Online Businesses ? How to Avoid the Online Obstacles | Internet ...

What are the best practises to adopt to ensure that online businesses achieve success rather than fall at the first hurdle?

Below are some tips on how to avoid the common online obstacles that can hinder online success.

Build A Personal Presence

Unlike in the past, success online now relies on spending up to 80% of your effort in building up a relationship and trust with your audience before the all important sale. This can be achieved in several ways:
Offer A free product

It is often said that the ?money is in the list? when referring to internet marketing. However having access to a list can be the difficult part. One of the easiest ways to build up your list is by offering something for free. This can range from an e book, to free advice or a free training video or DVD. Whatever you decide to promote for free, it is important to ensure that the item that you offer is of value to the customer. You should always offer your best advice on the free item as this will help to establish you as an expert in your niche and help you to build up that all important trust with potential customers. If the customer is impressed with what they learn from you for free they will be more inclined to buy your products.

Organic marketing

When you first start your online business it is better to concentrate your marketing efforts on free marketing such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, articles, blogs, press releases and video marketing. All of these sources offer you the opportunity to engage with others and also to subtly promote your business via a website link. These free ways of marketing can be very powerful in helping you to establish your business and make sales.

After all, even a mere one article or blog a week adds up to 52 in a year. You only have to write them once, but they will continue to make money for you over and over again.

To be successful with these methods of advertising it is crucial that your content consists of 80% of interesting information and 20% call to action to your business. If you try to sell from the outset, many of your readers/followers will lose interest and you will fail to connect with them.

Paid Advertising

If your budget allows, you should also include a small amount of paid advertising. One effective way of paid advertising is banner ads.

Banner ads are where you embed an advertisement within someone else?s website. To be successful with this form of advertising you should create a good headline, a realistic promise and a solution. You should also select a website that is specific within your niche e.g. an entrepreneur based website if you?re promoting entrepreneurial education products.

You should also ensure that you select a website that is in the top ten for that specific niche and select the page that you will feature on carefully. For example you will not want to be featured on the front page as people do not stay on the front page for very long. Therefore ideally you will want to feature on a page where there is other interesting and compelling information that will ensure that the reader stays on that page long enough for your advertisement to be seen.

When you are starting your online business it is better to concentrate on one or two forms of advertising to begin with and to gradually introduce other sources once you have mastered the others fully. As the old saying rightly says ?Jack of all trades is master of none.?

It is also prudent not to put all of your marketing eggs into one basket but to try different forms of marketing to create success for your business.

Create a planner

When you have an online home business it is very important to be disciplined in order to stay focused and productive. One way of achieving this is by completing a planner detailing goals that you want to achieve within a given month. You can then break this information down into what you want to achieve weekly.

For example you could plan that you want to write 20 blogs or articles a month which would mean achieving a target of 5 blogs or articles a week.

It is a fact that actually writing down your goals will actively help you to achieve them and lead you to success.

Analyse Your Results

When marketing an online business it is crucial to analyse very carefully what is working for you. This is relatively easy to do and can be set up free on Google analytics. You will then need to analyse your marketing results weekly, making sure to stop what isn?t working for you and to increase the activities that are working for you. This will not only save you money if you are using paid advertising, but also valuable time.

Outsource

Once you have identified what marketing activities are working best for you, you will then need to make a list of what you do every day and identify which of the items on the list are generating the most income for you. It is then better for to outsource the less profitable activities to allow yourself more time to concentrate your efforts on to the more income generating activities.

Successful business owners know what to outsource in order to spend more of their time and energies into getting their business to the next level.

Education

Self education plays a vital part in creating a successful internet business from home. This education can range from books that you read to training DVD?s.

There are also business models that have been set up by top business entrepreneurs that will teach you step by step how to start a successful business. Often these online businesses will provide live webinars hosted by successful online entrepreneurs who will share with you strategies that will help with marketing your online business and avoiding costly mistakes.

These opportunities can prove invaluable as they often provide a tried and powerful website and landing page to help convert your leads into paying customers. This can prove invaluable especially for those business opportunities that pay high commissions for sales. Often just one sale a week, within these opportunities, can replace and exceed your current salary?all from the comfort of your own home.

To close, online businesses have the potential to create financial freedom providing that you remain consistent and committed to your business. You will need to have patience as growing a business online can take time due to having to build up a relationship with your potential customers. However, when you do engage with them and they finally purchase from you, providing that your product or service lives up to its promise, those customers will remain loyal and continue to purchase from you helping you to prosper online.

My name is Roy Derrick and I have over 20 years experience in running my own business. Over the years I have set up and sold several successful businesses including a chain of retail stores and a construction company.

My wife Julie and I currently run a home based business that specialises in finding and sourcing the best ways to start a small, sustainable business working from home.

Business is our passion and that is why we set up Perfect Prosperity so that we could share our vast business knowledge with others to help them enjoy a better work/life balance.

Our opportunities range from businesses that can be started almost straight away for those wanting to earn extra income from home, to more advanced opportunities for those individuals wanting to replace and exceed their current salary and work less hours.

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