The Business Library

In the quest to find the perfect business to start, it is often tempting to get caught up in the memes of the moment – those ideas that are currently getting all of the press coverage. The only problem with this is that sometimes these great ideas are one-hit-wonders, and chasing the bandwagon can often lead nowhere.

Seth Godin talks a lot about Purple Cows – ideas that are remarkable, and therefore are spread by word of mouth very easily. It is important, however, to realise that there is a line between a Purple Cow and a Red Herring (a gimmick, if you will).

Take The Million Dollar Homepage for example: Here we see a very remarkable idea that was picked up by the national, then international media, banded about, then copied mercilessly with little success. Aside from Alex Tew’s initial effort, I have heard no mention of any other significant pixel-advertising site. A Purple Cow? Yes. But also a one-hit wonder as a business model.

Another notable mention has to go to Andrew Fischer, a man from Omaha, Nebraska who auctioned temporary advertising space on his forehead on eBay for around £20,000. Again, this is an exceptionally remarkable idea, so much so that in the weeks that followed, there were countless attempts at copying the idea. There were even auctions for permanent tattoos on eBay, though no-other walking billboard managed to garner the sort of interest that the originator did.

There are many other examples of gimmicks that, though they might be interesting and remarkable, the business model behind them is simply not built to last.

I personally think there needs to be more shepherds than sheep.

Or maybe a good shove?

Seth Godin has posted about the importance of luck in deciding the success of a venture. Now, I agree with what he talks about, and his examples do back up his musings, but luck is just one part of a whole mixing-pot of ingredients that go into starting a startup or pushing a product.

Luck is the only force we have no control over – even if we network as rampantly as possible and create the most elegant marketing materials possible, we may still never break the market open. However, instead of thinking about what could hold us back, maybe we should focus on what we can do to maximise our opportunities, and give luck a better chance to do it’s thing.

We still need to invest resources in our ventures – producing high-quality marketing, products and support will still go a long way to ensuring success when luck fails us somewhat, and if not, then relentlessly improving in these areas surely will.

Adding every conceivable keyword to your advertisement is in every sense of the phrase ‘a waste of time’. You may as well not bother. Really. The upshot of adding vague or unrelated keywords to your advertisement is that you waste the opportunity to target your advertisement to potential customers.

There is a fairly good chance, therefore, that adding bad keywords to your advertisement will do your advertisement more harm than good.

The perfect advertiser does not add unrelated keywords to their advertisements, rather, they research and then carefully select a number of specific keywords that match the particular niche that their business resides in. Adding these type of keywords will enable potential customers to find you quickly, and allow you to target the segment of the viewing audience that are more likely to make a conversion. Additionally, having specific keywords for your business reduces the initial competition for getting listed on the first page of the results brought back for a particular query, therefore giving you a better chance of being selected by the browsing customer.

This is one of the golden rules of good Internet Marketing – to place your business advertising in locations that fit your particular niche perfectly. Search engines will be able to then associate your business with the key words and phrases that people use to find you when looking to make a purchase. Doing this will, in almost every case, increase your Return On Investment (ROI) for your marketing campaigns, driving up conversions while reducing the amount you need to spend on marketing.

In summary:

• Choose keywords that are specific to your business
• Avoid general keywords and keyphrases
• Target your paying customers (what would you search for?)

So suppose your all singing, all dancing, brand new e-commerce site is now up and running, all you have left to do is get people to look at it, right?

I have spoken to many business owners that think that to be a successful business, they need to get as many visitors coming to their site as possible – irregardless as to where they come from. Their marketing strategies reflect this, often centering on just getting as many incoming links from other sites rather than actually focusing on targeting the locations where interested customers may congregate.

Advertising copy is the meat of your marketing campaigns – the actual information presented to your customers in order to get them to buy your products rather than a competitor’s.

If you create great advertising copy, your advertising campaigns can only benefit, bringing more custom to your business, however, creating bad copy can waste both time and money – it can even give your company a bad reputation in your target market’s eyes.

What I present here are a few points that I feel are vital to get right in order to produce marketing copy that is effective. These few points can be applied to many areas of marketing, whether it be creating a marketing brochure, a banner advertisement for a website or a point-of-sale display.

Once you have set up your online business, spent time and money promoting your services and products, and finally got a stream of new visitors coming to your site, you’ll need to think about how to convert those visitors into paying customers. I am going to look at methods by which you can improve your conversion rates by discussing some of the reasons that people will not make a purchase when visiting your site.

Over the past few years, we have gone from knowing nothing about running online businesses to creating and maintaining several. Our incomes from our ventures have given us the opportunity to break free from a regular day-job, and concentrate on enjoying a career centered on our own accomplishments.

This has meant that we have had to learn a lot of vary varied things in quite a short period of time. Much of our learning has come from trial-and-error experiences, and as such we thought that you might also like to know about some of the things we have learned – if only to prevent you having to make the same mistakes we did!

We will be adding posts to this site as and when we can, with stories ranging from Adsense Optimization through to company formation and Apache Rewrite Rules!