My brother and I set up RandomDeals.cc in the early part of 2002. Both of us had some technical background, but our main asset was our willingness to learn the ropes of building and marketing an online store. Our limited understanding of search engine optimization was manifest in our approach to getting traffic to our site. Right away my brother paid a company over $100 to submit RandomDeals.cc to a bunch of links farms and other similar worthless (worse, they could have had a negative impact on our site) link farm sites. We quickly figured out that route was not the way to go. Although we both had full-time occupations, we planned to dedicate whatever time we could to learning what we needed to learn and quickly building up a new career for both of us.
Around that time, I saw a commercial that showed employees of an online store around an order counter that recorded orders being placed soon after the company unveiled their newly created web site. The group cheered as a few orders trickled in. Then, their jubilation suddenly turned into panic as they watched the order meter spinning out of control. They were receiving so many orders they didn't know how they would keep up with them. That was my plan. I figured we could throw together our own online store, put in a few hours of marketing, and the orders would come rolling in.
The expectation that I had regarding how easy it would be to get our website rolling in the dough was pie in the sky. Like many American entrepreneurs, I didn't understand how much work would be involved in building an online business from scratch. Every time we got a link from a website to ours or our website was added to an online directory, etc., we thought we'd see our orders skyrocket. That never happened. Unless you're funded with tons of cash and resources galore [in which case my scenario doesn't apply to you] to market your site, you're very unlikely to see your business achieve the instant success that so many new online store owners expect. Instead, it will happen slowly, after lots of steady, determined effort.
A Note About Patience and Persistence
Over the years since I helped launch my first online store, I have had opportunities to mentor many people who wanted to find the freedom they saw in my ability to run a significant business from a home office. Some of them have been successful. Sadly, many of those I've mentored have failed in their goal to change from their existing jobs to become Internet entrepreneurs. I've seen a common trend among those whose online businesses have fizzled. Typically we'll have an initial meeting where I explain the fundamentals of finding a product to sell, determining who will be suppliers, registering a domain, setting up a store, and ultimately marketing the new site. After the initial meeting, the aspiring entrepreneur is normally thrilled thinking about how he will be his own boss within the following few months. Like the twelve-year-old boy who buys himself a nice new basketball and some sneakers intent on becoming the next NBA star, many of those I've worked with buy a domain or two, set up their business entities, establish accounts with suppliers, and in the short term seem bound for success. When I follow up with them later, it's obvious that most of these folks simply didn't understand that achieving success with an online business just doesn't happen overnight, and it doesn't happen with a few hours of work. When you begin building your online store, you're much more likely to see incremental gains and marginal improvement than you are to see instant windfall profits. However, over time, if you are patient and persistent in your efforts, you will find that your consistency has paid off.
My brother and I could very well have become two more among the numbers of people who tried to start an online business, gave up, and continue to work a job that doesn't fulfill their interests. I remember him telling me several times, "This isn't working. Let's just see if we can sell this thing for a few thousand dollars and try something else." I'd remind him that whereas during the previous month we were getting 30 visitors to our site each day, during the current month we averaged more than fifty visitors on a daily basis. We'd also notice that instead of getting five or six orders in a week as we had just three months ago, we were getting ten or twelve orders per week.
Obviously, the speed at which your eCommerce store takes off will depend upon how much time you put into it and how intelligently you approach it. Some strategies for setting up and marketing websites will be better than others. I've seen Internet marketers use creative, non-spamming, effective techniques to drive traffic to their site, and I've seen others whose efforts were not so effective. Hopefully the information you find on this blog and in my ebook will help you develop a strategy for your site that will be as optimized as possible. Spending some time planning, organizing, and refining your strategy (in addition to doing the actual grunt work) should accelerate your results.
No comments:
Post a Comment