Make the Offline to Online Mindshift....
It's "Information, Information, Information."
From
Theresa Coffey, TNT Editor...
The key to success in "e-tail" (electronic retail) for the
small business person is to master a niche. The Web, when
properly used, is the ultimate niche marketing-and-selling
vehicle. It is literally the ideal situation for small
business e-tailers... if you start with the right
approach. Unfortunately, 99% of e-tailers fail to do so.
Success on the Net (whether you are selling hard goods or
e-goods) all begins with a critical offline-to-online
mindset shift. This means replacing that well-known strategy
of "location, location, location" in your mind with...
"Information, information, information."
Let's see why this shift in thinking is so essential...
In the offline world, traffic is relatively easy to achieve
-- it's all about "location, location, location." An
attractive, nicely merchandised store in a mall or on a
high-traffic shopping street usually means instant traffic
-- and sales, of course!
However, in the online world, no one just happens to walk
past, see your product and enter. Surfers on the Net are
not looking for you or your business. People search for
information, for solutions. After all, if they knew you
existed, they would not be searching. They would already be
customers.
Online, you must generate your own traffic to be
successful. Therefore, your primary task, well before
you make your first sale to a customer (often well before
that person is even aware that s/he is shopping!) is to
provide the information that people are searching for, in a
way that Search Engines like.
Information is what surfers want.
What kind of information? As an online retailer, anticipate
two kinds of information-seekers...
1) Shoppers looking for product information -- provide
information related to the products themselves. But not the
short, sales bits of sales copy, picture and price -- that's
for your shopping catalog/cart. Create real content...
reviews, experiences, "the history of," and so forth.
Real content gets found. Product listings don't get found
at the major engines like Google. And they get buried among
thousands of similar listings in the "comparative shopping
engines" (ex., Froogle, shopping.com, etc.), which only send
dribs and drabs of traffic compared to the major engines.
2) Surfers looking for information about a related topic --
these people don't even know they are shopping... yet! They
seek information about topics related to the niche/theme of
your business. This approach converts surfers into
interested visitors because SBI! helps your pages score
highly at the engines which makes your site easy to find. As
trust and credibility grows, your content converts visitors
into warm, PREsold customers.
That all-important first purchase, of course, may not happen
on the first visit. However, the excellent content on your
site and in your regularly published e-zine (see Day 9 in
the Action Guide) will encourage repeat visits and foster a deeper
relationship between you and your visitors. And because
people buy from people they like and respect, you'll make
that sale... and then another... and the purchasing trend
continues.
Bottom line?
Product selection and sourcing will always be important for
your e-tail operation. Of course, if you sell many types of
products, it's critical to aggregate them into a creative,
appealing store (best if it's a themed store that fills a
well-defined niche). And it goes without saying that you
will have to be able to clear credit cards in real-time.
When you're ready, just add Store Build It!, specifically designed
to seamlessly work with the rest of Site Build It!. And SBI! is compatible with
most leading plug-n-play services (ex., ClickBank, etc.). Visit the SBI! Resources HQ for
the "best of the best". Avoid fraud and
automatically fulfill orders (e-goods) or ship orders (hard
goods), depending on your situation.
But, before you do any of that, before you collect
your first dollar in sales, you need to build a Web site
that generates traffic. Traffic must always come
before monetization.
There are literally hundreds of thousands of beautifully
designed e-tail sites that are crippled, dying or dead by a
lack of traffic... "the lights are on, but no one is home,
and no one's visiting." That is the sad reality of 99% of
e-merchants who followed the wrong process when they first
started out. They prepared to sell and collect money,
before they built content to deliver what their
PRE-customers really want... information.
If you don't attract free, targeted visitors via the Search
Engines, if you don't convert them into warm, willing-to-buy
customers, if you don't build that into your site from Day
1, you are going to end up working for your site.
You will have to pay for advertising to build traffic, more
than you can afford... and when you stop
paying for advertising, your traffic will stop.
High-traffic portals are not a solution either. While they
can provide small business retailers with a few visitors at
a high price, this should only be seen as a supplement.
Why? Because you build a dependency on the traffic of
others. And because there are limits to how many visitors
even the highest-traffic portals can send to hundreds of
thousands of different businesses.
However, you can easily belong to the 1% of e-tailers who
are generating profitable sales by following the SBI! process
carefully, as outlined in the Action Guide. You will build
a site that will be searched-and-found by prospective new
customers -- a number that will increase steadily as your
site gains in reputation and relevance at the engines.
Simply put, you will build a site that works for you.
The SBI! process will help you generate targeted traffic
that will steadily build in momentum...
STEP 1) You choose or create a great product to sell,
understanding that this product will be an extension, "the
logical next step," of a Theme-Based Content Site.
STEP 2) You develop your own site in the niche that you know
and love (a "Theme-Based Content Site").
STEP 3) You fill that site with high-value content -- this
is the foundation.
STEP 4) A prospective customer finds one of your content
pages during a search for information or a solution. You
OVERdeliver that sought-after info, which starts the process
on the right foot...
STEP 5) The surfer is PREsold (i.e., you gain trust and
credibility).
STEP 6) The surfer wants more information, surfs your site,
and signs up for your specialized e-zine.
STEP 7) The visitor may not have even been looking for a
product (the majority, most likely). But whether s/he is or
isn't, this pre-customer is being steadily PREsold on you,
your passion and knowledge, and business. So...
STEP 8) It's a matter of time before that surfer buys a
product... and then another one... and so on.
STEP 9) You diversify your revenue plan to include other
sources of income (ex.,
AdSense, affiliate income,
services, finder's fee, etc.), all related to your theme.
(See the other monetization articles in the TNT HQ for more
details.)
As this process repeats itself over and over again, you are
well on your way to building a business with hundreds of new
lifetime customers who generate substantial profits... and
just importantly, a buzz about your business.
The key to your online success is to put the e-horse of
traffic before the shopping cart. You must first build
your own targeted traffic... your own clientele, from
the ground up.
When you own your traffic, you own your business.
And what builds traffic? Quality theme-focused content.
It's all about following the SBI! process...
doing your homework -- creating or sourcing a great
product to sell
carefully picking your approach/theme of your site
building content before you start "collecting the money"
(of course, you have planned your monetization models ahead
of time, so you can work towards those ends).
building future traffic right into your content, from the
ground up, as you create that content.
So leave behind the old offline way of thinking and make the
following your new business mantra...
