price and demanding payment. This is how people socialized for thousands of years but recently more and more of these social norms have been monetized.
The monetization of social norms, pricing and demanding payment for what was once freely shared, represents theft from the common wealth of all people. This theft from the common wealth of all people started over 10,000 years ago and has grown by fits and starts ever since.
Recently this practice of theft from the common wealth of all people through privatization has accelerated, especially in the United States. I can identify this dysfunctional practice as sociopathic at best but that serves little purpose now that it has permeated nearly every facet of modern life including all areas of public service.
Thoughtful feeling people feel repelled by this nearly ubiquitous trend, as well they should. Thoughtful feeling people instinctually avoid giving money to artificial monopolies by seeking out friends who can meet their needs, often even if their needs are more poorly met.
Celebrity status merely indicates that someone has more friends than they can personally directly respond to. It has become customary to call these friends, fans.
Make no mistake, every fan feels a personal connection to the celebrity. This feeling is the same as what someone feels for a friend, for someone who has helped them out far beyond any compensation that may have been offered.
The perceived need to obtain financial compensation for every act of aid and human kindness has become the single greatest impediment to business growth. Monopolies may be in the position to demand such payment anyway but they are not making friends and no one feels any trust or loyalty towards them.
So unless you run a monopoly, start making friends if you want your business to survive and prosper.
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