Building An Internet Business From The Ground Up....Part 2
By: John Skorczewski
Hello,
I apologize for the lateness of this issue....I was out of the office yesterday for Memorial Day. I hope you had
a nice holiday weekend!
In Last Week's Issue I talked to you
about the first step in building an Internet business (at least, how I always do it), today I want to continue with the second step.
I have a feeling that this step will be the most unpopular, but it's easily one of the most important steps.
If you remember last week, I said step one was to find a group of people that have some want/need/problem that you can fill or solve.
Step two is research. Plain and simple - down and dirty research is the next thing you have to do. You've found a group of people (a market)
that has some want or need that you can fill...the next thing you do is research like mad....
You have to immerse yourself in this completely. Spend days, weeks, even months if you have to learning absolutely everything
you can about the product you want to sell, the people you want to sell to, the industry, the manufacturing process, everything
everything everything you can learn (no matter how inconsequential) will pay off in the end.
What's the purpose? Well all along the way in your new business you'll have to make decisions. Quick decisions, slow deliberate
decisions, small decisions, large decisions....the more you know about this industry, the easier and more correct your decisions
will be.
What kind of decisions? Where to spend your ad dollars (for instance)....which companies to run a Joint Venture with (for instance)....
how much to charge for your product (for instance)....and on and on.
The only way to make any of those decisions is to become an expert. No one else can tell you how to make those decisions....
no marketing book...no marketing consultant....no banker....no ad broker....no one but you, and to do that you need
to be so fluent that you can pull a hundred little inconsequential facts together, see the big picture, and make the right decision.
So where and what do you research? Easy enough....here's a quick list (in no particular order):
- Search For Competitors...make a list of them and their web sites and their contact info
- Study their products
- Study their web sites
- Study their sales material and Copy
- Buy their products
- Watch how they sell to you on the back end (if they do)
- Search for keywords relating to the product using a tool like our Submission-Spider
- Search for domain names containing those keywords
- Search for newsletters devoted to the industry or product
- Subscribe to all of them, and read all their back issues
- Contact all their editors/owners and ask for ad rates
And subscriber numbers (this gives you a good idea
of the size of the market, if you find 7 ezines related
to this product/industry and they each average 9,000
subscribers, you know your market is around 63,000
potential customers....now you can run all kinds of projections
like if 10% of those people buy your product at $19.95
how much income can you expect....etc etc etc
- Search for web sites selling similar products that would not be
your competitor...for possible joint ventures.
- Search and study eBay...are there lots of people selling similar
items there? If so, how often do they turn over their inventory
(how quick do their items sell and how feverish are the buyers,
are there lots of bidding?)
Basically collect as much data as you can from as many sources as
you can think of...
Immerse yourself in this data for days, even weeks...
just keep staring at it till you can recite it all from memory....this
gives you an incredible insight into the industry...it makes you an expert...
it gives you the ability to make decisions from instinct...it allows
you to make good gut decisions in the future because you instinctively
know whether this product you want to release will fit into the market
and sell well....
That's all for this week. See you next Monday!
John Skorczewski
(pronounced Score-Chess-Key)
Editor, WebPromotion-Weekly
http://www.WebPromotion-Weekly.com
Want to use this article in your own ezine or web site? You can...as long as you add this signature line
(including the links):
John Skorczewski is the publisher of WebPromotion-Weekly, a free ezine about Internet Marketing,
Promotion, Advertising, And Search Engine Submission as well as the creator of the popular Web Site Promotion software,
the Submission-Spider
