May 10
2
10 Steps to Internet Business Success
I have come to realise that for each business model, there is a fairly well defined list of activities that will ensure your long-term success if you are intent on making a living online. I will share my “list” below and invite you to contribute to this topic with the key activities that allow you to keep it all together.
This is not a blueprint for success, but an anecdotal list of activities I have developed over the last few years. There is room for improvement, I am sure, but they are worth pondering as you spend some time planning and refining your business model.
10 Steps to Improve Your Internet Business Success
- Have a clear vision of what you want to achieve and be sure you are passionate about it. There is little point in pursuing something halfheartedly. Doing so will surely reflect in your musings, business results and long-term success (or lack thereof).
- Select a niche in which to express your passion. Don’t make it too narrow or unique (such as – white-tailed penguin spotting in eastern Antarctica) and by the same token, don’t go too wide (such as – the world of football). Pick a niche you know you are, or can get, passionately involved in.
- Identify quality keywords for the niche (some people swap the order of 2 and 3). If it doesn’t look promising, reselect the niche (step 2). This is an important step. If there is little interest in the top 10 or so keywords related to your niche you will get little or no traffic from search engines. Try this free keyword tool from Wordtracker. How do you determine quality keywords? You are looking for keywords that have a dozen or so variations with at combined total of 1000 or more. Take note of the variations reported by the tool. They might give you more ideas on keywords you hadn’t considered. Note, a keyword can be one or more words in a phrase, such as “internet business”, “online income”.
- Create or buy a product or find an affiliate product or service to meet a need in the niche that can be and develop sales copy, graphics and set up sales channels, affiliate systems, etc.
- Write quality content specific to the niche, especially focused on the product or service. It might be an article you submit to an article directory (Ezinearticles is a good one) or a post on your blog. Use a combination of the identified keywords in the title, headings, body copy (the main part of your article) and hyperlinks. Do not struggle to include every keyword in every article rather, attempt to concentrate on one main keyword in each article. Of course, you can include any of the other keywords, but make an attempt to have each article or post focus on one keyword.
- Build incoming links. Build a steadily increasing number of links into your site. Do this by contributing to other blogs and forums, engaging in joint ventures, conducting and giving interviews, signing up affiliates. SEO (search engine optimisation) is another term that crosses over some of the above two activities and will be covered in detail in future posts. Look out for a post coming up soon on a cool (free) technique to quickly find blogs in your target niche.
- Build systems and processes. As you are cutting your teeth on the first product, build systems and processes around what you just did so that you can replicate it, or pay someone else to. Successful online businesses develop systems that allow them to concentrate on product development, research, marketing and so on. Without documented systems, each time you come to add a product or service to your offerings, you will be at risk of not completing each of the key steps and perhaps not getting the best return on the investment of time, money and energy.
- Repeat. Using the processes you developed in step 7, repeat steps 4 to 6 until you run out of opportunities in this niche. How will you know that? You run out of keywords or quality products to promote. When that happens …
- Go to step 2.
- At all times, maintain a steady rate of work and be sure to balance your work/life schedule.
I know the list above does not contain anywhere near enough detail, so to get a better understanding of how this works, I will be expanding on each step in more detail in future posts. Sign up for notifications of blog posts so that you don’t miss out on any of the steps in detail.
Blair Williams has recently posted about making money on your blog. In that post he expands on four different ways to add income producing elements to any blog.
Over to you. What do you think? Share your successful business steps below and help others at the same time.
A. What’s in your business planning folder?
B. What steps have you taken, or plan to take that will ensure your success?
C. Let me know if I missed out any that you have used/will use and think should be in this list.
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