DAY 1: Analyzing The Viability Of Your Niche
March 1, 2010 by Tyrone
In the next 3 weeks, there will be a guest post series about Search Engine Optimization and how you can improve and optimize any niche website. It’s been a huge topic from within my membership course and it’s something that can be easily outsourced. So let’s get started…
“Money isn’t the most important thing in life, but it’s reasonably close to oxygen on the ‘gotta have it’ scale.”
– Zig Ziglar -
Learn how to pick your own battles.
This may sound like a joke for many of you, but this is the primary reason why many sites or online businesses fail online.
Having a niche marketing strategy, that is focusing on a specific topic rather than a broad query allows you to perform better as you are competing with much less other sites on internet.
Your visitors will be much more targeted and thus will convert better.
Getting yourself into an overly competitive market is a recipe for disaster and a way to ensure that your site will never be found.
On the other hand, entering into an overly niche market may result in insufficient traffic volume to monetize your site or store and ensure your survival.
Remember, because you think you got a great idea doesn’t mean that other people share your feelings!
In the end, it’s all about money
Depending on the nature of your site, the way you plan to monetize your efforts may differ from site to site.
However, as a general rule, you’ll be monetizing your site through one or more of those following methods:
- Ecommerce– selling products, be it physical or digital.
- Affiliate Marketing– selling other people’s product and getting a commission for it.
- Advertising– selling ads space on your site.
- Services– selling your skills.
Regardless of the method you intend to use, you should have a number in mind as to how much money minimum you expect or you need to make out of your website for it to be worth your time.
I won’t elaborate much on it as this goes with all the information you should have gathered already in your business plan. You have one right? It would be foolish to start a business without one!
Ok, for the sake of illustration, I’m going to say that I want to start a new business online selling “nail polish”.
After my estimation, I also know that I’ll be making $1 profit for each bottle sold, and based on the marketing strategy I have established, I estimate that I’ll be able to sell 2 bottles to each customer in average.
Now, based on my expenses and personal needs, I want $2,000 of net profit per month to make this project worth.
Top 5 Tips On How To Outsource Your Business Whilst On Holidays
January 25, 2010 by Tyrone
These last few weeks have been the most fun and productive times in my life. I just got back from a trip over to Hong Kong and Thailand and to share with you what I did, I’ve created a little video right below here that shows one of my most memory events whilst on holidays:
The reason why I show you this event is because when I look back over the time whilst I was away, not once did I check my email or have to worry about what was happening in my business. I literally left my laptop and mobile phone in Australia and I headed overseas and just had FUN! When I came back I was not surprised to only get 32 emails that were from my virtual staff and personal friends. Last time I traveled overseas when my business was not setup with the proper systems, I received easily over 200 emails in that same period of time. What a change it was!
How Did I Setup My Business To Allow Me To Be Stress Free Whilst On Holidays?
The key is outsourcing. I have a business that has core systems in place that allow full-time virtual staff to manage and run the business whether I am working or not. I spend a majority of my time creating video content which is the heart of my business and my members appreciate this. The rest of the work that still needs to be completed, such as customer billing, technical issues and marketing are all outsourced to people I hire from the Philippines. Though, even having full-time virtual staff working for me it is still vital to have proper systems in place. I am going to share with you the top 5 tips on how you can prepare your business to allow you to enjoy a stress free holiday:
Tip #1: Plan Ahead Of Time
Within my business, delivering video content is like running a TV show and if I want to ensure that my viewers receive what they paid for, then I need to follow a schedule. The best way to look at this is if you are writing content for a blog or uploading video to an online channel website, then you need to plan at the beginning and consider what you want to deliver to your market. As the saying goes, “if you fail to plan, you plan to fail”. Before I left for my holiday, I already had created over 8 videos which will be delivered over one and a half months. That way I am already prepared ahead of schedule. The same thing also applies to virtual staff and you will need to discuss with them the necessary work to be completed over the course of the year.
Are You Batch Processing Your Outsourced Work?
November 26, 2009 by Tyrone
Over the past couple years I’ve been very privileged to participate in Yaro Starak’s coaching programs and learn from his teachings. Recently I’ve been listening to his audio Mindset series in the car quite a number of times, not because I don’t have anything to listen to, it’s because I want to. What I have noticed every time I listen to this series is a new idea will come to mind and it keeps me grounded in how I should be approaching my Internet business.
A specific topic Yaro talked about is batch processing and it’s an important system for any Internet business. This topic wasn’t directed to outsourcing, though I wanted to share with you how relevant it can be.
What is Batch Processing?
Let’s take a look at an example in relation to emails. Emails are probably one of the biggest distractions in modern society (sorry guys, in my opinion it is), though they are necessary because it is considered a main form of communication between a client and a business. Now you can have the option of checking your email every hour of the day and replying to people answering their questions or you can batch process them at most once a day or twice a week (ultimately this is what you should strive to achieve). What batch processing does is it allows you to process all your tasks at one time rather than processing them as they come.
Rather than answer an email straight away, which takes 5 minutes to complete and interrupt your current task, you can process all your emails once at the end of the day, that allows you to have a focused effort. So you get the emails replied to in 30 minutes compared to the 50 minutes it would have taken you if spread these over the day.
In my Dragonboat business I let customers know that I personally check my email twice a week on Tuesday or Thursday and if the matter is urgent, they need to send the request to my support team who checks the ticket system twice a day on my behalf.
What Are Tasks You Can Batch Process To Be More Productive?
Twitter Talk: How I Got 1,910 People To Follow Me In 5 Days?
August 26, 2009 by Tyrone
View the videos at: YouTube, Yahoo, MySpace, Metacafe, DailyMotion, Blip.tv, Veoh and i2TV
In this video I explain how I increased my Twitter followers from 12,550 people to adding 1,910 people in just 5 days. I also explain the 3 important reasons why this happened and how to convert these folllowers to subscribers on my database.
Building Your List Of Customers
July 23, 2009 by Tyrone
It’s time to attract visitors to your Internet business and to build a list of customers. Your customers will be your lifeline and without them, your Internet business cannot survive.
Build Your Foundation – The Email List
In the online world we communicate with our customers via multiple mediums and ultimately we need to collect their email address. Email addresses are used to send orders, updates and more information from your e-commerce website. Building an email list is very important because you will be able to deliver more information and convince your customers to buy more from your website. I strongly recommend you start building an email list at the beginning.
Here is a simple process of how collecting an email address is used to create sales:
- Sign up subscribers to your online newsletter through your website and send updates of new products and promotions
- Build rapport with these people who will be interested in receiving your online newsletter. Be sure you offer great advice and resources they can access.
- They become a customer of your website because they trust you and will recommend friends and family to buy from you.
This is a short process that is quite simple but very powerful. If you can build strong relationships with your customers via email, then imagine what your e-commerce business could achieve.
