What’s a Website For?

A business purposed website exists to either
(a) sell something to a potential Customer or
(b) sign them up for a newsletter.

IT REALLY IS THAT SIMPLE.

If the site does not help visitors accomplish at least one of those two things, then the site provides very little benefit to the business.

That’s basically all there is to it.
Buy, join, or leave.

There is no other option.

With that in mind, do you already distribute an industry newsletter that your potential Customers might value?

If not, this would be a very good first step in the right direction.
Always remember to use benefit’s based selling methods, track those downloads, keep good clean statistics and test what works best for your business every chance you get.

Folks, if your goal is to make more money online, then do something about it and sign up for our Newsletter right now. BoxOnline is a team of professional, business process consultants dedicated to helping people like you sell more, earn more and basically get the results that you desire.

Test Test & Track Track

If you are trying to start an online business but there isn’t really much money around to invest – read this article because I have gone through this cycle several times since launching my first online business in 1996. There’s so much you can learn about eBusiness before you have to spend money. And that should be great news for anyone trying to start up their e-business.

Hey, there are plenty of resources available to you when money is more important than your time. Oh, don’t worry – there will come a time in your eBiz career where your time will become more important than your money, but until it does, take advantage of the free-lunch education that’s available.

These are the salad days.. there’s plenty of free info out there.. sifting through it to find the diamonds among the other rocks is the time based challenge on your 18hr workday clock.

OK, so you want to make money online.

You know, I’m pretty fortunate. Over the past 12+ years that I’ve been running my online business, I’ve built a component to my business that allows me to get fast feedback. When I open a store, start a web site, create a new product or even write a newsletter, I can start to evaluate its effectiveness, sometimes in just a few minutes.

Having talked to thousands of other eCommerce store owners, webmasters, and Internet marketers, I can tell you that lack of feedback is why most folks fail.

Here’s the owner’s mindset of 90% of Internet business failures:

1) They are irrationally afraid of making a single mistake.

This might be the single biggest factor in a new Internet business false-start. Even though a new eBusiness owner has great information, a great eEducation, and desire to succeed, they are usually so afraid of committing an un-recoverable mistake that they don’t do anything.

Here’s a tip – there is no such thing as an un-recoverable mistake.

2) They execute their business plan backwards.

They spend time looking at technological solutions instead of market opportunities. I get more emails from people asking me what the best shopping cart solution, merchant account service, CMS or automatic search engine optimization tool is than any other correspondence.

Here’s my one and only answer for the new eBusiness owner:

Use services that require the LEAST amount of maintenance. Use the service that allows you to concentrate on selling your products. In other words, use the service that allows you to set up quickly, easily, and then forget about it.

These kinds of services are only a means to an end!

What counts is marketing your product.

3) If they can’t find the perfect product to sell, they don’t sell anything.

To that mindset, I have a few questions… If you’re new to eCommerce, how would you know, beyond the shadow of a doubt, what the perfect product is? More importantly, what sort of evidence do you have that a product isn’t going to sell?

Sure, there are 4 ways that you can research a product’s potential in the marketplace, but the only way to move out of the research phase and into the proof-of-concept phase is to actually try to sell the product online.

Bottom Line? You’ve got to try it before you know if it works.

4) If they don’t have instant success, they throw in the towel and declare their venture a failure.

Let’s put an end to this mindset, shall we?

Most of the time, your first effort at an eBusiness is going to be mediocre. That’s just a fact and it applies to everyone!

I mean, the first time you swung a golf club, tennis racquet or even the first time you rode a bike, did you do it like a pro?

Not likely.

How about your first day on the job? Did they train you first, or did they just put you in charge of a major project and say, “Do this perfectly or you’re fired”?

Probably not.

So, why would anyone think that they can “get a hole in one” their first time out?

A very few do, but most don’t. The ones that haul off and create a successful eBusiness their first time out do it because they bring with them all kinds of other business testing and feedback experience.

A friend of mine runs the marketing department of a very cool technology company. They’ve had a marketing campaign going for the last few months that costs their company about $100,000. That campaign has not broken even yet, but they’re declaring it a smashing success. In fact, they knew that it was going to lose money during its first 5 months. But because they’ve been actively seeking and tracking feedback, they know that it’ll pay off in the medium-term.

Here’s my point to all of this.

You need feedback and constant input from your business and your industry in order to determine how successful your business can be.

Here’s a few examples in practical terms:

1) Lack of sales does not indicate failure! – What if you don’t have any traffic? How can you tell if your site is converting visitors to sales or not?

2) Lack of conversion does not indicate a poor product choice! If you’re getting traffic and no sales, it’s a sales copy issue, a lack of credibility issue (does your web site look professional?) or a price issue.

3) Lack of traffic does not indicate a failure! Do you know how to get it? Have you educated yourself? Have you tested different traffic-generating methods?

And lastly, do you test?

You must test. You must track your test results. You need to test everything!

Different pictures

Different sales copy

Different on-page search engine optimization

Different off-page search engine optimization

Different price points

Different guarantees

Different web designs

Different headlines

And track it all.

If you get 100 visitors and one sale, and you do that consistently, change one thing about your web site and track the results of that change for a week.

Are your results better or worse? If they’re better, make a note of the change, and then change another! If the results are worse, change it back, make a note and then change another!

Feedback. You see – it’s all about what the marketplace tells you.

You can track visitors to sales, to page views, to abandoned shopping carts, to an email newsletter open rate, to everything!

And guess what? That’s the only way to know for sure what you’re doing is going to work.

Proof of concept is only valid when matched with empirical data.

Feedback – it tells you what’s working, and why.

So, test, test test and keep a log of what worked and what did not.

You also need to keep informed about the changing marketplace. And in most cases, you can do this without spending any money.

If you need some help along the way, drop us an email and we’ll do our best to set you back on track to making a living online.