Web Success Secret #4) Monetization Will Flow When All Steps Have Been Followed.

You may be a bit surprised to learn that monetization is the last of the 4 steps.  Many business owners position monetization as their first goal.  Everything they do from conception of the business is geared towards making money.  After all, that is the point of owning your own web business, right?

When I first learned of the four step approach to making successful web businesses, I was a bit skeptical.  I have never heard of such a risky business idea- think of making money as the last goal.  That sounded absurd to me! In all of my small business education the emphasis was on profit charts and balance sheets and projected annual returns.  Being online does change some things.  One of those things is how you start and run a long term and profitable business.

Following the process of starting a web business often involved very little capital.  The risk is typically much lower and the return on investment arrives in a shorter time span.  Because of this you have a unique advantage to allow the natural progression of your site visitors come into play.

Let’s back up a bit and review.  People search for information, not products, online.  They are not looking to spend money.  They type in their search query at the search engines.  Your site should be on the first page.  You should know how to provide a killer title and description that makes the potential visitor want to click on your site.

Once they are on your site, their objective has not changed.  They still want information.  So give it to them.  As you provide valuable content that satisfies your visitors, you should be developing trust and positioning yourself as the expert.  Make recommendations to your products or services. This is the natural progression of an online visitor.  They want information, they find you, they receive answers from you, they develop trust in you and think of you as an expert.  It is only when those criteria have been met that you gain customers.

Let me repeat that last line because it is the most important line in the entire 4 part series: it is only when the first three steps have been met that you earn income. The goods news is once you finish the first three steps (content, traffic, and pre-selling) you will continue to pull in hot, targeted traffic from the search engines month after month.  All of this traffic is totally free!  No advertising costs! Monetization naturally occurs.

There are a few things you can do to help increase your conversion rates:

- Only recommend 2-3 services or products.  Having more than this makes it difficult for your visitor to decide which is best for them.  It is also very difficult for you to recommend them all.

- Place graphics of your product or service on each page of your content website.  This allows visitors to see your offerings more than once.

- Write a monthly newsletter and provide excellent content.  Also provide a special on one of your services/products.

- Test everything- price points, graphics, sales page, etc.

As I mentioned earlier, it is best to work smarter and not harder.

Previous parts
4 Secrets to Turn Any Business Into a Successful Web Business- Part 1
4 Secrets to Turn Any Business Into a Successful Web Business- Part 2
4 Secrets to Turn Any Business Into a Successful Web Business- Part 3

Download Here The FREE eBook “Make Your Content PreSell” (139 pages!)… and learn all about how to optimize the content of your web site…

One of the most frustrating aspects to business is when you have all the marketing tools your business needs, perhaps even some your business does not need and yet you still see no results. You may even be spending time and effort marketing your business and yet conversion ratios and traffic remain constant or even drop. The reasons why marketing plans fail are numerous however; one of the primary reasons is that it was not the right marketing plan.

Every business is different and that includes businesses that sell the same products and services. Every business has something that is unique, the group of people they are targeting, the area they are working in, the options they have available to them. These different aspects mean that the same marketing plan is not going to work on every business.

When a marketing plan fails, it is important to find out exactly why it failed first. The reason or reasons are is essential. It may be that there is only one aspect of a marketing plan that failed, it may be multiple items or it may be the entire plan.

Research

Research is an essential aspect of marketing and inadequate research is one of the biggest pitfalls that can affect a marketing plan. Research provides a wealth of information that is vital to the success of a marketing plan. Generally, research is done on the target market. If a target market is not known, research is done to determine what market is going to be the most likely to benefit from the product or service provided by your business.

This is the group of individuals you will want to target and in some areas there may be multiple groups. While it may be possible to market to all these groups it is, in most situations better to market to a single group or groups which contain a large percentage of similar traits. This makes it easier to consolidate a marketing plan as well as eliminates a significant amount of research, time and effort.

The second aspect which needs to be researched for a marketing plan to be successful and is also one of the reasons why marketing fails to produce appropriate results involves research competition. Researching competition is not just about researching the prices of a competitor. It includes noting things such as lay out, finding out what marketing techniques the competitor is using and how often these tools are used for example.

Many business owners and beginning internet marketers fail to note anything more than price and perhaps general layout. As a result, they are missing vital information that can save time, money and effort when it comes to setting up their own marketing plans. It is also important to keep in mind that you want your business to be unique from your competition.

Get a good idea of the types of deals, offers, discounts and promotions that your competition uses and offer something different to help your business stand out. Many people simply do what their competition does. In doing so, they often lower their marketability and their marketing plan can ultimately fail in this area.

Marketing Tools

Having enough research to create your marketing plan is only the first step in solving the problems that often cause marketing plans to fail. The next step is to take the time to pick out the right tools. Having the right tools for the job is essential to ensuring you get the most out of your marketing strategies.

Marketing tools have diversified over the years. Tools are not limited strictly to email and promotional options. Video, social networking, SMS texting, in addition to email and promotional marketing tools are also available. The increase in available options means that there is a greater spectrum to work with. It also means that picking the right tools is more important than ever.

Pick tools that are going to be easy for you to use, require minimal maintenance but provide you with maximum potential results. This will help to prevent your marketing plan from joining the ranks of those that have failed. Knowing the right tools to use can often be a trial and error process. The important thing is to avoid one of the reasons why marketing plans fail. In this case the reason involves putting too much into a single marketing tool.

Action, Action, Action

One of the biggest reasons why marketing plans end up failing is the lack of action. Marketing is an active part of your business, it is not a set and forget aspect of you business. In order to ensure that a marketing plan succeeds you must be actively engaged in working that plan. This means that email marketing messages should be updated and redesigned regularly.

SMS messages should be rewritten after very send. These messages should be short, contain only the minimum necessary information. It is important to remember that SMS marketing is relatively new and involves sending messages to mobile devices that often indicate repeat messages.

Videos should be produced, edited and updated to as high a level as possible. Computers and technology can turn just about any computer into a production studio with the right software. Keep videos interesting, engaging and relevant. The videos should be related to the company, the products or the services offered.

It is important to set up a marketing schedule and find out how much time, generally through trial and error that you need each day, week or month to handle all your marketing tasks and keep everything up to date.

The reasons why a marketing plan might fail are numerous. Some of these reasons include, failing to do the proper research into the market, the competition as well as the tools available. Other reasons can be failing to have enough tools, having too many tools or not using the tools you have effectively. Taking the time to make sure that you have the information you need as well as putting in the effort to ensure your success can go a long way to eliminating these reasons.

Next, Discover here how to outsmart your competitor, ethically dominate the search engines,and legally siphon off tons of cash in hand buyers from your website!

As business owners and managers, we need to look at a variety of numbers to gain a better understanding of our businesses. In this article, we are going to consider two very important metrics in business marketing – Cost Of Customer Acquisition and Advertising ROI (Return On Investment).

One of the most important numbers we need to always be mindful of is the “Cost of a New Customer” or “Cost of Customer Acquisition”.

Understanding Customer Acquisition Costs

If you are unfamiliar with this concept, let me give you a quick tutorial on this advertising metric.

Suppose you run an advertisement in your local newspaper for your furniture store. Suppose for the sake of this example that you paid $1000 for your display ad in the newspaper.

Now, suppose your advertising brought 4 new customers into your store, who bought from you. Suppose also that the average spend for each customer was $1500.

With the example I am drawing, your $1000 display advertisement in the newspaper brought in 4 customers who spent a total of $6000 in your store.

I am going to keep this example simple, so that more people can keep up with the numbers.

On the basic premise of our example, you generated 4 customers after an outlay of $1000 in advertising. So your basic Cost Of Customer Acquisition was $250 per customer.

If your business received fewer customers, from your outlay of $1000 in advertising, then your Cost Of Customer Acquisition is more expensive.

But, if your business earned more customers who spent money, then your Cost Of Customer Acquisition would be much smaller.

In its simplest form, the Cost Of Customer Acquisition is the money spent to get the customer to your store divided by the number of new customers acquired. We will look at this in more detail, later in this article.

The Best Way To Measure Sales And Marketing Performance

Entrepreneur Magazine in a 1999 article reflected on the Cost Of Customer Acquisition in the dot com world. The article suggested, “the cost of new customer acquisition is one of the best ways to measure sales and marketing performance.”

In 1999, the Cost Of Customer Acquisition for the following companies were:

• BarnesAndNoble.com – $42
• Amazon.com – $27.60
• Priceline – $32.30
• Beyond.com – $29.30

On the surface, these numbers may seem small. But, Amazon’s Average Sale is in the $17-range! This makes the challenge that Amazon and other major retailers face fairly transparent. If these retailers could only count on one purchase from the newly acquired customer, then these businesses would be losing money by the truckload.

Fortunately, Amazon continues to perform well in Repeat Business from a single customer. The following calculations reflect additional numbers that we business people should also factor into our Cost Of Acquisition metrics.

The Real Value Of A Customer

Amazon’s first-sale may only be $17, but in 1999, Amazon’s Average Sales Per Customer was $116, up $10 from the previous year. Unfortunately, Amazon isn’t very forthcoming with these numbers, so after two hours research, I was unable to come up with more up-to-date numbers for you to consider.

The point of mentioning this is that it is important for business owners and managers to recognize that the Value Of A Customer is not how much sales revenue is derived from the initial purchase, but more importantly, from the Lifetime Value Of A Customer.

If we looked at Amazon’s Cost Of Customer Acquisition only in terms of that first sale, then they will be losing money hand-over-fist. With a Cost Of Acquisition of $27.60 and the first sale of $17, Amazon could not stay in business long if they were continuously producing numbers at that level. However, once you factor in the Lifetime Value Of A Customer, then Amazon is spending $27.60 to acquire a customer that is worth $116 in sales for them. Therefore, by measuring the Lifetime Value of a Customer, Amazon is spending only 24% of their revenue in order to acquire one customer.

Few businesses invest 24% of their revenue in advertising, but Amazon hopes that the Lifetime Value of a Customer will eventually exceed the $116 value, known to have existed in FY2000.

As the Lifetime Value of a Customer increases, the overall Cost of Customer Acquisition will fall, as an overall percentage value of Cost Of Acquisition divided by the Lifetime Value of the customer.

The Compounding Lifetime Value Of A Customer

If you have a hair-cutting salon and your advertising budget for one month is $1000, and you get 30 new customers through the door, who will spend an average of $20 for a hair cut, then your basic Cost of Customer Acquisition is roughly $33.34 to gain $20 in new sales.

But if only half of your 30 new customers become regular clients, then you can anticipate 15 of those customers coming to your hair salon at least once a month for the remainder of the year. Therefore, the first 15 customers will be worth $20 each, and the next 15 customers will be worth $240 each over the course of one year ($20 x 12 months). All told, your first 15 customers will put $300 in your cash register, and the next 15 customers will put another $3600 in your cash register.

Thus, in the hair salon example, your $1000 in advertising could generate new customers that will generate $3900 in new sales. Once you start to consider the Lifetime Value of a Customer, within the Cost of Customer Acquisition, then you will realize that the Cost of Customer Acquisition – although it might be higher than the initial sale – holds out the possibility and promise reducing itself as the Lifetime Value of a Customer increases over time.

As the end of the year winds down, you will be able to see that a $1000 expenditure was turned into $3900 in new revenue. In essence, for every dollar you spent on advertising that month, your return value was $3.90 over the course of one year.

In the second year, if only half of the original 15 regular customers or roughly 8 people stay with you for the full course of the second year, then the $1920 in revenue (8 people X $20 each X 12 months) you can expect from those customers could almost be considered free money. Of course, you will still have service fulfillment costs, but that second year will give you nearly $2000 in revenue that you will not have to chase.

Even if half of the customers drop off during the following calendar years, then a 50% customer attrition rate will allow you to have customers that could stay with you up to five years. Calculated against a 50% decrease in customers over each calendar year, your $1000 investment in advertising may translate into $7500 in revenues over five years ($3900 + $1920 + $960 + $480 + $240 = $7500), from the initial investment of $1000 in advertising.

The interesting thing about this scenario is that it is based on an advertising budget of $1000 ONE TIME. But, most businesses will continue the advertising process every month in every year. Therefore, the above example could compound month-after-month. Every month should bring the same or similar results to your business for the month and year.

Advertising Is A Process, Not An Event

Many small business owners have a dire misunderstanding of the nature of advertising and the value to be received from the advertising.

When business owners or managers fail to track and measure the new business generated from the advertising, then the business owners and managers will fail to see that advertising is an expense that can return huge dividends to the business.

When businesses fail to track and measure advertising successes, people tend to only see the money leaving the business without every seeing the reward coming back into the business. As a result, many business managers will employ advertising for a short time, then cancel the advertising, under the false belief that the advertising was not returning value to the business.

When businesses fail to understand the Lifetime Value Of A Customer, it is hard to appreciate any advertising method that fails to pay for itself in its first cycle. If Amazon was to only look at the initial sale generated by a new customer, they would quickly cancel all of their advertising efforts. Fortunately for Amazon, its management understands that the initial $17 sale is not the measure to use to determine the value of Amazon’s advertising efforts. Amazon’s management understands that the true Cost of Customer Acquisition should not be measured by the initial sale, but by the Lifetime Value of a Customer. In doing so, Amazon has ensured that it will continue to be one of the largest and most successful retail outlets on the planet.

When business managers fail to understand the Lifetime Value of a Customer, it is hard for them to appreciate and understand the compounding nature of the revenue stream for a business. It is hard for them to understand that money invested into advertising today, can deliver huge rewards over the next several years.

A Wake Up Call For Small Business Owners

According to Scott Shane, author of “Illusions of Entrepreneurship: The Costly Myths that Entrepreneurs, Investors, and Policy Makers Live By“, only 29-in-100 businesses will remain in business after ten years. That means that a full 71% of businesses started in any calendar year will be out of business in only ten years.

It is sad to say, but the reason most businesses fail is that business owners and managers fail to understand the nature of advertising, the importance of tracking and measuring advertising results, the Lifetime Value of a Customer, and the compounding nature of the revenue stream.

I don’t want to see your business on the trash heap of yesteryear. So, it is my hope that you will take this article as a wake-up call, as to the importance of advertising and its potential to lift your business into profits.

Next, Learn Here More On How To Advertise Online……And Then Watch This FREE 26 Part Step-By-Step VIDEO Course

First, let’s define the term Explosive Results for our usage.

A standard social media campaign helps spread the word about you and encourages other people to as well.

An explosive social media campaign has inherent viral exposure, inspires community driven communication, helps make the web a better place, and even brings joy to people, however fleeting.

When you share in social media, if your goal is just to get more people to see your links, you’re on the right track, but at the same time, you’re limiting your potential. You may think that getting explosive results from social media will take more time, energy and money, but this doesn’t have to be the case.

If you’re a business owner, you know that working harder doesn’t necessarily mean better results – what if you’re working hard on the wrong thing?

Sometimes the remedy is working smarter. Here are a few small changes you can make to your social media approach that can propel your social media results from lukewarm to smoking hot.

Explosive Social Media Tactic #1 – Hot Content

The cornerstone to any social media campaign is the content. If you get this component wrong, it doesn’t matter if all other elements are perfect. Study what’s going hot in your targeted topic and find a unique angle to fit your content into what people already like, without stealing their ideas.

Explosive Social Media Tactic #2 – Niched Network Nuances

The more tightly focused your submissions to social media sites are, the more likely they are to go viral, whether they are links you share by other people or your own. Here’s the logic.

People follow other people with similar interests. They’re on sites like Google, Yahoo, StumbleUpon, Delicious and Digg actively looking for new content. Put those two things together and you have a whirlwind of clicks happening. The only question is, will it be your link that gets clicked or passed over?

Having 5000 connections on Twitter or Facebook is useless if you are connected to people who don’t want your broadcasts, and you’re just as useless to them if you don’t want theirs. If my interest is in improving my existing business and you’re trying to get me to sell your network marketing products, it doesn’t matter how many times you ask me. If I’m not interested, your continued broadcasts will be ignored, or worse yet, blocked completely.

It’s about the perfect balance of quality AND quantity.

And if I’m not paying attention to you, I can’t and won’t spread your message. If you are in network marketing, why not go after people who love the network marketing concept but can’t seem to find the right company? That’s a perfect match, and can dramatically cut down your search for the right partners and prospects.

Explosive Social Media Tactic #3 – Simplify Sharing

It amazes me how many people miss this one.

You’ve got great content. You’ve got a massive, niched network.

Why feed them content that’s hard to share? Does that report have to be in PDF format? If so, does it have to be behind an opt-in wall if you’re spreading it among people who have Already opted in? Anyone connected to your business through its Facebook page, or your Twitter stream is also part of your opt-in list. Yes, it would be best if they were on your email newsletter list, but what faster way to get them there than to show them you don’t need to hold them prisoner there?

If your whitepaper is of such high value that you don’t Want it to spread, well, that’s something different. But if you’re sharing it so other people will spread it, make it easy for others to share.

• Send your su.pr link so all they have to do is click the Thumbs-Up button.
• Put a few sharing links on your page.
• Make it easy for them to Retweet.

The easier it is for them to share, the more likely they are to do it.

Explosive Social Media Tactic #4 – Consistency

And now we come to the area I fail at the most. It’s one of the things I know I need to do, but I haven’t quite gotten the hang of how to brainstorm, create and distribute quality content consistency, and still give them best possible service and support to my customers and clients. I always err on serving people who have bought from me, figuring that next blog post can wait until tomorrow.

Then at some point, I noticed a decline in return traffic – people weren’t coming back because they’d already heard everything I had to say. The solution? I got help for my content creation process. The ideas are still mine, but I was able to barter help for research, transcribing, and editing. I am also able to get audio and video polished much less expensively than I thought, though I don’t always use this option due to time constraints.

The other thing that helped a lot was getting over my perfectionism complex. Release your content as soon as you can. I can’t tell you how much money I’ve left on the table from my old fear of the typo and grammar police. Not to mention the fact that I felt like I was leaving my audience hanging.

You subscribe to something because you want to get regular updates. If your favorite daily news show started coming on once a week, you’d probably switch channels. If you’re inconsistent without explanation, your audience numbers will drop and your network will fade.

Explosive Social Media Tactic #5 – Think Engagement

Measuring your results by page view alone is a thing of the past. When the web was mostly text and images, it made some sense that how many pages a visitor viewed at your site was a true measure of engagement.

Nowadays this isn’t the case. You want to look instead at how long people are at your site. The exception, of course, is when customers are coming to your site to buy, and the order processing system takes them off your page. But if people aren’t leaving your site because they’re ready to buy or subscribe, you truly must look at why they aren’t paying more attention to your content, and what changes you can make to get them to stay.

This is critically important in understanding which content will go viral naturally. What posts are people staying on your site to comment on? When do they take a few extra seconds to retweet? Are they watching your videos all the way through?

Once you know the content your audience is most connected to, and why, you can make more of it.

Explosive Social Media Tactic #6 – Three-Way Connection and Communication

That’s not a typo. Three-way communication is when the way you conduct yourself online is observed to a third party, who is also indirectly being addressed by your manner or statement. I wish I could credit the proper author of this, but I just don’t remember who it was who first observed that three people are positively affected by an act of kindness – the person giving, the person receiving, and the person observing.

One example of this in action is having a conversation with a peer about their new product on a social media site. Your friend is probably Dying to tell someone about the testimonial they just got, but don’t want to be rude or are too humble to brag. Ask them in front of your audience, and the conversation is exposed to your connections and re-exposed to theirs.

Connection is just as important – if communication is the conveyance of information, connection is doing so in a way that bonds. A several hundred closely bonded contacts will spread your message faster and farther than several thousand distant aquaintances.

Explosive Social Media Tactic #7 – What’s In It for All?

In the 80s, we all thought about what was in it for ourselves. In the 90s we decided to focus on others, hence, what’s in it for them. Today, we’re in the age of the win-win-win situation. Tell them how you benefit and tie it to their benefit.

Want someone to help you spread your stories? Make sure they know how important it is to you, why you came to them for help, and how they’ll be perceived for being the bearer of your good news.

You may look at the list above and feel that it’s intimidating, but it doesn’t have to be. Focus on doing just one of these things better each day for a few weeks, and before you know it, you’ll be doing them habitually. The results you’ll get will help these new habits stick.

Next, learn even more social media tactics for Explosive Results …
… and then watch this 26 Step-By-Step VIDEO course – yours FREE!

I’m in the process of completely rethinking my business model, and that will be my primary focus as I plan this year’s business retreat for myself. Your business model doesn’t have to be at all complex, but should provide the guiding force for all that you do, like guiding you to the opportunities to accept (and those to decline), the joint ventures and strategic alliances to pursue, and the new ideas you should retain and develop, as well as those to let go of.

Here’s are the 4 steps I’m following as I create the blueprint for my business model:

1. Make clients pay well for your most valuable commodity — your time. I see many service business owners tying themselves up with (and tying themselves down to) far too many 1:1 clients. You have only so many hours in the day, and at some point you’ll hit the wall and not be able to expand the number of 1:1 clients you see. Sure, you can hire and train additional staff to handle the overflow, but in many cases, you make less money in this model while tripling your headaches. Make your 1:1 time with clients your highest-fee service, charging a premium fee to dispense your expertise.

2. Ongoing recurring revenue is key. Feast or famine seems to shape the life of the service business owner, regardless of industry. Wouldn’t your life be much more sane if you knew that you could count on recurring revenue each and every month, rather than having to constantly go out and find new clients? This was one of the models I adopted early on in my virtual assistant practice, i.e. working exclusively with clients on retainer rather than a “pay as you go” model. What is it that your clients need from you that you could provide on an ongoing basis with them that isn’t time-intensive for you?

3. Always have an upgrade. Never offer a stand-alone product or program that doesn’t have a natural tie-in to the next level of program or service that you offer. If there’s no way to leverage what you’re offering into some type of upgrade, don’t offer it! For example, a free teleclass can lead participants to enroll in a paid short-term group program. From that program, plan to enroll a certain percentage of those participants into a recurring revenue continuity program. You can then upgrade a percentage of these participants into a live event or small ongoing mentoring program, and from there make an upgrade offer to your premium 1:1 time.

4. Design the blueprint. Brainstorm all of the types of programs, products, and services you might offer in your business. Your list might look like the one below:

• Consulting
• 1:1 Service Provision
• Group Coaching/Mentoring/Continuity Programs
• Sale of Info Products –Private Retreats
• Strategy Sessions
• Live Events
• Speaking
• Information Products or Books –Licensing/Certification Training
• Teleseminars/Webinars
• Subscription Membership Web site

Pick 3-5 of these items that will make up your business model, and then determine what percentage of income you want to derive from each. Your total needs to equal 100%. Then, determine the order in which you offer the components of your program over the next 1-2 years. This becomes your blueprint for action.

How do you determine your success? If your business still suffers from feast and famine, take a long, hard look at your business model for the solution. Every offer you make in your business should flow seamlessly into the next, which will result in a steady, predictable income that you can increase over time as you become more expert at designing and following your blueprint.