With unemployment running sky-high, a recession that continues, and no real end in sight, many people are starting to look at starting their own company. The statistics aren’t in your favor – many fail. Many major corporations aren’t doing so well at the moment as well, however. You job is to find a strategic niche market and creative methods of marketing this product or service you have.
For almost anyone starting a business today, this is probably going to involve the Internet, a web site, and social marketing – Twitter, blogs, Linkedin, and more. With this strategy you are selling to a very targeted audience. This is very different from television advertising, periodical advertising, and even email in which you are reaching a large, broad audience and the hits are few and poorly qualified.
With the strategy mentioned here using a web site (or multiple sites), your company targets a small niche – you identify a need that isn’t been met, then start fishing in this highly qualified market.
A few warnings as we start. There is risk. You need to be a self-starter. You will get discouraged at times and you will need to deal with that. It will also take more money than you expect and more time. You’ll also have more fun that you ever had. Starting a successful business is the American Dream. See how qualified your are: http://youtubemarketingcoaching.co.cc/benefits-of-using-youtube-for-business/are-you-suitable-to-start-your-online-home-business/
Here’s another good one from Chris Brogan: http://ht.ly/2vmpm
Here’s another by Tim Berry: http://bit.ly/bVHdyX
The Vision
Start by defining your vision. What is your goal? What product or service will you be offering?
What are your strengths relative to this? Your weaknesses? How can you resolve those weaknesses (educational classes, partnering with others)?
- How competitive is your vision? Try a search on a relative keyword phrase in Google. Google will return the number of competitive pages for that keyword phrase at the top of the list.
- How popular is your vision? How many people have searched on a relative keyword phrase in the last year in a group of search engines partnered with Wordtracker.com? Go to http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com and search on your phrase.
What you are really looking for is a keyword phrase with a minimum of competition that many people are using for searching: search count high, competition low. That, to quote Robert Allen, is your “school of fish” where you want to drop you bait. That keyword phrase, or a small collection of them, is one of the most valuable things you have for launching your business. If you really want to do this professionally, you could go to http://www.wordtracker.com and set up a trial keyword search membership and repeat this to see the number of searches in Google in the last year. The trial is free for a week, or you can buy a month for about $60. Lots of tutorial stuff there.
Your site will reside on a host system somewhere. You have to purchase the hosting and your domain name. We can set all that up if you wish.
Legal
There are many, many questions involved in setting up your business legally. In America, your best step to work with this is to start at the web site for the Small Business Administration at http://www.sba.gov. You will find an encyclopedia of information here: choosing a business name, what type of business structure you should use (corporate, LLC, etc.), how to write a business plan, how to get a loan or grant, and much, much more.
You do need a mentor – someone who has business experience, believes in you, and cheer you on when things get tough. You may find this person in your church or your circle of friends. You may also be able to locate this person through your local SBA office. There are also other volunteer organizations, such as SCORE (http://www.score.org/findscore/index.html) , that have helping you as their mission.
If you are going for a grant, the competition is high and you should have an experienced person helping you with this or perhaps take a grant-writing class.
You should also arrange for an accountant and get advice from this accountant on which bookkeeping software to use to minimize his work.
The Big Secret
You probably are use to using the Internet to help you find solutions as you develop your product or service. Now you need to take the next step in learning how to use the Internet to market your product or service. In fact, I just used the wrong word. “Marketing” is a dirty word here in this age. If you try mass emails you will get a major bad reputation and few results. We kill the hosts of the spam traffic that comes in to us. That’s the only option I have until I can vote enough politicians out until I get one that can hear me.
The magic words are “social networking”. The basic strategy is still to build your web site and optimize it on your keyword phrases for good SEO. That hasn’t changed. You want very high quality content on this site. Establish yourself as an authority. Give information away. That doesn’t sound like the old days, does it? I’ll tell you a secret. This isn’t the old days. You need to establish authority. You also need to tell stories. I won’t build a web site for a client unless they have a testimonial. If it’s an e-book they are selling, how has somebody used it for success?
You next step is to add a blog to your website. Why add a blog? Google will pretty much ignore your web site at the start. You may see it the first day you put it out, but then it disappears for weeks or maybe months – it’s called sandboxing. The site also needs to have quality links into it from other sites. That’s the way Google finds it. If we develop your site we will add a link from our web site to yours, but if you develop the site you are on your own. We can also show you how to get Google to find your site quickly. If you add a blog, however, the search engines see the blog pages as social networking, web pages that from their perspective are updated frequently and need to be indexed frequently. To find blogs on a subject of interest, simple search on the subject plus “+ blog”. For example, to find blogs on starting a coffee business search on “How to start a coffee business” + blog. A single blog will have multiple pages, or postings.
To add a blog, in most cases it is as easy as installing the free WordPress blog software on your host. Then add a link to it from your web site’s menu.
Now you can niche “market” from your blog, using postings with multiple keyword phrases. Remember – direct marketing in the traditional sense will turn people off, even with a blog. You are networking. Your blog posts should have content, not an overt sales pitch. Lead people from your blog posts to your web site.
The next step is to open a free Twitter account. Over 100 million people use Twitter. One advantage here is that any posting to Twitter is indexed immediately in the Twitter index. Newspapers love this for finding news, as I often find a news item in Twitter before it reaches CNN, Fox News, or local newspapers.
Twitter postings are limited to 140 characters. This means you have to use various tricks to tease the user from your Twitter post to your blog or web site. Look at this one from John Maxwell in Twitter:
The secret to gaining trust is ______. New post on
John Maxwell on Leadership. http://dld.bz/thGQ
Notice how he leads you into his web site. It’s not an overt sales pitch – he’s going to give you content with an ad on the side. He used a web site (such as http://bit.ly) to shorten his URL and save characters.
Since this is a social networking post and your post is indexed immediately in Twitter, Google and other search engines will need to capture this quickly stay competitive with Twitter’s instant indexing.
So the strategy is to update your blog very, very frequently AND update Twitter frequently.
Another social networking site that is important is Linkedin.com. This is more of a business site that networks people based on common interests.
Another social networking site is good for social networking is often used but has very little security. Facebook has over 5 million subscribers, and I have friends that see it as very important; but I do like to control my security. Whether you use it or not depends on what you are doing. The name of the game is often to increase your influence. The number of followers is not important. How many are you influencing, and what tools serve you best at this?
A very good book on social networking is The New Rules of Marketing and PR by David Meerman Scott. A Businessweek best-seller and highly recommended.
We provide consulting in this area. If you need it, contact us.
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