Small Business Marketing Insight Tip #5 - How to get started at all.

(photocredit: kapungo)

Starting a Small Business Online:

You have to start by picking out a basket to put your eggs in.

Trite (but true) aphorisms:

• One always learns from his mistakes.
• And as well, hindsight is 20-20.
• Thirdly, what you don't take care of in the beginning can set you back to the beginning.

Or you'll seem to think that. But it's not time to get depressed about things. Take stock of your resources and you'll find that you've been learning all the time. And are now in a much better condition to get really going. This next time will be faster.

I recently found myself back at doing what I should have done to begin with. However, I didn't know it at the time. The reason my sales aren't taking off is that I never set up a proper back end (terminal), followed by a regular runway, and using a definite flight plan.

The steps are simply in this sequence:

1. A proper back end first consists of having something valuable to offer.
2. Next, you set up a way to exchange for this - either affiliate sales, or dropshipping, or ecommerce.
3. Then, you promote this all over the place. So people can find your valuable offer and take you up on it.
4. And all of this is before you quit your day job.
   

Nothing new, perhaps. But here is something - and take this to heart:

You settle on one valuable item and
get that really moving before
you expand to another.

Sure, if it doesn't work out, then fine - start researching and picking out another. Now that you know what reasearch you need to do, the second one will be easier.

Practically, pick out your basket - one basket - and then get some eggs into it. And watch those eggs real closely

But the basket comes before the eggs (figuring that the chicken is around there somewhere - but let's not go there...) Basket first.

A. What is something valuable that you can offer to people who will exchange something with you for them?

Now, go and find out all about that item and what people think about it. Find your keywords, find your delivery methods, find out the demographics who will buy or subscribe to it. Get all this nailed down.

B. Next, figure out your delivery system. If this is an info product, figure out how you can offer it online and deliver it at very low cost - usually, this is an ecommerce site of some sort. If someone else already has that product, maybe you promote and sell it as an affiliate. Or you sel it directly and they dropship it for you. Or you buy in bulk, warehouse, and ship it yourself.

C. Third is to figure out how to promote it. Nowadays, this is best done through social media - a blog, usually - and also posted to the winds through bookmarking sites, etc. Some people tell you to use PPC (not me) to get started. And I recently found an article where the author recommended it as a temporary jump-start to get things going. (I don't tell people starting out to advertise as you can lose your budget very quickly with no results - and the best advertisement is by getting word of mouth through excellent products and delivery.)

D. Now, once you have successfully sold and delivered goods which are making you money - then expand into another (niche) line of work, another (niche) product. You use what you learned from the first time and expand. You keep producing and delivering products from the first one, but now you have some more income and probably some more time to invest in ramping up another product. This can be an additional product in the same niche, or a new product line in a new niche area. (Preferably related to the first, either in main subject, or in delivery mode - so you can use the existing shopping cart and blogs to start promoting these new products.)

Make the second line as or more successful than the first, and then start up a third. Research first, always.

As you continue to do this, life becomes simpler and more profitable.

But again: basket first, then eggs - and then to market.

- - - -

Here's the special news for all those stalwart readers who have made it this far:

I'm restarting the Online Millionaire Plan and reworking it from the bottom up. Meaning that I'm going to take all the many volumes of work I've already done so far and verifying the tests and results. And then re-release new versions with new materials. The emphasis will be on practical application for this new economic scene we just inherited. How to start or expand a small business online on a very small (tiny) budget. Step by step. I figure with all the mis-steps I've already taken, and the tons of data I've already poured through, this should be pretty valuable and useful. Emphasis will be on each step, tying it back into the overall.

And now I know how to really give value as we go, so I'll tell you the tips and secrets uncovered during this line of work.

Stay tuned to http://robertworstell.com - as this is where I'll give the core data - a lot of my peripheral blogs will be changing as I do. But I'll also tell you why and how to apply it on your own.

Good Hunting!!

Where is social media going?

(photo credit: volunteersinparks.blogspot.com)

Where is social media going?

Looked up predictions on this and found a few. Some make sense, some don't.

Innovation will continue to take risks and find new solutions to recurring problems.

Here's a comment I just left on another Chris Brogan channel:

All this makes sense. Especially in this worrisome economic climate we've inherited.

Figure the online activities that can't monetize themselves will fold, but those which have greater communities will become "sponsored" by various entities.

There will be no "one" universal media, but rather - as Brogan points out - there will be one (or a few) accumulators for all these feeds. Right now, Friendfeed has the top spot in this, particularly as they just came out with an auto-updating live feed.

And so MSM has been given notice. Steve Rubel pointed this out recently. Newspapers either have to embrace social media or drop out entirely.

I want RSS feeds for papers so I don't have to wade through emails. RSS I can scan, emails have to be opened one by one (although there are some gmail features...) I want media archives to be open and able to be searched for earlier articles. I don't care if there are a lot of ads on those pages, as long as they are relevant products to what is being discussed. (Note, with templated ads, you can serve up current ads for old stories...)

There is no problem "making money" with any sort of content. The problem is carrying on the conversations that are already existing.

Conversations like, "How do I solve this?" "How to I keep my family fed and food on the table, a roof over their head, and clothes on our backs?" "How's my favorite sports team doing and why?" "How can I get some cheap distraction from all this bad news?" "How can I increase my disposable income - or have any at all?"

That's what marketing has to address - real concerns. It has to revisit their reasons for flashy cars and beautiful clothes and what Hollywood celebrities think (or if they do).

For the individual entrepreneur, this is the way to go. Find what solutions you are using and get them out in front of people who might care. Contribute to solving the world's problems. And have fun at it.

What's your take on this? Make sense? No? Tell me.

How to Get New Business Ideas - self help book promotion through social media

When you have the secret genius recipe for Getting New Business Ideas, you want to get the word out.

And that's what I've been doing this week. Took a lot longer than I thought. But the result has been worth it.

Slideshare has some user hurdles I'm just now jumping - and these are the preliminary findings:

• Slidecasts (contain audio) do better than simple Powerpoint. More exposure faster.
  
• Can't be overly long. Ideal is probably around 3 minutes, like a pop song.
• Lots of high-quality visuals, not a great deal of text on each slide.
• Like articles, you need to give valuable data quickly, concisely.
  

Technical details:

• Very active community, so only post your best and final version.
• Means you have to have your audio ready for sync-ing right after you post your slideshare (in order to make a slidecast).
• Links are active, not no-follow - means you get link love from Slideshare when you comment on someone else's creation (or your own). Search engines follow those links.
  
• Google loves Slideshare currently and posts your stuff at the top of their rankings within minutes.

My point with posting this was to get the word out about my new book - but also to help people with what I'd found. (And in the process, tell people that I was available for hire as a genius idea-finder.)

Earlier work was just on YouTube and didn't go anywhere. Here's the video:





As you can see, it's not bad, but isn't the same quality as my later slidecast:

| View | Upload your own

Comparing the two - I've gotten just over 500 views through YouTube on the first video in the month since I posted it. Slideshare has given me over 230 views in 12 hours, with three or four people favoriting it.

Just for grins and giggles - here's the same data (pix and audio) converted to a YouTube video:



Technical How-To's:

In this case, I tried something new, as well as keeping to the established ways of doing things.

New - created this in Corel Draw as it doesn't have to have a template like OpenOffice Impress (or MS Word's PowerPoint). It's an excellent graphic layout tool, though it remains a niche product. CorelDraw outputs direct to PDF, and so can import into Slideshare easily.

Old - learned from my earlier mistakes and held off posting the slideshare until I had the audio online.

Here's that audio from Archive.org:



You'll note that I've got two soundtracks here. This falls under new-based-on-old. I put a short and a longer soundtrack up for the same slides. You see, I sit on a wealth of data on self help, as well as how to create/unleash genius abilities. So the first short version (the popular one) was just to create the overview. The longer one gives the down and dirty of how and why I say what I do.

Now, with those sound tracks posted, I then finished up posting the slideshare and quickly converted it to a slidecast.

Why this sequence? So the initial impression is with sound. Higher value for the visitor experience.

Creating the slideshow was first, but posting it was fourth. Audio posting was third. First was creating a one-page landing page. Second was working out a press release and getting this into my article submitter program.

The web page is the end-point I want people going to. The press release drives people to the slidecast and my websites. But I didn't wait to get all my press release sites contacted before I got the slidecast up and running.

Following all this promotion is this blog post, which I'll social post.

Different from earlier work is the absence of an article to put on the article directories. I'd already posted the "Genius Recipe" so I didn't figure I could revamp it again. (And, spending a week on this slidecast, plus other distractions, has put me behind on other work...)

- - - -

So this about wraps up the scene. Oh yes, a word from our sponsor:

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