After this discussion has come up in a couple of different threads I currently follow, I’ve decided to start one dedicated to building and growing an online business. I am by no means a great writer nor do I purport to be one so with that being said I’d hope no one would expect too much style wise but I do hope its informative. This is a general overview on a online business however as I am in the tech field things that I’ve done will have to be done a bit different for other fields but the majority can be replicated in any fields especially service work of any kind. I’ll not go into any specifics about exactly what I do or sale for obvious reasons I’ll try to answer as many questions as best I can though I just don’t have all the answers.
I began my business close to six years ago in my basement with nothing more than a Magic Jack and a Dell desktop with one simple goal in mind FREEDOM! Even as a much younger man while in college working at a major retailer as a manager, and way before that I knew a normal 9-5 just wasn’t for me. There were many reasons that brought me to this conclusion number one being money, I just couldn’t accept the fact that no matter what I did how hard I worked I’d only ever be able to make x amount of dollars. I have a problem with “authority figures” simply put I have zero patience for anyone telling me what to do, when to do it, and how to do it. I was very much keen to the reality as early as elementary school I suck at playing politics, making fake “hi how are you doing” friends, kiss ass, nor was I ever going to win a popularity contest, or homecoming king. Later I learned after I began working for the man I had zero intention of participating in the circle jerk that is corporate life so I have zero chance at being put in a VP or presidents role which in my mind is where I felt I should be.
A little background on me I majored in marketing and minored in international business (though I did more partying than studying and never graduated) and have a background in sales, starting with my first job in a telemarketing center in High School and later where I really learned how to sale at a multi-level marketing company selling services to business clients (nothing like an Amway, door to door selling magazines, buy into this program scams) and this experience was a huge help when it came time to start my organization as being a business owner your first and foremost priority is to sale!!!!! I don’t care if you are selling plastic dog pooh you have to be able to vocalize why your plastic pooh is the best and why the prospective client or customer should drop their hard earned money on plastic pooh period. Because of this a huge amount of the populace will never consider going into business for themselves and more importantly in my personal opinion it’s the reason 95% of businesses fail miserably within the first 5 years of inception.
My number one thought I had in mind was “how would I get clients in the door” and there were many different options available. Person to person marketing which I’ve had a lot of experience in, online, mailers, print ads, etc…. Due to the fact my funds were extremely limited I had not choice than to go with with the least costly, and most effective in my opinion so I focused on my online presence and people to people marketing and went from there.
Online marketing you have websites, pay per clicks, yellow pages, manta, yelp, craigslist and the list goes on and on. I had to determine which would give me the best ROI and that will be determined by few factors ie what products/services will we offer as an organization? Or who are my clients consumers or businesses? Who is my target audience? How does my target audience go about making a purchasing decision from the point they begin their search? After their initial search how do they research the items, services, or products they have found? What will be their decision making process after they have researched. Every question you ask will lead to another question while there are many variables that play into this. I think the most important would be what causes my audience to even decide to make the purchase initially? Are you selling a product or service that is a luxury, or necessity? Is the product only needed when something breaks down, or is it a item bought not out of necessity right now but due to future plans the client has in mind? Is it something strictly for fun? If you cannot and or do not consider these things first and foremost you’ve already missed the boat and will be in the 95% sooner than later.
Taking all that in to consideration online, and person to person marketing were complete no brainers for me. Once I decided online would be the best marketing option I needed to figure out how to do so and my search for a website guy began (I don’t do Amazon, or have an Ecommerce currently though I’ve researched and dabbled in both and plan on doing a more concerted effort for fully launching both in the future) This will suck and you may likely not find the right guy for the job and get a useless website, and when I say useless I refer to sites that are professional looking but cannot be found by prospective clients so SEO is key. The site doesn’t offer enough information, or vice versa offers entirely too much confusing the client, finding that sweet spot is key as you want the prospects to actually call you or purchase once they find your page not just find your page click and keep on looking or move on to the next guy.
We’ve really seen some success with online advertising in the fact the majority of our new businesses comes from online, initially close to 90% and the rest from cold calling. Nowadays that 90% number has gone down because we get a lot of repeat, and referral business coupled with the fact I just haven’t the time to cold call (hiring sales is a whole other list of problems) and we are heavily involved in the channel. I personally went for broke when it came to websites as I now own 160 domains and am always purchasing more it always helps to do this as it will help with SEO. I never under any circumstances use link farms or services but rather do it organically myself using my own pages or links from other valid sties (you can post blogs on sites like yelp, or find other industry specific sites) some allow anyone to do it simply go on there and post a blog others you have to call and go through the whole dance but its definitely worth doing this will cost time but again goes back to do everything for the least amount you can and do it the right way. The web site guy can help you with this and answer questions better than I can not as I’m not an SEO expert by any means.
As this is an online business your foot print can be as big or small as you want it to be. Our sites are both location and product specific allowing us to really target specific area with specific services and products which for what we do is HUGE because of availability in that area (I will not go into full detail as to how I do that again something you the web designer can help you with and I just don’t want to give away my entire marketing strategy). My web site guy was able to pull information for me as to what cities, or certain phrases were searched for the most so I know which phrases to focus on in my SEO and what cities to start with and focus my dollar spend as dollars are very short at this stage. I’m glad I pulled this information because I found out the cities I’d think were the highest in searching turned out not to be, for instance one phrase the was used the most for this particular product (and our most lucrative product) the highest ranked city was Jackson, MS followed by Memphis TN. That gave me the information I needed to know I should spend more dollars advertising, marketing, building sites initially for those areas as opposed to the places I thought we’re no brainers such as New York, LA, Chicago, or even Houston. Years later now we have matching dollars spend in Memphis and New York it turns out Memphis is still out performing New York by a long shot I continually get some of my largest customers and the most out of that market and it is not close to where we are located as a business.
For all intents and purposes our location means absolutely nothing as we get phone numbers from any city we want in the US, and other countries and use those numbers for advertising in that market giving out clients the feeling and comfort of dealing with a local business. Allowing us to be able to complete on a much larger scale than Stans widget service can because stan is living in Detroit and is happy with being one of the big dogs in a nice sized city. When we get clients in these other cities a lot what we do is online but the majority needs to have someone on site. So we have a few ways of tackling this one is subcontractors both for onsite and off site, however for your most lucrative product, service, or business you should focus on in house to full time employees because that’s your number one priority customer.
Its soooooo hard to find good people most don’t want to work and the majority that do just want to clock in and clock out. This is what I found to be a huge ongoing problem, especially with our growth and make no mistake about it with out more people and good people growth will be impossible. But that’s a whole set of problems I’m not going to go into because its too time consuming….
I began my business close to six years ago in my basement with nothing more than a Magic Jack and a Dell desktop with one simple goal in mind FREEDOM! Even as a much younger man while in college working at a major retailer as a manager, and way before that I knew a normal 9-5 just wasn’t for me. There were many reasons that brought me to this conclusion number one being money, I just couldn’t accept the fact that no matter what I did how hard I worked I’d only ever be able to make x amount of dollars. I have a problem with “authority figures” simply put I have zero patience for anyone telling me what to do, when to do it, and how to do it. I was very much keen to the reality as early as elementary school I suck at playing politics, making fake “hi how are you doing” friends, kiss ass, nor was I ever going to win a popularity contest, or homecoming king. Later I learned after I began working for the man I had zero intention of participating in the circle jerk that is corporate life so I have zero chance at being put in a VP or presidents role which in my mind is where I felt I should be.
A little background on me I majored in marketing and minored in international business (though I did more partying than studying and never graduated) and have a background in sales, starting with my first job in a telemarketing center in High School and later where I really learned how to sale at a multi-level marketing company selling services to business clients (nothing like an Amway, door to door selling magazines, buy into this program scams) and this experience was a huge help when it came time to start my organization as being a business owner your first and foremost priority is to sale!!!!! I don’t care if you are selling plastic dog pooh you have to be able to vocalize why your plastic pooh is the best and why the prospective client or customer should drop their hard earned money on plastic pooh period. Because of this a huge amount of the populace will never consider going into business for themselves and more importantly in my personal opinion it’s the reason 95% of businesses fail miserably within the first 5 years of inception.
My number one thought I had in mind was “how would I get clients in the door” and there were many different options available. Person to person marketing which I’ve had a lot of experience in, online, mailers, print ads, etc…. Due to the fact my funds were extremely limited I had not choice than to go with with the least costly, and most effective in my opinion so I focused on my online presence and people to people marketing and went from there.
Online marketing you have websites, pay per clicks, yellow pages, manta, yelp, craigslist and the list goes on and on. I had to determine which would give me the best ROI and that will be determined by few factors ie what products/services will we offer as an organization? Or who are my clients consumers or businesses? Who is my target audience? How does my target audience go about making a purchasing decision from the point they begin their search? After their initial search how do they research the items, services, or products they have found? What will be their decision making process after they have researched. Every question you ask will lead to another question while there are many variables that play into this. I think the most important would be what causes my audience to even decide to make the purchase initially? Are you selling a product or service that is a luxury, or necessity? Is the product only needed when something breaks down, or is it a item bought not out of necessity right now but due to future plans the client has in mind? Is it something strictly for fun? If you cannot and or do not consider these things first and foremost you’ve already missed the boat and will be in the 95% sooner than later.
Taking all that in to consideration online, and person to person marketing were complete no brainers for me. Once I decided online would be the best marketing option I needed to figure out how to do so and my search for a website guy began (I don’t do Amazon, or have an Ecommerce currently though I’ve researched and dabbled in both and plan on doing a more concerted effort for fully launching both in the future) This will suck and you may likely not find the right guy for the job and get a useless website, and when I say useless I refer to sites that are professional looking but cannot be found by prospective clients so SEO is key. The site doesn’t offer enough information, or vice versa offers entirely too much confusing the client, finding that sweet spot is key as you want the prospects to actually call you or purchase once they find your page not just find your page click and keep on looking or move on to the next guy.
We’ve really seen some success with online advertising in the fact the majority of our new businesses comes from online, initially close to 90% and the rest from cold calling. Nowadays that 90% number has gone down because we get a lot of repeat, and referral business coupled with the fact I just haven’t the time to cold call (hiring sales is a whole other list of problems) and we are heavily involved in the channel. I personally went for broke when it came to websites as I now own 160 domains and am always purchasing more it always helps to do this as it will help with SEO. I never under any circumstances use link farms or services but rather do it organically myself using my own pages or links from other valid sties (you can post blogs on sites like yelp, or find other industry specific sites) some allow anyone to do it simply go on there and post a blog others you have to call and go through the whole dance but its definitely worth doing this will cost time but again goes back to do everything for the least amount you can and do it the right way. The web site guy can help you with this and answer questions better than I can not as I’m not an SEO expert by any means.
As this is an online business your foot print can be as big or small as you want it to be. Our sites are both location and product specific allowing us to really target specific area with specific services and products which for what we do is HUGE because of availability in that area (I will not go into full detail as to how I do that again something you the web designer can help you with and I just don’t want to give away my entire marketing strategy). My web site guy was able to pull information for me as to what cities, or certain phrases were searched for the most so I know which phrases to focus on in my SEO and what cities to start with and focus my dollar spend as dollars are very short at this stage. I’m glad I pulled this information because I found out the cities I’d think were the highest in searching turned out not to be, for instance one phrase the was used the most for this particular product (and our most lucrative product) the highest ranked city was Jackson, MS followed by Memphis TN. That gave me the information I needed to know I should spend more dollars advertising, marketing, building sites initially for those areas as opposed to the places I thought we’re no brainers such as New York, LA, Chicago, or even Houston. Years later now we have matching dollars spend in Memphis and New York it turns out Memphis is still out performing New York by a long shot I continually get some of my largest customers and the most out of that market and it is not close to where we are located as a business.
For all intents and purposes our location means absolutely nothing as we get phone numbers from any city we want in the US, and other countries and use those numbers for advertising in that market giving out clients the feeling and comfort of dealing with a local business. Allowing us to be able to complete on a much larger scale than Stans widget service can because stan is living in Detroit and is happy with being one of the big dogs in a nice sized city. When we get clients in these other cities a lot what we do is online but the majority needs to have someone on site. So we have a few ways of tackling this one is subcontractors both for onsite and off site, however for your most lucrative product, service, or business you should focus on in house to full time employees because that’s your number one priority customer.
Its soooooo hard to find good people most don’t want to work and the majority that do just want to clock in and clock out. This is what I found to be a huge ongoing problem, especially with our growth and make no mistake about it with out more people and good people growth will be impossible. But that’s a whole set of problems I’m not going to go into because its too time consuming….
"I got no game it's just some bitches understand my story." Nas
