You've probably seen a lot of advertising and websites these days that claim you can start your own internet business, and begin earning cash while working from home for just a few hours a day.
These offers might seem very enticing. After all, wouldn't you want to earn easy cash from the comfort of your home working flexible hours ? However, what these alluring sales letters don't tell you is that to make decent money from your website, you need to have good, unique content, generate substantial traffic, and presell your visitors so that they are in a frame of mind where they want to buy the products you are selling. This article will help you avoid the mistakes people commonly make when they start out to build their own online business.
Generating good, unique, useful content on your site is the cornerstone of building a successful web business. With billions of sites on the internet, your site better offer unique and valuable information to your readers. Why would users want to visit your new site if you offer them the same information that is already available on the net ?
One of the keys to creating good web content is to select a unique niche that you are passionate and knowledgeable about. When you know and love a topic, writing about it becomes much more easier, and also ensures that you are creating useful, unique content that delivers value to your readers. But the best content in the world is not going to do you any good if no one reads it. Which brings us to the next reason why so many online businesses fail - lack of traffic.
Traffic is another very important element often overlooked by newbies starting their own websites or blogs. They mistakenly assume that once the content is written, visitors will automatically arrive in droves to read the articles and buy the products on their site. That is sadly not the case.
Most users will find your website by typing what they're searching for into a search engine like Google or Yahoo (at least when your site is new). For your site to rank well with the search engines, your web pages must be optimized with the right keywords. In addition, there are a lot of other factors that contribute to your ranking on the engines. One of them is the number of backlinks to your site - that is, the numbers of links on other sites that link to your site. You're better off doing some SEO (Search Engine Optimization) research before you begin writing your web pages. Traffic is probably THE most important factor to your online success - No traffic = No sales = Failed online business
Preselling your visitors - For many this would be a totally new and unheard of concept, but it is important in the online world nonetheless. When you deliver unique, useful information to your visitors, you build a relationship of trust with them over time. They value your opinion and recommendations. This puts them in a frame of mind where they are willing to buy. Also, another useful tip is to overdeliver as often as possible - Don't just deliver...Overdeliver. Give your customers more than they expect. They will be delighted, and will keep coming back to your site.
Monetizing or making money from your site is the last step. The last step ? Isn't the whole purpose of building an online business to make money as quickly as possible ? Well, you might go about it that way, but then you risk setting yourself up for failure. Your visitors need to be presold before they're in the state of mind where they will spend money on your products. And preselling your visitors practically guarantees that you will make the sale. This is almost always true regardless of what you're selling - hard goods, digital products, or promoting your offline business via the internet.
So, hopefully now you can see who so many online small businesses are unsuccessful. They do NOT :
- Provide unique useful, content to their visitors
- Optimize their site for the search engines - no traffic
- Presell their visitors
- Monetize only when their visitors are pre-sold.
Make sure you avoid these mistakes, and you'll give yourself a more than fair chance of succeeding at your online business.
