Saturday, October 4, 2008

Getting Started

The old way of marketing was to put an advert on the radio, TV or newspaper.
Today it is slightly more technical but the idea is the same.


The first thing you need for your business is a product to sell. The second thing is a marketing vehicle which is used to expose your product to the public.


By far the easiest and cheapest way to do this is to build a website. Here are some ideas to get you started.

1. Firstly, you need to find out what your customers want and this can be the hardest part of the whole process and may I add, where most online businesses fail. They do not do enough research at this stage to make sure their is a eager to by population out there waiting for your product. Your product should provide a solution of some kind that will make that will improve the quality of life either at home or at work.

2. Pick a domain name. Try to make it easy to remember. One obstacle to this could be that the name you want has been picked already. You may have to add a hyphen or something similar as I have done in the title of this site.

Try to use the name of your product in the title as it will act a a Keyword Phrase. There are sites in the web that have search engines to look for a specific subject and using popular keywords for ones website will easily help people find it. These sites also allow one to make a site map which can be downloaded in minutes for a small fee.

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3. Your product has to be priced correctly. Too dear and prospects will switch to a another similar product. Too cheap and prospects will smell a rat and wonder where the catch is. You may have to try a few different prices first and see which has the best results. Make sure your product is of good quality and customers will come back time and time again. Emphasise the unique selling point of your product and you may wan to give a free gift away as well to give your product the edge over your competitors.

4. Remove obstacles for payment. If you have a long drawn out form to fill in customers will switch to another product. Trust me on this. Also once the sale has been made make sure the delivery of the product is on time and hassle free.


5. Don't throw money into the business until you it has been tried and tested. This is the great thing about the internet. You could set up a blog free promoting you product and measure the response before you spend a penny.

6. To promote you site and this is a whole new topic which I will cover in the coming months. However, here are a few things to get you started with promotion.. You can use:
Contact similar websites and ask them to promote your product.
If they have a email contact list ask them to promote your product to thier list for a percentage of the sales.
Try using traffic exchanges to get some quick hits to your site.
Write articles with your website link on them.
Ask other sites to link to you to help you get up the search engine rankings.

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