The Biggest Mistake Online Marketers Do

This is a guest post by Daniel Wood

When people start an internet business the major mistake they make is that they forget, the business part. For most people online marketing is a quick way to making money without the hassle a regular business requires.

Building an online business is the same as building a regular (offline) business

It might be a short cut but the same rules apply for building and maintaining a business.

If you are to succeed you need a business plan, budgets, you need to outsource, delegate, work on time management, risk management, project prioritizing, human resource questions, business culture, the education of ourselves and/or employees, marketing, product management, branding, market planning and so on. If you do not do all of this, your business will not prosper.

The IT-bubble

When the internet was new we saw the same thing happen, lots of companies were started and as soon as the word internet was mentioned investors lined up to give them money.

The difference is that today it isn’t the investors who are lining up, it is us, regular people trying to make a living.

It is different today, but it is still the same

Don’t make the same mistakes that they made back then.

Today we know not to spend money in the same way as they did back then, but to make money you need to build a business, not just a website.

Long term success vs. short-term profit

It is possible to forget everything I have written in this article and still make short-term profits, the problem is that you will slowly kill your market making any long-term success impossible.

This is very common among Telemarketing companies (in the real world) they work through their markets and within a few years they need to switch markets.

This allows them to start over, but they will never grow into hugely successful companies, it forces them to start over from scratch every few years.

5 Things to think about when building a business

1. Have a business plan.
Every minute you spend on planning is 10 minutes you will save on execution.

Making decisions before you start (or before you continue) about how you are going to make money, promote your business, what help you will need, how to approach the people you will need help from, what you are going to spend money on and what you aren’t going to spend money on and so on, is going to save you a lot of time and money in the future.

2. Over deliver on your promises.
The best way to make a lot of money is by building relationships with your customers, which is best done by over delivering on your promises. If your customers trust that they will get something worth 50 dollars for every 20 they spend, they won’t be able to wait to give you more and more money, because that means more value to them.

3. Build a sales funnel moving customers forward towards larger and larger deals.
Once you start building relationships you need to make a plan for how you will move your customers through your funnel into larger and larger deals.

4. Have a marketing plan.
I want to give this a separate point even though it is closely related to the business plan. This is what most online marketers do best; plan how to build traffic and so on. Do not forget this step since you cannot make money without marketing.

5. Don’t give up, keep at it and keep improving, as long as you over deliver you will succeed.
Even though you might make 0 dollars and 0 cents your first year, don’t give up, keep learning and improving, sooner or later you will have learned enough to succeed.

Conclusion

Success online is the same as success offline. The same rules apply, but if used correctly, online business can be a shortcut to building a profitable business.

About The Author: If you would like to read more from Daniel M. Wood. you can find more at his blog Looking to Business.com. He writes mainly about Motivation and the Principals of Success. You can also download his eBook on How To Make Selling Easy.

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