Business Alone

It seems that almost everyone has an idea for a killer home business.

In fact, some folks can only think of ideas - they get stuck trying to figure out how to implement their ideas to the point of never actually starting anything!

At times, it will pay to have confidence in your idea and be its champion from start to successful business launch.

At other times, many of us tend to over-analyze or over-scrutinize our business ideas to the point of dooming the business before it ever has a chance.

Why not identify the roadblocks to coming up with a great business idea, then move beyond them once you understand what they are.

I've often thought about the myriad of reasons for startup business failure. Because creating and operating a business involves so many details, it's easy to understand why problems galore plague entrepreneurs.

Many mess-ups are not fatal.

The owner can recover from non-crippling problems that result from unexpected circumstances or misjudged steps. Persistence and adaptability are key ingredients in the owner's arsenal of personality traits that are needed to overcome big mistakes.

But there is one very tough problem to correct: a poor choice of the basic business idea.

If the whole subject of your business is wrong - if you have employed an incorrect model - or you have overestimated the "salability" of your product - you could be in for a very rude awakening.

Coming up with a workable home business idea is only a beginning. If whatever that idea is never develops beyond a thought, your dream of a real business will never happen.

In fact, let me be so blunt as to say that your chances for success in any business creation attempt will be directly proportional to your ability to translate ideas, and feelings, and thoughts into executed action steps.

Every new product and service that you see in the world today is the result of someone's acting upon an idea and following through by executing a series of steps that eventually resulted in the product's launch.

There may have been many, many people that had a similar, or even the exact same idea.

It's a nasty name, "swipe files," but it's an idea you should implement immediately if you haven't already gotten yours started!

If you're like me, you run across great little ideas and tidbits on the Internet every day.

But if you don't record that idea, or web site, or reference, or "how to" hint for later recall, you will have forgotten that even existed within a day or two.

If you've been involved in copywriting, direct ad creation, web site development, graphics creation, email headlining, and any number of other online business tasks, you've probably heard the term "swipe files."

That's kind of a nasty or unpleasant term, but the concept is smart and the results of you building such files will be significant as you venture into your new information business.

If you don't know what a "swipe file" is, or you're not convinced you need one (or several), read on.

Working for yourself often seems like the perfect solution for finding a way to earn a living and also enjoy some freedom of expression and the flexibility to set your own work schedule.

In addition, the idea of getting paid what you're worth and not having to share the profit of your own labors really appeals to many.

But before you dive into a solo business, you would do well to discuss the implications of being your own boss and "going it alone" with others that have already chosen this path and are actually making a living this way.

Their insights and advice will most likely do one of two things: strengthen your resolve to strike out down this path, or bring doubts into your mind about whether this type of business is really something that you will be happy and productive doing.

Often magazines and news articles about self-employment include tests or checklists that you can review to see if you possess the traits or qualities that are necessary to become a profitable business owner.

You might wonder how accurate such "predictors" are of future success.

My experience in studying a number of these tests is that results vary somewhat depending upon the audience polled and the skill of the survey designer and the results analyst. Nothing is black and white.

So are these predictors useless? Do they have any value to aspiring solo business owners? Here's my take:

Indicators or predictors are just that - they give us some clues about what might be - based upon probabilities captured in repeated tests. There are always exceptions and cases that fall outside the expected range of results.

Most of the Internet's best marketing minds agree on this philosophy:

"Don't try to create interest and excitement in your prospect for your product. Find an overwhelming desire already in your prospect's mind and fill it."

What does this idea suggest? Simply this . . .

Does the headline of your sales ad or marketing piece really deserve 80% of the time you spend on writing the ad copy?

That's the suggestion of author Ted Nicholas, one of the all time greats in direct marketing.

He figures that between 50 and 80% of the sales generated in direct advertising are attributable to the ad's headline.

That's a pretty amazing statistic, but maybe not totally surprising given the way readers skim copy and jump from heading to heading.

When you get right down to brass tacks, most successful businesses are pretty boring. Really!

How many boring hamburgers does your local McDonalds crank out in a year? How many boring oil changes does Jiffy Lube perform for their customers every day? How often do Amazon employees wrap up a boring package of books to be shipped worldwide?

Many of today's most successful companies are at the top of their niche because they have mastered the execution of very boring business subjects and activities. They understand how to execute their boring routine over and over and over again; usually better and cheaper than anyone else.

Profitable companies develop systems of execution based on testing, modifying, and refining. Once they determine what works best, they simply repeat that formula or system over and over again.

There should be a number of considerations that you look at before you set a pricing structure to your products.

But many entrepreneurs don't think much about an overall strategy. They believe they are limited in their ability to set prices beyond a certain range.

Let's say you decide to sell a DVD, for instance, that you produced yourself called "The Ups and Downs of Exploring the Grand Canyon on a Pogo Stick!"

It's fun to skim through a number of new business plans in a short period of time. I always take special note of the sales projections and compare set against set.

Of course, there is probably no merit in comparing apples to oranges as I'm suggesting I like to do. But it sometimes becomes apparent which prospective owners are attempting to be objective, and which are merely dreaming.

Even if you don't understand specific market demand, you will get a distinct "feel" for the amount of hype and exaggeration that floats around in the numbers and the logic.

There is a critical business principle that you need to learn and implement in your solo Internet business that will serve you extremely well. In all digital businesses it will become either an invaluable friend or a nightmare of an enemy.

Some stay in business for years and spend a lot of valuable daily time on managing this area of their business, while others adapt and implement an automated system that does almost all of the manual work for them.

I'm talking about implementing and operating a system of records and data keeping that will aid you in maintaining your business and your customers.

If you want to have a professional and legitimate solo business, you must learn the discipline of setting goals and visualizing where you want your business to be in the future.

Goal-setting is sometimes viewed as nothing more than the worthless act of day dreaming. After all, how can anyone see into the future? Why waste time in guessing where your business will end up 5 or 10 years down the road?

There are three main hang-ups or difficulties with setting goals that keep most folks from realizing the power they hold in their hand when they establish proper goals.

One of the things that most business owners look for are ways to add value to their businesses.

The usual thoughts are to add more products to the mix of things sold thereby increasing the profit potential. They reason, "More to sell = more sales!"

If you sell other people's products and if you have a source of additional offerings, this strategy may make sense for your business.

But what if you create your own products and can't readily add new offerings? What if you sell a single item and your business revolves around just that product?

II tend to be personally aligned with perfectionists.

I believe in doing the very best I can no matter what I'm doing. I sometimes spend hours on trying to get something right, even though that pursuit is mostly meaningless.

I'm a sucker for puzzles, brain teasers, and word games.

As an entrepreneur, I have to fight this tendency toward perfection and "coming up with the very best solution" all the time.

One of my favorite mentors (even though I have not personally met him) is a gentleman by the name of Seth Godin. He was formerly the Direct Marketing Vice President at Yahoo!

I call him a mentor because I feel his direction and guidance have helped me immensely in my business career. He keeps in contact with his readers through his popular blog found HERE .

Seth is also a prolific writer and a creative genius when it comes to understanding human behavior in the context of online marketing psychology and how companies can be successful as they develop relationships with their customers.

Can you imagine the satisfaction, pride, and profitability you could enjoy if your solo business was something very extraordinary?

Most businesses online these days are comparatively bland. They sell products and services that are accepted by customers and the companies for the most part operate as mirror images of one another.

But once in a great while, a business elevates itself to the apex of its niche because it is so radically different and remarkable as to be incomparable and considered in a league of its own.

If so, you need to do everything possible to increase the amount of traffic, the click-through response rate to your affiliate page links, and the relevance of your content to the product(s) you're promoting.

Typically, affiliates slap up a web page, add a few links, some cut-and-paste content, and forget about the site for a few weeks or months waiting for it to get spidered and included in the search engines.

There is a better way to accomplish affiliate sales. If you pay close attention to the details of your site, like you would if you were selling your own direct marketing product, your affiliate sales can soar.

Often, new business owners figure the only way to increase sales is to put your product or service in front of more people.

Such a strategy usually means that you spend increasing amounts of money on advertising so you can extend your reach in to more and more markets.

Increasing sales by ramping up advertising is one way to pump up the bottom line. But there may be other more effective uses of your business operating budget.

Entrepreneur is kind of a funny word. It's obviously of French origin. I've been hunting for years to find its English counterpart, but have not yet come up with a suitable substitute.

Maybe we don't need an English word for entrepreneur - it's used so commonly these days in the English language that most business-minded people, at least, have a pretty good understanding of the term.

My dictionary states the word "entrepreneur" comes from the Old French "entreprendre" which means, "to undertake." An entrepreneur is one who undertakes the creation, organization, operation, and risk of a business venture.

I've written a number of times on getting started in business and most of those discussions, at some point at least, lead back to the importance to small businesses of doing market research to understand who your customers are and what they really want.

I have come to the conclusion over my years in dealing with small business owners that some of them (the true entrepreneurs) are exceptionally good at the skill of listening, and others (let's call them business road kill) haven't a clue what listening entails and don't ever do it.

The premier search engine Google has come up with several programs that may be of interest to the solo small business owner. But there seems to be some matter of conflicting opinion about whether a web site owner should do anything to send his traffic away to someone else.

Here's the deal: Google allows web site owners to advertise products and services on their web site in exchange for a small referral fee each time a viewer clicks on one of the Google ads.

This is not an affiliate program since Google pays for each click rather than for a product that is actually purchased. In a sense, the web site owner is sharing in a PPC (pay per click) program. Google serves the ads and keeps track of the clicks. The web site owner puts Google's html code on his pages and provides relevant content for Google to match to its advertisers.

If you are a solo business operator and choose to increase the revenue generated at your web site, you have the option of employing Google Adsense advertising. I believe Yahoo and MSN also (or will soon) offer similar programs that allow the web owner to monetize his content.

There are several factors that determine how much revenue a web owner can generate for each of the particular content pages on his site that serve Adsense advertising.

First, the traffic to a site is important as most Internet advertising is, in part at lease, a numbers game. Your viewers will only click on an Adsense ad a certain proportion of the time.

Let's use the example of 1 click every 200 visitors. Given that type of click-through rate, a site with 200 visitors/page/day will generate 1/10 the income that a site with 2,000 visitors/page/day will get, all other things being equal.

I've often spoken and written of the accelerated pace of business on the Internet. Online, everything moves quickly and changes happen almost overnight.

It seems products, businesses and the strategies used to reach customers are here today and gone tomorrow.

Press releases and the way businesses keep in the public eye have also changed significantly with the speed and open access of the Internet.

Just a few years ago, press releases were confined to a very predictable format and were used to relay certain kinds of company highlights and events to the mass media.

Today, things have changed and press releases are nothing like they used to be. Here are some of the changes:

Did you know there are cheap places to display your small classified ads all over the Internet?

How successful you are will depend upon a number of factors, but doing your homework in advance will increase your chances greatly of having a profitable campaign.

There is a lot of psychology that goes into developing a winning classified ad - much more than can be discussed here. But you may want to try a few inexpensive ads while you're learning about the subject so that you understand the process of finding good sources and writing tantalizing copy.

Big Madison Avenue advertising agencies need to know what customers think about specific companies (their clients) and the products and services they sell.

They create branding messages, images, and positioning for these companies that affect how the business is perceived by the general public.

Such information can be helpful to a small business as well; however, most small businesses are not in a position to be able to afford this level of outsourcing and detail in their marketing.

Still, there is an easy way to check on consumer sentiment about the companies that do business in your niche.

Most of us have been taught to value "more" over "less." The more we have, the better off we are.

If two of something is good, then surely three of that same thing is better!

In the Internet world, quantity often means little because it is so relative depending upon the context in which it us used. Here's an example.

Most business owners would think that being able to contact 5,000 prospects in a single sales pitch campaign would be a big deal. In the offline world that is certainly the case.

But if your message is being broadcast via email, and you're trying to choose between two options (say, for instance, sending your message to 45,000 prospects compared to 50,000) that extra 5,000 may not be a very significant amount.

I wanted to mention the case for quality over quantity related to renting lists of prospects from a list broker.

Grab any piece of junk mail and take a quick look at it.

You will probably notice one of two things: either the copywriter hits you right between the eyes with his offer up front, or he forces you to read through the ad to locate the offer which will invariably be hidden at the tail end.

The first strategy is employed to qualify the potential buyers from the "just looking" crowd.

The sales copy is very straightforward and pushes the prospect early to decide if this offer is for him or not.

If the viewer has a genuine interest, he will continue reading the ad.

There's a very interesting phenomenon that often takes place in small business environments that to some extent can be predicted.

Solo businesses that roll along from day to day and week to week, never trying new methods or strategies, never experimenting with radically different systems or marketing, can be pretty much assured that their results will remain steady and predictable.

I have noticed that it's at times of greatest change and upheaval that some businesses make their greatest leap forward.

In essence, the business owner decides to depart from former or traditional ideas and methods and strike out in a new direction, or with a completely different approach.

There is a simple and very straightforward way to engage your prospect in the conversation, or in your advertising, or your web site, or your email.

Savvy marketers have used this technique to grab the attention of casual on-lookers and passers-by when other copy and narrative tactics simply fail to produce the results that the owner expects.

Here's the simple technique: State your title or headline in terms of a thought-provoking question and include the word "you" so that it grabs the viewer and demands a response.

One of the surest things besides death and taxes, is the fact that change will occur in your business niche. It's inevitable.

Markets for products and services evolve over time.

Innovations in products and technology create new markets and make previous products obsolete.

Changes in economics, politics, and consumer appetites constantly force upheaval and churning in niches.

It doesn't matter that you have a successful product or a profitable business.

Sooner or later (and it's usually sooner), the market that you're in will change and the profits that you're now amassing will dwindle.

The popularity of survey results in a specialized niche is undeniable. Customers and prospects alike love to be part of a survey and then look at the results.

Often they compare their own responses with those of the survey to see if they have similar or differing opinions than the "group."

Surveys that are not targeted, i.e. those that ask very generic and general questions, are often ignored or disregarded.

Most people feel they are a waste of time because the respondent is not interested in the subject and could care less how the masses feel.

In the previous two articles, we have been discussing some marketing tactics that fall under the strategy of "piggyback marketing."

With this method, you have the opportunity to "piggyback" your marketing message with other products, sales messages, a service, or a bill.

Your marketing "piggybacks" with something else that is going to be delivered anyway and can be thought of as a "bonus" or gift by the prospect.

Marketing your solo business with coupons can be a very effective selling strategy if you incorporate some of the time-proven and tested principles that other marketers have learned about this special kind of advertising.

Coupons can the open the door to better customer relations, more back door sales, and greater communication with your valued customers.

Here are a few more tips that will help any small business owner make his coupon campaign a success regardless of the product or niche he's in:

One of the most overlooked steps in web site publishing, product creation, and article writing is the "chore" of first doing market research.

It's a chore to most people and therefore it is often neglected or shunned altogether because performing the research takes time, a certain amount of "know how" and definitely some amount of your precious time.

But the consequences of not first doing research are almost always negative and will certainly cost you time and money in the long run.

One of the most frustrating aspects of web business is trying to figure out problems to customer response rates on your web site. Why are my customers getting lost online? Why are they not responding to my ads? Why are my offers being ignored?

The challenge of this puzzle is figuring out what parts of the web site need to be fixed.

Is it the offer itself? Are my navigation signals unclear? Is my offering price too high? Is my offer language boring or uninspiring? Is there a problem with my ordering system?

You see, it seems that there are an endless number of little variables that could be hindering sales at the web site. Often, trying to figure out where the roadblocks are is a difficult and frustrating exercise.

We all fear the unknown, don't we?

Maybe that's why we tend to shy away from digging into web site analytics.

Many web owners that have been online running a solo business for years have never really bothered to look into their site stats to analyze where their traffic is coming from and what those visitors are actually doing on their web site.

Maybe these owners feel like doing web analytics is akin to filling out your income tax return - it's something to fear ... to put off as long as possible. After all, it seems like a pretty boring and tedious thing to use numbers to analyze something.

The difference between the two, however, is that there are penalties and the law that will come after you if you don't file your taxes.

If you don't look at your analytics, there is no one that is going to force you to "comply" - to make your business stronger and more profitable.