5 Simple Steps To Building A Real Online Business

In this blog post I aim to take the mystery out of Internet Marketing and share with you a simple five step system for building a real online business. At its most basic level, Internet Marketing is nothing more than selling products or services online, so, whether you want to sell cars, dog food, information products, health and fitness products or anything else, the marketing process is the same and once you learn it you will have the ability to create a selling system that provides both a generous income and the time freedom to enjoy it.

However, before describing the five simple steps for building a real online business, I should add a note of caution for the reader. I am by no means making any claims about how much money you can make by following these methods. In life there are no guarantees and it is entirely possible that you may not make any money at all. You may even lose money. As with any entrepreneurial venture, your success depends entirely on you and the actions you take in trying to follow this proven system. The reader should be under no illusions that the process I am about to describe requires hard work and dedication to succeed. Having said that, my goal here is to show you that, by putting in the hard work now, you can build a money making machine that will provide a sustainable residual income and freedom for the rest of your life.

A Quick Word About Marketing.

Aspiring entrepreneurs will do well to always have at the back of their minds that marketing is all about striving to solve people’s problems…for a profit. This is the key to your success, whether you are marketing online or offline. Your product or service must solve someone’s problem, or more to point, a lot of people’s problem, otherwise it will not be bought and you will not have a business, period.

What that means is that all your marketing efforts, your marketing materials, communications, promotions and so on, must appeal to someone’s need. It must tell the reader how your product or service will solve their problem. The number one priority of someone who has a particular problem is to find a solution to that problem and if you can provide that solution, then you will become their friend and they will trust you enough to buy from you again. It is as simple as that.

The Five Steps to Building an Online Business

There are five steps to building an online business. These are:

1. Find the right market
2. Find the right product
3. Find the best way to reach the market
4. Have a website to make sales
5. Have a follow up system to make even more sales

The first thing you need to succeed online is an active market. Many people make the mistake of choosing a product to sell before considering the size and potential of the market. However, whilst believing in your product is important, if there is no market, or the market for that product is too small, then it is impossible to succeed.

Conversely, having a market means nothing if the people who make up that market do not need what you have to offer or they have not the money to buy your product or service. The methods used in finding the right market and the right product and in implementing the other three steps to building an online business are covered in more detail in my article 5 Steps to Internet Marketing Success.

Automating Your Online Business

Now, once you have the foundations of your business established, you will find that doing business online can be either a nightmare or a dream come true. People have been known to spend fifty to sixty hours a week on their online business with very little success. On the other hand some people work a few hours only and make more money than they ever dreamed of.

So what is the difference between the two groups and how can one go from the former group to the latter? The answer lies in automating your marketing, which essentially involves automating the flow of traffic to your website and automating the sales process once the traffic arrives on your website.  Automating your marketing not only allows you to work smarter, but you will find that automation creates more income and gives you more options. The goal is to work less and have more time to do what you want with your life.

The good news is that there are some amazing internet marketing tools available that will almost completely automate your online business, saving you time and money. Here are four ways that I automate my online business. These are by no means the only ways to automate, but they are a good start, particularly if you are a beginner in Internet Marketing.

1. Pay Per Click (PPC) Automates Your Traffic

As the name suggests, Pay Per Click is a form of paid traffic and the beauty of Pay Per Click is that the traffic is guaranteed and once you set it you can forget it, and the traffic will continue to flow. As a general rule, the amount of traffic you get is determined by how much you are prepared to spend to acquire it, although it is not always about acquiring large volumes of traffic. The quality of traffic is an important factor and a smaller amount of higher quality traffic is infinitely better than a large volume of poorer quality traffic. Learn more about how to drive traffic to your web site in my article The Truth About Traffic.

2. An Autoresponder Automates Your Follow Up

Even the most successful marketing websites struggle to convert first time visitors to customers. Only around 1 to 2 percent of first time visitors will buy something. The other 98 percent leave empty handed, and the majority of these visitors never return.

An autorestonder is a tool that is used in conjunction with an opt-in form to collect and store the email addresses of those visitors who do not buy, but may decide to receive a free gift that may be on offer on the website. The free gift, variously referred to as a lead magnet, ethical bribe or trip wire, is deliverable via email only, meaning that the visitor has to enter their email address into an appropriate form on the website in order to receive the gift. Having captured their emails, these visitors can then be followed up later with emails that persuade them to come back to the site and buy. Learn more about the use of autoresponders in eMail Marketing in the article The 3 Pillars of a Marketing Funnel.

3. Blogging Automates Your Content.

A blog is a website that is essentially designed for publishing content such as articles, audios, videos and infographics on the internet. The website you are reading now, DuckboardsAndStilts.com, is one such blog. The published information of a blog is then picked up by search engines like Goggle, Bing and Yahoo, such that when people key certain words or phrases into their browser in search of some specific information, those blogs whose content best matches the specific search phrase are displayed in the search engine listings.

Clearly, the ideal for any website that wishes to be found by people searching the internet for its products or services is a first page placement in the search results listing for a particular search term or key word. Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is a special discipline applied to the configuration of the content of a blog to optimise it for ranking as high as possible in the search engine listings.

Ultimately, however, the way to achieve high rankings on search engine listings is to publish, as often as possible, high quality, unique information that will be helpful to Human readers of your blog. New, high quality content is the life blood of the search engines and if you supply them with this then they will reward you with the highest placing on their search results.