| |
Welcome to
Getting started using the
Internet for business.
This is a basic overview on how to
get started creating a business on the World Wide Web. This
basic knowledge applies whether you open a Sunnypark alliance store
or do your own web site. If you would like to partner with
Sunnypark send us an email and tell us about your business idea and
product. There is never an up-front cost to partnering with
Sunnypark.
The provided resources and links are selected by the criteria of
being free, limited marketing hype, and concise good SEO and
promotion information. So how do you get into business
using the Internet?
The Essential Plan
-
By far the most important thing to
do is to spend considerable time deciding what you want to do.
There are tons of guides on how to write a business plan but the
bottom line is put it all on paper before you start anything.
Know what your tools are, understand your market (and keyword
phrases) completely. Know how much you need to make to
be successful, and exactly how many you will need to sell to make
that number. Know your competition and their keywords. Know
how you are going to move product, are you going to buy wholesale,
look for a drop shipper, run an affiliate program like
Commission Junction, or Linkshare. If it is a tangible
product, how much does it weigh, how much will it cost to ship from
the wholesaler to you and then to the customer. Do you have a business
address to ship in to (cheaper)? Tax Id? How
much do you intend to invest in marketing. What type of
marketing will you do: online, offline, e-zines, autoresponders,
link exchanging? How will you take payment? Are
you going to use a fulfillment house like Ifullfill.com?
Do you want to do your own marketing, or do you want to outsource
that. Most important you must realistically
evaluate how much of your time you are willing to spend building the
business. If the answer is not "every waking minute", then
consider outsourcing marketing, inventory/shipping, order taking,
customer service, and/or accounting .
Understanding the money flow is critical.
Determine your Niche
Pick your Product
-
Focus. Focus. Focus. You
don't want to sell toys, you want to sell R/C Helicopters. You
don't want to sell books about flowers, you want to sell a
book about growing the perfect Orchid. Get the picture? People do not surf the Internet looking for general stuff. They will be looking for a specific thing. You need to connect
those two or three words that person is going to type into a search
engine to your product.
Build the Web Site
-
The easiest way to get started is using a product like
Microsoft FrontPage. How to use FrontPage is outside the scope of
this article but it’s pretty easy to use and is included with
Windows XP and some versions of Windows 98. There are plenty of
FrontPage tutorials around, and if you can find someone to show you,
the ramp up time to learn it is a matter of a couple of hours.
-
Make it clean looking with a light
background. Keep it simple with lots of white space.
Keep pictures to a minimum and small. It's better to display a
bigger image when the user clicks the picture.
When building your page think like Google thinks. Google
will look at only the text on your pages and look for words that are
repeated. Those words will be evaluated as being the page's
keywords. In other words your page will boil down to
being a few keywords to Google. You want those keywords
to be the same as what your potential buyer is going to type in to
the search engine.
-
There are tons of free templates around. Just do a
Google
search on “Free templates” and you will find some to choose from.
Careful though with free templates, sometimes they will have a
hidden link back to their site that your users will activate at some
time.
-
You will also need a file transfer program such as WSFTP or
CuteFTP. This is used to move your web files up to the Internet
provider. If you are using Frontpage as a development
tool the publish function can be set up to work as an FTP client to
get the files to the server.
-
You need a graphics program like Photoshop or Picture
publisher to resize pictures to the correct size for the web.
-
Stay away from Frames. Frames are nice because you can have
your navigation in one window and the content can scroll in another
window. Unfortunately many search engines cannot see past the main frame
page so it can’t evaluate your sub pages. There are ways around
this problem like using the /Noframes tag, but it is best to stick
to non-frame pages. Just put the same navigation buttons on every
page and it will still look like a frame.
-
Get a good domain name. If possible use keywords in your
domain name. the .com domains are difficult to get exactly what you
want but there are new suffixes now like .info, .us or .biz that
still have a lot of good names available. See Cheap-domains.com
for the lowest price I have seen for domain names and small sites.
-
Write the pages so that the
keywords your visitors will type in to a search engine matches the
highest used words on your pages.
-
Use an Autoresponder. Actually most all e-mail account
have a “Vacation message” option. This is actually a small autoresponder. You can set it up like: “To download this e-book
send a blank email to ……..” , the email is sent and the autoresponder replies with a link for the user to download the
book. You can purchase services that expand this capability.
-
Make sure you add your Meta tags. These are “Title,
Description, and Keywords. These are looked at by some search
engines but are not nearly as important as what the text is that is
on the page. It is the text that search engines look at to
determine what keywords your page is equal to. Use a
meta tag analyzer and fix whatever it says is wrong.
-
Once your site is built you will want to make sure it is
perfect. No broken links, check the keywords, and such. Then you
can submit the site to the search engines asking them to visit and
catalog your site. Stay away from the services that offer to
submit you to 8 billion search engines, you can achieve better
results by doing it manually and using just the top 5 search
engines.
-
Remember, people buy on emotion
and justify it with logic. Use colors to trigger emotion.
Blue and Green sooth. Red and Orange are hot and
exciting. Provide lots of
information to inspire trust. Be real in whatever you
say, don't try to over impress. Use your name, picture,
email and phone numbers. Anything to make the visitor trust
you. Capital Letters considered shouting if
overused but they can draw attention to an area.
Don't over do special characters that draw attention such as the
exclamation point. Warm colors speed up perception of time and
cause feelings that are warm, and inviting. Warm colors are:
magenta, red, orange, yellow, and yellow-green. Cool
colors produce calm, peace, or sadness. Cool colors are:
violet, blue, light blue, cyan and sea green.
Take a look at
http://www.infoplease.com/spot/colors1.html.
-
http://www.sitepronews.com/ebegin.html has a good selection of
free e-books about Internet marketing.
-
Use images, phone numbers, and contact info to instill trust in your
visitor. Avoid Flash animations, hard to read text,
pattern backgrounds. Make payment easy. Paypal is
a good choice for free.
-
Although most search engines look
at page content over Meta tags you still need to define them.
Meta tags are Title, Keywords, and Description. The
easiest way to create these is to use a Meta Tag generator like you
would find at http://Bravenet.com
Visitor collaboration
-
You might want to set up
something so your visitors can communicate with other visitors.
Perhaps you want to set up a chat with the musician area.
There are many different collaboration tools:
-
Blogs are the latest thing for visitors to
communicate. See blogger.com
-
Chat rooms can be set up for free if you are ok with
someone else's ads. See Bravenet.com
-
Message boards are very functional but its
hard to get people to use them
Pushing the product
-
Ok so the site is built, and
hooked to an e-commerce system like Paypal. The orders
are set up to be filled and shipped to the customer. Next you need to start marketing. If you built
your site correctly to evaluate to your target keywords you will get
some hits after a while, but if you want to get focused, targeted
hits you should use PPC engines like Google Adwords or Overture. Each person that clicks on a Google ad or Overture listing will cost
you 10 cents or more but if you chose your keywords carefully, each
of those hits could be a very qualified buyer. You need to
monitor this process very closely picking out a few keyword phrases
to use at a time, evaluate how well each did, and drop the ones they
draw the least qualified buyers.
-
It takes on average, 7 exposures
to a product for someone to buy it. So the most
important thing you can do when you get a visitor is to get them to
Opt-in to your email list. Giving away a free e-book or
whitepaper is a great way to gather email addresses. Using an Auto responder you then follow up with an emails that has
value to your potential customer. You don't want your customer
to opt-out before he decides to buy your product, and you can not by
law send an email pushing a product to anyone that didn't opt-in.
Multiple Streams
The word for success is FOCUS
~~~~~~
Promotion Tools
Promotional techniques and articles
E-zines and Newsletters
I have found the following E-zines
and Newsletters
to be helpful. Look for E-Zines that market in your market space.
More on Promoting your site
-
Pay per click engines will let you bid on and buy certain
keywords, so when someone types in a particular phrase your site
will come up. You want your site to show up on the first search
page; positions 2,3, and 4 are the best.
-
Market off-line. Hand out cards, put small two line ads in
publications, posters, etc.
-
Build your site with SEO in mind. (Search engine
optimization). This will get clicks for free.
-
Joint Venture and affiliate
marketing. When a visitor comes to your site you can not
only show them your offerings but also the offerings of a paying
affiliate. Choose a Joint venture that is compatible
with your theme. Good JVs in this scenario would be
photography, stage clothing, stage equipment, recording studios,
teaching performance arts, and accessories.
It's a fact
There are over 606 million people
on the Internet today. Internet usage is growing exponentially,
approximately doubling each year.
NUA Internet Surveys, Sept. 2002 & Matrix Information and
Directory Services
The Internet is a big place. There
are more than 4 billion pages on the Internet, with 7 million new
pages being added each day.
Cyveillance, Jul. 2000
More than 80% of U.S. Internet
users use search engines to find information.
Pew Internet & American Life, Jul. 2002
Online retail sales in the US
surpassed $45 billion in 2002. 55% of online purchases were made on
sites found through search listings.
E-Commerce Times, Feb, 2003 & InternetNews, Feb. 2001
Search position matters. 16% of
Internet users only look at the first few search results, and 56%
don't look beyond page two.
CyberAtlas, Nov. 2002
"Pay-for-placement" search
advertising is the fastest growing segment of online marketing and
promotion. eMarketer, 2003
"Pay-for-placement" search
advertising delivers a higher return on investment (ROI) than other
online advertising methods such as opt-in email or banner campaigns,
and better brand awareness.
Jupiter Media Metrix, July 2001 & NPD Group, Jan 2001
Affiliate Marketing
 |
Affiliates are people that will pay you to sell
their product. Don't make the mistake of filling up your
pages with lots and lots of affiliate ads. Pick a few and
focus on them with your market plan. The good news is by selecting one of these Affiliate brokers all
the tracking is done for you. Just put one of thier
clients on your site and when someone buys something though your
link, you get paid. |
| |
|
 |
Paypal is our friend. Set it up for free
to take credit cards and such so people can buy your products. You can pay $40 and up per month for a merchant account, or you
can use Paypal for free. People trust PayPal. |
| |
|
 |
These are good deals for the web that needs lots
of space. Both offer marketing tools and a $50 credit with
Overture PPC engine. |
| |
 |
| |
|
Send questions by email to mac@sunnyparkfun.com
© Copyright 2003. All rights reserved.
|
