Online Business Is Pretty Simple After All – From a Bird’s Eye View, weebo At Least

You can break down the process of online marketing into two main parts:

(1)    What you give
(2)    What you sell

You can do the same for your audience, or customer base:

(1)    Your current audience
(2)    Your potential audience

The idea is to both give and sell a lot to both your current and your potential audience. It’s easier to sell to your current audience, but important to expand it if you want to make a bigger impact.

Expanding Your Audience

The way you expand your audience is generally to give. That can come in the form of:

o    Videos
o    Podcasts
o    Articles
o    Blogging
o    Interviews
o    Software (open-source code, limited versions of closed-source software)
o    Reports

But giving doesn’t just involve letting it sit out there on the World Wide Web. It means actively promoting it and building relationships with people who will want to spread it far and wide. It means pursuing various types of campaigns (e.g. a virtual summit); developing your presence on the major social networks; and generally building your presence online, livewebdir through developing promotional partnerships, optimizing your site for search engines, and other simple tasks.

The Avenues for Expanding Your Audience

Again, the fastest avenue is to develop a campaign, in which you either (a) spend lots of money and/or (b) get lots of partners on board to promote your campaign.

Other important avenues include developing your presence on social networks, blogging, creating social media, optimizing your site for the search engines, going to conferences and meeting people, and getting generally involved in your community.

The product launch is a very powerful way to give a jumpstart to your business. Here are some product launch ideas (credit to names and ideas goes entirely to Jeff Walker, creator of Product Launch Formula):

o    Quick launch. If you already have a list, you can simply create a product quickly and then let your list know about it.

o    Seed launch. If you don’t have much of a list, or have a very small one, you ask them what they want and then create it. For example, roidirectory you could offer several teleseminars to your list, and then sell them later as a product.

o    Internal launch. This is also for people who have a list, but it’s a more drawn out process. You want to build up interest and suspense over time, through previews of content (screenshots, videos, reports, excerpts) and an overall sequence of emails that will generate desire for the product.

o    Big JV (Joint Venture) Launch. This is where you get as many JVs (partners) as possible to promote your product. It’s a complicated and often messy affair, which is why Jeff recommends that you do an internal launch first before going big.

And the last type of launch, which Rich Schefren articulated, is the rolling launch: rather than doing one big (or small) launch, you work with partners and do “micro-launches” to their lists: give away free content, maybe do a teleseminar, and sell the product at the end.

Selling to Your Audience

The way to sell to your audience is, well, to offer products they want to buy. (The key word here is want: if you’re selling things that people don’t want to buy, then it’s either a bad market or your copywriting isn’t working. One way to know if it’s a bad market is to, as marketer Frank Kern advises, see if other people are marketing things successfully; if they’re not, then it may not be a good market to be in. Of course, if this is your life’s work and you know it’s what you need to do-and you know that there’s a market for what you’re doing-then it may be that your marketing isn’t doing the trick.)

One way to find out what they want to buy is to ask them. It seems obvious, but it’s incredibly important. Ask them what their biggest challenges, questions, and concerns are, what would make their lives easier, what they want to learn most. Use a service like Survey Monkey or Ask Database to do so.

You can sell products like:

o    Information (DVDs, CDs, seminars, workshops, retreats, digital audios, huntingtime videos, and books)
o    Subscription access (to software, tutorials, specialized knowledge)
o    Anything that people want to buy: art, website templates, you name it

How you make more money with those products is to:

o    Develop deeply valuable and trusted relationships with your subscribers. That means giving a lot.
o    Offer them more products they want to buy. That means selling as you’re giving
o    See your business as a Story of Engagement, and think about what it me