In this edition of the Friday Podcast, I go into 5 important considerations if you’re serious about building your web business this year.

Note: The notes are pretty detailed, though the podcast itself contains even more content.

Enjoy!

Friday Podcast 4 Jan 2008 Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (726)

Duration: 18 minutes | Filesize:  4.5 mb

Notes:

I get many questions about the tactical aspects of internet marketing, like what’s the best webhost, which is the best CPA network, how to configure a xml datafeed, how to use an autoresponder, which is the best ebook.

If you’re interested, I mention a number of these in the course of my blogging and i’ve listed a couple in my recommendations tabs.

But here’s the kicker, although these ‘technical’ questions represent about 90% of the questions that get asked, it’s the 10% of other questions that will help you grow your business and explode your profits!

The other questions deal with building your business, and positioning it for long term growth.

At the root of it,
Succeeding in internet marketing is simple and fundamental
1) Find a need.
2) Match it with a solution (could be a product/service)

Macro Issues in Internet Marketing

Most important than the ‘how do i learn HTML’ type questions are the macro or higher level considerations of your business strategy.

Your business strategy works as a business plan or blueprint to help you identify what you should or should not be doing.
It also goes into how you should be doing it.

If done correctly, your business plan will give you the answers to the questions you might be wondering about – like how do I select a partner, how much should i budget for my expenses and how much you should charge for your products, which offers or products should i promote.

Your business blueprint will drive what you do and when you’re stuck or you’re wondering about the next action you should take, it determines which of the tiny pieces of blog or affiliate or seo or ppc tools and software you will need.

I want to give you 5 important factors to take note of as you’re building your business this year.

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1) TRUST

If you’ve dealt with a bank, insurance provider, realtor or another service provider who’s serious about building a long term relationship, you’ll notice that they will spend time to get to know you and what you’re about. If they were to try to force you to buy something the first time you met, it would seriously damage or even kill the relationship.

A significant part of the success I experienced in my business last year was due to the network i built up and the relationships and contacts i had made.

Spend a moment to think about the people you consider your good friends, and the people you do business with.
what is it that makes you trust them?

How would you bring those values and attitudes into your business?

Consciously or unconsciously, we buy from people we like and we trust.

As an internet marketer and as an affiliate,
promotion doesn’t always need to be something that you’re an affiliate or something you own. Might be a free resource.
You may not benefit from it, but your audience could stand to benefit greatly from.

Take a look at the products that prominent marketers like Wil Reynolds, Shawn Collins, Geordie Carswell, Sam Harrelson talk about and mention on their blogs.

Aaron Wall provides a number of free equivalents for products which other marketers are charging hundreds of dollars for, in a list of resources in his SEO Book. His intention is to help you grow your business and that builds trust.

Build trust.

You might recommend something free today, but if you build up your social goodwill bank (refer to blog post), you will reap the rewards later.

*** on a strong, reliable and trusted recommendation, conversions can be higher than 50%.

2) PATIENCE
If you plant a seed today, do you expect a tree tomorrow?

Why have the same expectation for your business?

It’s going to take time.

Drop the make instant money idea, and focus on long term, steady business.

Yes, i have helped generate 5-figure and 6-figure paydays in the course of my marketing efforts,
but nothing beats taking time to build a business which provides steady income

Normally, you can’t start a business today and expect it to generate 100,000 next month.
99% of the time, it doesn’t work that way.

In general any business needs time to build momentum.

Momentum is like moving a huge rock, it’s tough to get it moving, but once it starts going, it’s not easy to stop it.

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3) KNOWLEDGEABLE / SUBJECT EXPERT
Too many affiliates and sometimes product owners are creating products or promoting products they know nothing about.

Going through a couple of sales pages, and reading wikipedia doesnt make you a niche specialist.

–The trend is that for high value offers especially, in the range of $50-more than 100 per lead or sale, EPCs can sometimes be in the single digit dollar range. this means that a lot of affiliates are flinging offers at their traffic like throwing mud on a wall and hoping something sticks.

no surprise that conversions will be sub 1%, and could hover near zero

Consumers with the most troublesome, horrible and life-crippling problems will have the biggest wallets.
If you’re in such a position, you’d want to get the best doctor or professional to take care of your problem, not someone who learned root canal surgery out of an ebook!

if you’re going to do something important like debt consolidation or mortgage refinancing, you’re likely to trust a solid and credible finance content website, rather than some guy who shot some spam emails into your email inbox.

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4) Shift From QUICK BUCK TO LONG TERM MENTALITY
systems are geared this way, pay per lead, pay per sale.

make the sale, move on the next customer

“single-sale, fire and forget, goodbye” mentality
retain customers, needs change in mindset,

going fwd, lead generation costs are going to be more expensive.
customer retention is key.

to the repeat customer mentality.

like popular blog or community site, have customers coming back a couple of times a week.
if really popular, come back every day.

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5) FUN
Have a vested interest

Have a personal stake.
***This is the most important factor

some progs are going to pay 75% of sale value, in some cases, get payouts of 150% of the sale value.

I have had offers to promote products with double and triple the normal affiliate payouts, but didn’t take it up.

You’re not going to do well if your heart is not in it.

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Bottom Line:

A lot of doomsayers are saying that Internet Marketing is getting harder is harder, blogging is getting harder and harder, Google slaps are making it more difficult to rank in the search engines, escalating PPC prices are going to kick all the new PPC affiliates out of the market.

They usually say this just before they promote their product which is going to get rid of all these problems for $97!

What a bargain!

To borrow a phrase from Shawn Collins’, here’s the real deal…

It doesn’t take a genius to succeed in internet marketing, while there’re a number of guys with PhDs, there’re also many marketers who didn’t complete high school.

You don’t always need book smarts to succeed in internet marketing, but you need to be smart enough to have a long term focus on building your business on a solid foundation.