The Secret to Business Profits By Abbie Drew Sep 7, 2005

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So what is the secret to designing a profitable Internet Business?

Find out the most important element to Internet business success below, as I continue our series on how to start an Internet business

I am writing this series as my partner and I go through each of the stages. I am sharing with you the step-by-step process we take to build our new futures and forex site. You are getting an inside look at how Internet veterans, we’ve been making our living online for the last 10 years, development an Internet Business.

If you’re just joining us and are wondering what steps we’ve covered, take a minute to review my previous articles. I’ve gone over steps 1 - 6, how to select a target market, devise the products to sell, select the right help to get the job done and establish a contract. You’ll find the articles of this series in our DEMC issue archive:

Starting a Business


In the last issue, I thought we were ready to sign the contract and get started. Before signing on the dotted line, however, we decided to take a step back. We took a couple of days to review our proposal and ensure it included every item we believed we’d need.

Guess what?

It had a big hole! I mean big!

What was the hole?

Well before I discuss the hole, I have to input a step 7 into this series.

Step 7: Review Your Proposal

Once you have a company lined up to hire and you think you’re ready to sign the contract. STOP!

Take a day or two to go back through your written project proposal. Does the proposal have all of the features, items, etc. that you need?

It is better to make any adjustments to the proposal now, before the contractor gets started. The changes may affect the agreed upon price slightly. The price changes, however, are likely to be minor at this stage. If you wait and make the changes later causing the contractor to re-do work the costs in most instances will be higher.

Do the review now and make the changes before you begin.

When reviewing, be sure to consider if the proposal addresses how you are going to sell the product / service you’re creating?

And, I don’t mean does the site have a shopping cart for customers to purchase through. I certainly hope this would be included.

What I’m referring to is marketing.

Because, when we reviewed our futures and forex site proposal we realized, it was missing important marketing tools.

Oops!

A major hole, wouldn’t you agree.

For an online business to succeed you have to have marketing.

No marketing. No business. No Profits.

Which brings us to the next step.

Step 8: The Marketing Plan

A Marketing Plan is the secret to business profits and the most important aspect to designing an Internet Business! ( And yes, in a perfect series, it should have come earlier in our process! )

Having a marketing plan before your new business site is developed will save you an enormous amount of time and headaches. The reason being, you’ll want to build into the site marketing tools.

If you wait to do your marketing, I assure you, you’ll end up having to go back and re-hire the contractor to make adjustments and changes. This will delay your launch. Or if you launch without the necessary tools, it will delay the success of your site.

When writing a marketing plan the first step is to review the various marketing elements you need to consider. And at this point in time, this is exactly what my partner and I are doing. We’re looking over all the marketing options to see what elements we should put into place with our new futures and forex site.

I’ll review the questions we are asking ourselves so you understand what we’re discussing. You should ask these questions of your new business as well.

1) The Offer

How are you going to package the product / service you sell?

Is the product / service a one time purchase or will their be re-occurring monthly billing?

Will there be various packages so customers can be offered upgrades?

Will there be a bonus for bigger purchases? What will the bonuses be?

Are you offering a money back guarantee? Or what about a pro-rated guarantee?

Do you want to test multiple price points? Does your site allow you to do this easily and track the results?

2) The Email List

Will you be collecting the email addresses of visitors? Paid customers? Both?

What will you be emailing to your list?

Will you have an autoresponder series? What will it say?

Do you intend to publish an ezine? What will it be about?

How will you entice people to sign-up for your list?

3) Public Relations

Is PR going to be part of your promotional strategy?

Do you have any built in techniques for generating PR information? (For example you could collect visitor statistics or take visitor polls and then write up press releases with the information.)

Are you going to do PR in house? Or are you going to hire a PR firm to assist you?

If you hire a PR firm, what will they do? What will be the duration of their contract? For the launch of your site, for 6 months, a year?

4) Search Engine Optimization

Are you building your site to be SE friendly? If you intend to do SEO yourself, you’ll want to make sure as the site is developed the pages have the necessary meta tags.

What is your plan to add continuous content to your site so Search Engines keep coming back?

Will you have an inbound linking strategy? How do you intend to develop incoming quality links?

Do you anticipate hiring a SEO firm? What will they do? What will be the duration of their contract? For the launch of your site, for 6 months, a year?

5) Affiliate Program

Will you offer an affiliate program?

What will you offer affiliates by way of compensation and tools?

Will you do the affiliate program in-house or will you use an outside service?

If you do the affiliate program in-house what software will you use? You’ll need to know this so the contractor can build it into your site.

6) Blogs? RSS? Pod Casting?

Do you intend to build an RSS feed into your site?

What about keeping a Blog? How often will you update it?

Pod Casting is a new technology but a growing field, do you think you might want to incorporate it into your marketing?

7) Paid advertising?

Will you being buying ads?

Where will you be purchasing ads? Ezines? SE pay-per-click? Banners?

Do you have tracking in place on your site for running ad campaigns? If you spend money you are going to want to know what works and what doesn’t.

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Okay, okay … I can hear you saying enough already!

But before you begin your site, think through how you are going to market it.

Yes, it can be overwhelming. But don’t give up and say oh, I’ll figure it out later. I can tell you from experience, that strategy does not work.

Go through these questions as my partner and I are doing. In the upcoming issues, I’ll fill you in on the decisions we make and our resulting marketing plan.

So stay tuned . . .

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Abbie Drew
DEMC Editor

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