Why do some internet businesses succeed and some fail miserably? What steps will a person have to take to make sure they have the right mindset to be successful? These questions and many more are clues to the “Big Picture” that helps us to understand the “Small Picture.” After all, the Big Picture is all that matters online.
The small picture is what you need to focus on. The most important component of the small picture is gaining a customer base. That’s a simple fact, but the effect of focusing on that single “niche” can make a significant difference in your online business.
The first thing to understand about your business is that it is a dynamic, ever changing environment. “Social” media, blog, networking sites, video sites, and my-space all used to be just that. Today, all of those can be analyzed as segments of your overall online strategy. Once the components that were best suited to as (just-outside-of) that environment became more easily adapted to the web as a whole. As the target audience became a significant segment of the general online population, they steadily replaced the small audience as the “product.”
The biggest development from this point forward is that your main online focus should not be a single business but rather an approach that integrates multiple streams of income, although that is a post for another day!
The Big Picture does not need to be complicated to understand, and not as big as the “Big Test.” The Big Picture is a brick and mortar version of yourself. It is the sum total of all the tactical steps you will have to take to optimize your website, build your email list, solve a problem, or earn a sale online. It may be a bit more complicated than this, but the idea is to develop that “big picture” as quickly as possible. And as your online business and business strategy develops, you will spend the rest of your time thinking about what the next step is.
Your Website
The starting point is to create a functional website, one with an effective sales funnel that converts prospects into customers. The critical components are to begin with a very effectively designed website. The design of your website says a lot about you, and for that reason you must do your homework if you are redesigning a website or creating a new one. Does it look professional enough? Does it invite “web” style visitors, i.e. small but interested in your product? Does it contain good copy and an effective layout, resulting in a good visitor experience? An effective website is an important success factor because the importance of this may outweigh the other authentic components, forced as they are to compete with the search engines. You can check your website’s credibility by going to a few independent reviews sites on the Web. The sites usually list URL’s of the most successful sites for a particular industry. Be sure to select a comprehensive review site rather than one that offers just the links of your top 10 competitors, since the first results you might be drawn to are not necessarily the best.
Remember, the goal is to establish yourself as the expert in whatever field you are marketing online. Good “credibility” is a critical component of building relationships with prospects and customers.
Outsourcing
Once you have your website functioning, the next step is to start designing a marketing strategy. As you may know, there are many good marketing strategies out there, and you can find them by conducting ” floods & analytics”. inundate keyword select full-service companies with your sales & marketing needs, and hire individual consultants for different campaigns. Outsourcing frees up your time and money, and increases the quality of your internet presence and efforts.
If you do decide to take search engine marketing help, be sure to select an effective SEOAnalytics partner. Your online advertising mechanism will be one that is tuned for “long haul”. Do not jeopardize the results from your search engine marketing by outsourcing on this vital initial step.
