Hi
We’re now well into our internet business. It’s taking longer than I thought. There are lots of tricks and traps. In effect, its a new business, a startup. But, there are really great opportunities here. I’ve been surprised at the potential for increasing sales. The more I know the more revenue streams I can see for us to tap into.
Here are a few key things that I’ve learnt:
Some tricks…
- work out who the gurus are and copy them
- pay to learn from others, it’s too painful any other way
- look for models that will suit your business, but you’ll need to think laterally
- monitor, test and measure EVERYTHING OFTEN
- build a mastermind group to learn from each other. This is a new area and there are not that many people who really understand how it works
- get (in other words, pay for) a mentor with experience in internet sales
Some traps
- not focusing on traffic generation - 80% of effort should be on driving traffic to your site
- mediocre copy. In this business copy is king.
- copying websites that ‘look good’. They may look good but do they generate sales? Keep the objective clear: to increase sales
- paying exorbitant fees to marketing companies that don’t understand this business
- not understanding this business yourself. There is plenty of information available so go and read it
I’ll be passing on more about our experiences in later blogs.
Till then, cheers.
As most of you already know, Achaeus is venturing down the path of internet marketing to reach a wider audience to help SME business. My job here at Achaeus is to setup and implement the technology behind automating this process.
Gail and I are both very particular when it comes down to designing processes and one of the ways we do this is through flow charting. Typically we have used just word or excel to do this, (even though we could have used other software) purely because it was simple and everyone could open the document. I have just found some software that is both intuitive, simple and relatively cheap.
We use Mac’s here in the office and I stumbled across from great flow charting software called omnigraffle.
I downloaded and installed the trial, and after only a few moments, I knew I was on a winner. It was extremely simple, quick and very powerful. Gone are the days of boxes not lining up, or manually having to join the arrows between boxes. Omnigraffle is so intuitive that it seems like it reads your mind.
I was working on the flow chart for our new site pitchingtoinvestors.com and it was faily detailed. Using omnigraffle made the process so easy, it allowed me to spend more time designing and less time “fudging” if you know what I mean. It intuitively predicts what space size you want between gaps by cross referencing with any other gap to see if you want that size. It automatically lines up, snaps, scales depending on what shapes you put on the screen.
I highly recommend this software, check out their website here.
Hi All
On the weekend I went to the ‘Think and Grow Rich’ seminar. The only reason I went was because I wanted to get a meeting with my very smart friends, Andrew and Daryl Grant - master of the internet business. No, make that Grand Masters.
If you ever get the chance to see them in action then you should definitely go. That is, if you are interested in building some form of internet business.
But I got more from the speakers than I thought. And sitting in a room for hours gave me lots of time to brainstorm a little. My thoughts were having a great time talking to one another!
Background…
Some time ago I read a book by Charles Handy, one of those managment gurus. He was espousing the value of ‘the portfolio man’. What he was saying is that you should have multiple sources on income, spread the risk. Well, that always made sense to me but I work very long hours and it was good in theory but difficult in practice. All my energy went into Achaeus.
Now I have re-structured and have time to put into place my portfolio. One speaker gave a great presentation on share trading and another re-kindled my interest in the property market.
Best of all I have signed up with Andrew and Daryl to get moving on our first membership site - very exciting.
Cheers
Gail Geronimos