Tag Archives: business benefits

Everyone can do it (with expert help)

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This is a guest post from my biggest and best client (she’s also my wife, but read it anyway). She told me, “You can’t tell people what it’s like not to know anything about , because you already know. I’ll write a post for you and you just publish it and show it to anyone who is non-technical like me”. So here goes. Enjoy.

Ronit BarasAs a blogger with tens of thousands of readers every month, I am often asked, “How did you do it?” usually with admiration for this . I usually feel uncomfortable answering (my parents always told me to be modest), but I am going to stretch myself this time and answer everyone once and for all, without being shy about it.

Whether you know me from Family Matters, Be Happy in LIFE or The Motivational Speaker, you know how strongly I am into the “You can do it!” attitude. I am a life coach and an educator and ever since I started my first business at the age of 25, this has been my motto – I can do it! Everyone can!

I often use the quote “If you think you can or think you can’t, you’re right” as one of my life coaching favorites. I am in the business of happiness and my slogan is “Happiness is a choice!”

Even success on the Internet is a choice, isn’t it?

If you have a business and want to open it to the Internet, if you want to get more business online, if you want to have tens of thousands of readers or a stream of buyers, if you want to know how to be successful at Internet marketing, sit tight and enjoy the ride.

A free event for suckers

[I know the word "suckers" is strong, but it is not my choice. This is what people ultimately call themselves when they realize what has happened to them. I have heard it enough times to know]

clip_image003Wealth seminarThe first time I came into the Internet world was when Gal and I did our life coaching course. While everyone was working on establishing a practice, Gal, who had been an IT manager, was focusing on our . By the end of my course, we were the only people, out of about 50 coaches, who had a site and a business card to give potential clients. After a while, our roles became clearer – I was an educator with over 20 years of experience and knew nothing about computer technology and Internet, and Gal was an IT professional with over 20 years experience and knew a lot about it. So I did the offline work and Gal did the online work.

The first thing you learn about starting a business on the Internet is that everyone can do it. I remember the first seminar I attended. You may have had the same experience yourself. It is a free event that makes hundreds of thousands of dollars in sales in one day. The food, the venue and the free gifts are nothing compared to how many suckers come to those events for the promise of sitting on the beach in a swimsuit with a laptop, sipping cool drinks and watching the dollars appearing on the screen every day and every hour.

The suckers’ slogans

Gal and I went to our first event as life coaches. It was an awesome weekend. It was a great seminar and I learned a lot. For 2 days, they promised the world “Be your own boss! Work 3 hours a day! Money will be coming out of your ears!” and … “Everyone can do it!”

I have to say I almost believed them. I wanted to believe them with all my heart, but because our life coaching course had promised exactly the same thing, I had the suspicion there was a pattern there. Luckily for us, it was not a test of our trust. We just did not have $10,000 to buy the product on offer. We were shocked that our fellow coaches spent so much money just weeks after they had spent thousands of dollars on the life coaching course.

If you have ever heard these slogans about trying to build a business on the Internet, be warned, someone is convinced you are a sucker and might be taking you for a ride.

Seminars that teach you have a system to convince you that everyone can do it. They show a woman who could hardly type and has a family to support in order to attract parents who want to make some quick cash and say she did it within 3 months in her spare time, in-between doing her daytime job, taking the kids from one activity to another, doing housework and oh, I almost forgot, a huge debt she was trying to pay. Or, they show you a group of teens without any capital who came up with a brilliant idea that became a hit overnight. Those events are like a magic show – you know there is a trick, but it is done so beautifully that you just accept it. You buy into the illusion.

Business seminar posterWhat kills me every time is hearing the presenter say, “I’m a successful person and I’m here to teach you how to make money effortlessly, have lots of time off and have all the luxury you want”. I especially hate the word “effortlessly”. The harder life is for you, the louder you hear how effortlessly it can be done.

I always have the same question to those speakers – “If your system can make you a millionaire overnight, why would you spend your time sleeping away from your wife and kids, sleep in a different hotel every night for 200 days in a year to convince us, suckers, to buy your product? Why aren’t you on the beach next to some amazingly blue water working an hour each day and drinking tequila? Isn’t it because you are too busy running workshops?”

I never ask it out loud, because I know the answer. I have 30,000 readers a month because I understood that not everyone can do it. I certainly could not!

Overnight success

I swear to you I have tried. I spent hours studying the same course with Gal. The Internet marketing guru said to us, “You need $90 to buy a website and hosting and an hour a day. Everyone can do it.” I sat 4 and sometimes 5 hours a day, watching videos, reading, summarizing and trying to implement, but pretty quickly, I realized that our Internet marketing guru’s “overnight success” had taken about 8 years and the reason he was successful was that he sold Internet marketing products to aspiring Internet marketers. It was a closed market – people who were making money by convincing others they could make money using their own products. They even have affiliates that sell to the same people. It is like a feeding frenzy. There was so much dishonesty there (MLM, or “direct marketing”, is the same).

My product was a coaching service. I did not want to tell my client they could make a fortune from my coaching, because it was just not true. Every time I watched Gal programming something, I freaked out. I wanted a business, not a course in HTML, PHP, CSS or any other strange acronym. I wanted to work with my clients, do my workshops and sell my books, not to sit in front of the computer all day long.

So many readers come to my site because I decided to give up trying to prove that everyone can do it by doing it myself. Instead, I focus on what I do best and allow the Internet marketer in the family to do what he does so well. Coaching and doing Internet marketing are two different skills and focusing on one leaves much less time for the other.

All my life coaching buddies wanted a website and spent months learning something that Gal did in 2 weeks. In the meantime, they neglected their life coaching practice and got nowhere in both areas.

The reason I feel uncomfortable when people ask, “How did you do it?” is because I did not do it, at least not on my own. Someone had to take my parenting advice, my books and my coaching services and publish them so that many people would actually get to see them.

Get Business Online logoMy message to you is that the online world is big and keeps expanding. Yes, at some stage every business will have a site, even if only for presence. If you want a business online, if you want buyers online, if you want a website even just as an online brochure with your contact details, stick to what you do best and let those who know Internet marketing do the rest for you.

The same applies to any business service and even to family and parenting services, such as accounting, public relations, gardening, construction and architecture. In the same way you would not reinvent a smart phone and prefer to buy one that has been developed by experts, using expert services can produce better results (perhaps more expensive upfront, but cheaper over time) and allow you to concentrate on what you do well and enjoy doing.

You just have to let go of the illusion.

Life is much better this way.

Happy days,
Ronit

You don’t know what you know

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For the past few months, I’ve been facilitating a Small Business Online workshop. Small Business Online is an Australian government initiative to help small business owners create web presence for their business and get business online.

The material is excellent and provide a solid foundation for working with specialists and web developers. For people who are in IT and want to build their own site (or one for their wife’s business), the course provided many opportunities to gain perspective from experienced consultants and even have their specific sites reviewed.

The main messages of the workshops were:

  1. Small business owners can’t focus on too many things. Therefore, they should do what they do best and engage professionals. So we gave the participants some great advice on how to select and get the best out of their Internet professionals
  2. Small business owners are typically action-oriented and want to do things, but getting business from the Internet requires setting business goals, developing strategies and measuring results. So we tied every technical decision area back to business objectives
  3. Small business owners are familiar with every little aspect of their own business, but they are often blind to the bigger picture. For example, they may know their clients on a personal level, but they have no idea how the people who don’t buy from them think, so they can’t attract them. So we showed them ways to find out “where the wind is blowing”
  4. Small business owners often apply offline, local thinking to their online venture and can’t see the true potential of the global web.

In the last session, Phil Hoffman (the program organizer) and I were talking (again) about why the participants should hire professional Internet consultants to help them and at some stage, I said, “You don’t know what you don’t know”. That’s because professionals keep their knowledge up to date and small business operators have no hope in Hell of doing that while running a business, so they are very likely to miss important stuff.

But then I thought about something else – “You don’t know what you DO know”. That’s because whenever I look at a client’s business with my Internet Vision, I see potential products they could sell worldwide, ways to engage their market and incentives they could use to inspire action and they just go, “Wow! I could never think of THAT”.

And that’s the point, folks. You don’t know what you don’t know, but you also don’t know what you DO know that somebody else may want to pay you for. After years of doing something, you think it’s easy, but it’s not easy for everyone.

Brokers in any market add value to their clients by being able to find and match products and services. It may not seem like much, but to a client in dire need who can’t find what he needs, the value is incredible.

Great web developers, graphic designers, copy writers and online marketing specialists add value to their clients by making their sites more robust, faster, more appealing, more compelling and generating more profits than the clients could do on their own. In most cases, the cost is incurred ONCE and the benefits are ONGOING.

If you live in Queensland, I invite you to register on the Small Business Online site (click the banner below) and plan to attend the upcoming webinars. I’ll be there too.

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Talk to you soon,
Gal

2 More Clients, Anyone?

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How would you like just 2 more client per month? How about just 2 more clients per week? Per day? Per hour? How would that affect your bottom line? Your life?

Too many business owners, when they consider taking their business online, can only think about costs and risks. They ask for detailed quotes and specific explanations of how each piece of work will be done.

What they normally fail to see are the benefits.

But realizing the benefits of an is really easy and, once you know what’s in it for you, it’s also easy to justify any cost that will leave you enough of a margin.

So how can you tell what good will come out of your new website or campaign or paid ads?

The first thing you need to work out is how much money you make from an average client. This may seem like a simple question, but for most of the business owners I meet, it’s really hard, especially when their business is new.

Online shoppingBasically, you need to take all your business profits and divide them by the number of clients who have generated that profit for you. If you have more than one line of business or group of products/services, you will probably separate them online, so work out each one of them separately. This will also help you decide what is most likely to be profitable online, so you’ll do that first.

If your business is fairly young, use conservative estimates based on what’s going during the past year of a few months, because that’s the closest you’ve got to the future.

It’s important to take into account any additional value brought to you by your clients, such as joint ventures, referrals, barters, etc, because those are worth money too, although they may be indirect. However, if you want to stay conservative, you can just count cash.

Now you know your client lifetime value.

With this figure, most businesses can quickly see that getting just 2 clients – not per hour, not per day, not per week and not per month, just 2 clients – pays for a lot of Internet marketing. The implication of this is huge:

By taking your business online and getting just a small number of new clients that would otherwise not find you, your Internet-based business pays for itself over and over again!

Of course, every business is different, which is why I encourage you to do the math for your own business and see for yourself, but even if it takes 5 clients to pay for your Internet marketing and even if it takes 2 months to get them, you are going to earn back all your investment in 2 months and then again and again and again every 2 months afterward.

What would this do to your life? Could you take some time off? Could you relax? Could you take the family out to a nice place? Could you fix the deck or upgrade your car?

Come on, what are you waiting for? Contact me

What you don’t know, doesn’t hurt

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You may have heard this saying from people already

What you don’t know, doesn’t hurt you

Well, I’m here to tell you this saying is really wrong when it comes to getting business online.

You see, the Internet is a very BIG place and it keeps cHanGIng all the time, faster than anyone can keep up with, let alone anyone who happens to be busy making products, servicing clients or doing the accounting.

On the Internet, what you don’t know can hurt you. A lot!

For example, say you want to develop a website and all you know is Microsoft Word. You create a simple site that looks good to you and you publish it online. No niche research, no usability design, no speed optimization, no and no dynamic content. Just an online brochure, really. You think, “It cost me nothing and it looks nice. Now, all I have to do is wait”.

WRONG! Your website takes months to be picked up by search engines and sits at the bottom of page 523, never to be seen by anyone, let alone buyers.

What you need is someone who can help you put business sense into your website from Day 1.

But let’s say you got some help and your website looks professional and even includes a shopping cart for your products, but you have not done your Internet marketing research, so your keywords are off and your structure is sub-optimal. You cleverly figure out that AdWords can get you traffic quickly and create a campaign.

BAD MOVE! Your ads will receive low quality scores by AdWords, which means they will appear lower than they should and you’ll be paying a lot more than you should. If that’s not enough, you’ll get the wrong type of visitors, the kind that doesn’t buy.

What you need is someone who can help you put business sense into your website from Day 1.

But let’s say you hire someone to put links all over the Internet back to your site. Surely, this will help bring you site up in searches and get you more business, no?

Nope. It will certainly improve your position, but working outside your site can only improve so much. Incorrect structure and content will still result in a low conversion rate and require a lot more links to make any noticeable difference to your business.

What you need is someone who can help you put business sense into your website from Day 1.

I could go on for a while, but the gist of it is

On the Internet, what you don’t know can hurt you. A lot!

If you don’t do this stuff (Internet marketing, that is) all the time and stay on top of things, you will pay more and get less than you should and make a lot less profit. Why waste time and money and why frustrate yourself? Find an Internet marketer you can trust (I know this great guy) and hire him to get you business quickly and easily from the ground up.

You new Internet business is not far away.

Talk to you soon,
Gal

How to Get Business Online (part 1)

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If you’re reading this, you are most likely a business owner looking to market your products or services on the Internet. So what should you do first? What should you do next? Where can you find more information?

The answer is: right here, of course. Let’s start at the beginning, then, shall we?

Finding a Niche

In the offline world, when customers want to buy something (say a bottle of olive oil), this is what they do:

  1. They go shopping at the nearest mall or shopping center
  2. They enter the store where the product is most likely to be sold (say Wal Mart)
  3. They find the shelf or aisle in which the product is kept
  4. On that shelf, they typically find several types and several brands of their product
  5. They start reading labels and price tags and compare the different options against one another and against their needs
  6. They decide what to buy and add it to their shopping basket, in which there are other, completely unrelated products

Sounds familiar?

In the Internet world, however, things are totally different. When Internet shoppers want to buy something (say a bottle of olive oil):

  1. They go looking for information using their favorite search engine (say Google)
  2. They type in “olive oil”
  3. They take a look at the title, description and URL of the websites listed and consider ways to fine tune their search
  4. They type in a more specific search query (say “extra virgin olive oil” or “cold pressed olive oil”)
  5. They take a look at the title, description and URL of the websites listed and pick out the most relevant sites
  6. They visit only the sites that seem relevant, typically from top to bottom, and stop reading when they believe they have enough information
  7. Now they are ready to buy
  8. They look for sites that sell their preferred choice of olive oil, possibly by searching for “buy cold pressed extra virgin olive oil” or by clicking one of the sponsored links around the search results
  9. They directly “land” on the page that sells what they were looking for and they buy it

Different, isn’t it?

Bottles of olive oil So you see, even if you have a pretty successful offline business selling olive oil, putting up a website featuring all your products on one page or mixing your shopping cart with some history of olive oil or olive oil recipes will get you absolutely nowhere on the Internet compared with sites that have a page dedicated to one very specific thing – cold pressed extra virgin olive oil. One click to get to it, one click to buy.

The upside, of course, is that you can have as many pages as you need on your website, so you don’t have to save. There’s not rent to pay for commercial space by the square foot, no cleaning for the extra pages, only the setup cost. But the returns, oh, the returns!

The difference between having your website listed at the top of the first page of search results and having it listed on, say, page 15, is pretty much like the difference between having a website and not having one. So you must identify your online niches first, and then have your website designed to have dedicated pages for each niche.

Doing this step first makes all the rest of your () possible. If you don’t do this first, you are effectively crippling anything you will do later on.

Of course, being deeply involved in your own business and having an offline mindset, it is best to engage an Internet marketing consultant to help generate ideas and check how often people search for them, because some niches are not worth your effort. Not wasting your time and money on those niches and discovering “golden nuggets” you couldn’t think of yourself will bring you more than enough value to cover anything the Internet marketer will charge. Guaranteed.

Services

Depending on where you are on your Internet marketing or journey, Get Business Onlineplease choose from the list below:

  1. “I’m still thinking about putting my business online”
  2. “I want to have a website”
  3. “I already have a website, and I want it to do better”
  4. “I’m happy with my website, but I need more traffic”
  5. “Why should I choose you to do Internet marketing for my online business?”

“I’m still thinking about putting my business online”

Free, no obligation consultation

  • I will answer any questions you may have about taking your business online, show you examples of Internet successes.
  • At the end of this step, you will be comfortable making a decision whether to take your business online.

Contact me to request your free consultation, get great value from me and pay nothing. When you’re happy to continue, consider doing more with me.

“I want to have a website”

Internet market research and recommendations report

  • I will understand your business goals for going online and then perform a thorough analysis of the online marketplace to identify Internet niches in which your business can do well.
  • This includes competitive analysis, search volume checks, keyword phrase generation and other areas, as your business requires.
  • At the end of this step, you will have a detailed report, which your web designer can use to build a powerful website, which will attract search engines and convert visitors to clients (or leads).

Contact me to arrange our initial discussion, spend about 1 hour with me discussing your business performance indicators and Internet goals and invest $595.

“I already have a website, and I want it to do better”

Option 1: Quick website review (FREE)

  • I will take a quick look at your website.
  • I will email you my general impression and some key points on improving the site’s performance as a business tool for you.
  • I will give you my honest opinion about your market potential, market positioning and optimization.
  • You will be able to make an informed decision on the value of my paid service and start using my feedback to get more business (if you know how).

Contact me to request your free quick website review. With no risk and so much to gain, this should be an easy decision.

Option 2: Website review, Internet marketing research and online business recommendations report

  • I will understand your online business goals, review your website thoroughly and recommend ways to make the website perform better and bring you more profits.
  • This includes a review of the design (look & feel), navigation, functionality and performance statistics, as well as online market research, competitive analysis and generation of ideas tailored to your business.
  • At the end of this step, you will have a detailed report, which your web designer can use to update your website, so it will receive more traffic and generate more sales (or leads). Often, having someone else look at your website results in massive value.

Contact me to arrange our initial discussion, spend about 1 hour with me discussing your business performance indicators and Internet goals and invest $595.

“I’m happy with my website, but I need more traffic”

, link building, article marketing, social bookmarking and other website promotion methods

  • I will understand your parameters, agree the best strategy with you and drive more traffic to your website.
  • This service can be delivered based on time, budget, method or performance.
  • Through this service, you will get targeted traffic to your website, which you will be able to link with more sales, more leads and more business profits.

Contact me to arrange our initial discussion, spend about 1 hour with me discussing your business performance indicators and Internet goals, agree the scope of work and budget.

“Why should I choose you as my Internet marketer?”

You will find it easy to choose me for your Internet marketing:

  • My aim is to give you more business. I don’t sell design, I don’t sell hosting, I don’t sell domains and I don’t sell traffic. What’s good for you is good for me, because when you’re happy, you’ll want more websites and you’ll send your friends my way too.
  • I’m not some kid, so your business is safe with me. I’ve been in professional IT services for many years, I’m a parent of 3, still with the same woman for 30 years and you can trust me with your business.
  • If it ain’t gonna work, I’ll let you know. No point wasting your time or mine chasing red herrings if we can both do something useful instead.
  • I have proof that my methods work. I have succeeded in tough markets by doing what I do best. See my Internet marketing results for yourself.
  • I structure my charges so that most of them will come out of your new online profits. You can book as much of my time as you like and ensure you get value all along the way.
  • Making profits online will add to your business’ value and credibility. You may want to check your D&B business credit information and keep track of what your business is worth as your online profits grow.

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Who Needs Internet Marketing (part 3)?

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By now, you know that the Internet is great for , as well as for offline products with a global appeal. So far, so good. But not every business sells standard products. Some businesses make their products to suit their clients’ needs. What about them?

Well, businesses that offer custom-made products can derive great benefits from using the Internet. You see, the Internet makes communication a whole lot easier than any other alternative, and a whole lot cheaper.

Say your company offers a product with many options: color, finish, size, embossed logo, etc. You could employ an army of specialized sales people, who could walk each new customer through the decision-making process in person or over the phone, or you could build a web site, which includes pictures, descriptive text, videos and even interactively-generated visual product images, which allow your prospects to try a few options, work out what’s best for them and then order or request a quotation without employing a single person on an ongoing basis.

Couple this with the ability to keep in touch with your clients via rich emails and informing them whenever you start offering more colors, bigger sizes and so on, and you will see that the Internet can give your business a huge boost in productivity and profitability.

It is true that sometimes, human interaction is required, because the client may need some expert advice in order to get it just right, but your website will screen those who would not buy, and would just waste your time and money, because they will quickly (and at no cost to you) find out what you cannot do for them. Those who choose to contact you can now receive your full attention, because by the time you contact them, you will already have a very good idea of what they need.

To summarize, if your business can benefit from getting complex custom-order inquiries, screening those who are unlikely to buy and saving a lot of time in your selling process, which you can translate to a much smaller sales team, look seriously into your online options and contact an Internet marketer as soon as you can.

Who Needs Internet Marketing (part 2)?

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So the Internet is great for . Got that. But what if my product cannot be digitized and sold electronically?

First, it may be that you are selling something very unique or that you are offering it in a special way, perhaps at a special price. If your item can be sent by post or international courier service (like FedEx or UPS), you should be able to expand your business significantly by selling to other parts of the world.

Second, getting business on the Internet is so much cheaper than offline, because it doesn’t require any showroom space or sales people. This means that your profit margin is larger, and you can afford to “throw in” the cost of shipping or any “deal sweetener” you can think of that will help you get sales.

Third, your online store is open 24 hours a day, every day, in every timezone, which means you can get 2-3 times the amount of business you would get from an offline store, while catering for every possible type of Internet buyer anywhere in the world.

To summarize, if your business can benefit from selling online by increasing profit margins, reaching large new markets and virtually operating around the clock. Look seriously into your online options and contact an Internet marketer as soon as you can.

Who Needs Internet Marketing (part 1)?

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Let’s face it – the Internet is not as useful for every business.  It’s also not as appealing to every business owner. So who should consider engaging an Internet marketer for their business. More importantly, should you?

The Internet is probably by far the fastest, cheapest and richest way to deliver information. With the ability to rotate images, display animated images and show video, the Internet can deliver any type of content quicker and cheaper than any other medium. If you need to communicate information to your clients or potential buyers, the Internet can offer you some great tools.

If you have an information product, you have probably gone through the phase of creating a digital version of it, which might have been printed later. On the Internet, your digital product can be sold as a separate, possibly lower cost item, at lightening speed, to an unlimited number of customers in a completely separate market to offline buyers. Furthermore, the Internet offers armies of promotion experts, called “Affiliates”, who will gladly help you sell your information product, in return for a share of your income.

Note that the type of information best suited for the Internet is one that has global appeal. The language you use may be the only limitation, but as the Internet crosses all borders, your information can be carried to wherever there’s a need for it via this great medium.

To summarize, if your business can benefit from the delivery of paid or unpaid information to a wide, targeted market, the Internet is the place for you. Look seriously into your online options and contact an Internet marketer as soon as you can.

Welcome

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Welcome to Get Your Business Online, a site about bringing small businesses to the world via the Internet.

The Internet, or the World Wide Web, is a unique place, where the rules change almost daily. It’s hard to keep up with everything going on online when you’re also busy running a business. So it makes business sense to let someone else do it, who can keep up on your behalf and show you the way.

Getting a web site is a small step in the right direction, but getting business requires patience, a small investment and a good deal of knowledge and skills, which I can use to help your business profit and grow.

Want to know more? Contact me.