Get Your Biz Going
If you hadn’t guessed it about me, I like the Internet. I mean - as a way to get ahead in life, I like the Internet. As a way to reach out and help others - I like the Internet. Have you thought about it? If you don’t already know what you are going to do to get ahead, let me give you a suggestion. And if you’ve already got a good plan and a way to generate more and more income, then you might want to establish a new Internet income stream.
Actually, I just like it. How about you? Now, some of you are thinking that reading a blog or two and checking on your next vacation is fine, but nothing more. I understand that. Or you might be unsure, curious, maybe thinking that getting something going on the Internet would be exciting. But scary. I guess this will be for you, then. I’d like to help calm your fears a bit, give you a few ideas, and help you to take some action.
First off, realize that the Internet is most like the new medium for moving information, as in….radio, then TV, now the Internet. Have you heard about Web 2.0? That’s like the original Internet, but with interactive communities for people to share their thoughts and experiences. You can find out what websites a friend has bookmarked; you can shoot a video of your new grandkid on a phone and upload it to your Blog; you can subscribe to a podcast series from Stanford on Social Entrepreneurship - and iTunes will sync that to your iPod or iPhone for you automatically. I like to use an FM transmitter and listen to those things in the car while I’m driving. I heard Zig Ziglar mention that you can get the equivalent of a master’s degree by listening to quality audio material for a year or two while driving.
So if we think about using the Internet for a platform to build a business, or to provide an additional channel for a business, we run into a big problem. Basically, the Internet is huge, yet a lot of websites sit out there and starve and they never get people to visit. Some people put a lot of time into building up a beautiful website, and spend a lot of money on that. That approach is as flawed on the Internet as it is anywhere. Unless the money you are spending helps to support a decent plan, the money is potentially being wasted. If so, this also wastes time. And I’m sure you can relate to the emotional stubbornness created by spending a pile of money supporting an idea. It can create a huge blind spot.
Let me explain it this way. Las Vegas was started as an awesome entertainment area, but it wasn’t going to get any visitors, was it? Part of the success plan had to include the transportation and the attraction of visitors. They didn’t start off with the Luxor out there, did they? No - they got things started, and they split their resources between building an amazing entertainment environment and attracting the visitors that would happily exchange their money for hotels, food, blackjack and shows.
Think for a few moments about the phrase, “building a business”. Isn’t that what I just described? The alternative is to build some amazing website with all the bells and whistles, maybe some wonderful flash, blah blah blah…. But if that amazing site is effectively as visible as a glittery signboard in a remote area of the desert, all that perfection will need a LOT of remedial promotion to bring interested visitors to it. The results in that situation would likely be disappointing for a period of time. The point is that putting more stress on starting a small Internet business, and growing that business by responding to its marketplace will normally produce better business results. And it can definitely be less emotionally straining.
But how do you design a business using the Internet? Actually, that’s not much of a problem. If you start looking for business ideas, they are everywhere! That is part of the problem with the Internet. There is just too much! Search on certain things, and you get no results. Search on other topics, and you can get 5 million results! Google and other search engines generally do a great job of providing us good results first. But, that is not always the case. And there are definitely a few whole classes of low-value website out there basically designed just to transfer dollars from us into the website’s coffers. You need to filter what’s out there, consider the source of the information, and generally be a bit discerning. The same things you do if you are watching the news, reading a newspaper or a magazine, or hearing someone interviewed on the radio. We don’t automatically trust the information on an infomercial, do we?
One thing to realize about this overwhelming number of sites and sources of information is this: We are people. People trust people. We may respect the Encyclopedia Britannica, but that is really just a set of books that contain facts. When we want to use the information, we want to be able to turn to a trusted expert. If we hear contradictory information, we’ll likely believe our trusted expert more often than not. They filter and sort and help us process all the chaotic plethora of information that is out there. Any one person can only be really good at a certain number of things. In most other things, it’s good to have a trusted source of information and advice. That saves us time, lets us trust the information that we allow to enter our brains, and that gets stored in our own amazing storage devices - our brains.
So how do we select a business model for the Internet? I suggest that we become an expert to a group of people, our customers and visitors and readers. We limit our focus and get good at solving some problem for those people. And we get to know our customers and respond to their needs. There are lots of ways to make money from a situation like that. We can sell things like books or Playstations. We can sell information, maybe in the form of a PDF, a series of phone conferences, or a podcast subscription. We can run a seminar, give training, or provide a service.
But realize that we are now talking about marketing. So let me tie all this together. One of the basics of marketing is to identify your target audience. Target them, learn about them, talk to them in a way that leads to good communication. Ask your market what they need, how you can help, and what they want to spend their money on. If you build a business with these basics in mind, you won’t likely build a perfect website with amazing sales and entertainment potential when you’ve got no audience and market. That is, unless you have a very good plan for launching that site with a big bang. You are more likely to provide things that your market wants to spend its money on, and enhancing that business over time.
This should help solve the overwhelming volume of “help” available on over a billion websites that exist already. If you know that you’d like to develop a training site to help people establish a successful account service business, then you can safely ignore a lot of things. You will have identified whole classes of websites and information as noise that you can virtually ignore. If you haven’t identified a market and a problem that you’ll solve for that market, then you may end up listening to all the promises and ideas, investigating all the glitzy, hypey sites, and you could spend years on doing research.
I hope this is making sense. If you want to establish a business that uses the Internet, then…well….you’ll have to do many of the same things that you’d do to establish a business or a shop without any Internet components. There are some markets that are hugely more successful online than they can be in today’s world using any other communication medium.
For now, let me leave you with one suggestion. For those of you that have ideas to share, that can talk or write about some topic of interest to you, I have a suggestion. Start out sharing your ideas, putting them out there in writing and audio. Maybe have phone calls or Skpe calls with others. Practice presenting your idea, and conduct some market research in the process. Develop some of the skills that you can use later to run a business that uses the Internet.
How do you do those things? Well, start a blog. Establish a podcast. Become involved in forums and other peoples’ blogs by adding your comments. This networking can lay the groundwork for a support group, or even partners, for your business as it develops. You can also start to find an audience. So, start a blog. Start writing. If you find you’re having trouble adding to your blog after 2 or 3 weeks, reflect on that. This gives you a chance to modify or completely change your “topic” or market before spending any significant money. More importantly, you don’t have the emotional stubbornness and blind spots caused by deciding on a course of action, and putting $100,000 behind that idea. Somehow it is much easier to adjust our direction when our total investment has been some time, and maybe $100.
If this approach appeals to you, then subscribe to get more of these ideas. My Get Your Biz Going email sequence deals with this topic. It gives you suggestions. You’ll see some of the ideas in action. You are reading my blog, but - maybe you have NO idea how to get your own blog started. Maybe you have a website and a few products, and have traffic, but you’re having trouble turning those pieces into sales. The idea is to get the groundwork in place to grow a business using the Internet. Join me to Get Your Biz Going. Another way to say that is - Create Your Own Newsletter. Let me help you change your momentum - and get it going!
A bit of fun - and a Naked Baby…(video)
Would you like to see what some real people have accomplished on the Internet? Some of the big numbers? Heck, I don’t even care - you really just need to see this video! It’s fun - it’s creative - and it has great rockstar appeal. Turn up your speakers. Naked Baby, Big Money Video
