A
lot has changed in the past ten years, but the web’s love affair with eyeballs
has remained fairly constant.
Roughly
twenty years after the launch of Mosaic (one of the earliest web browsers), the
world has changed. Commerce is alive and well, albeit with an “e” prefix, and
everything from dog food to baby food can (and is) bought online.
But
the questions still remains for internet marketing: How do I drive eyeballs to
my site?
·
*Content marketing
·
*Content syndication
·
*Search engine marketing (SEM)
·
*Search engine optimization (SEO)
·
*Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising
·
*Affiliate marketing
·
*Co-registration / co-marketing
The
list is nearly endless…And each of these methods probably has a place in the
portfolio of every marketer. But there’s a simple truth when it comes to
internet marketing.
Very
few businesses exist in a vacuum, and even start-ups come from somewhere.
Every
day, thousands of new companies venture out onto the web. Whether it’s a
dorm-room start-up or a new offering from a Fortune 500, each new venture seeks
to drive eyeballs, gather clicks, win conversions, and generate sales through
internet marketing.
And
whether the new venture is a main street business or the latest offering of
some multi-national firm, the truth is that there is a wealth of opportunities
to build a great online business so long as one does not allow the perfect to
be the enemy of the good.
With
that in mind, allow me to share my three-step view on how to build a great
online business:
Step
One: Think Big
This
is pretty self-explanatory. Few people start out with a mediocre vision or a
plan to build a tiny business. Thinking big allows people to free themselves
from constraints and get as many great ideas, including internet marketing ideas,
on the table. It also serves to get people excited and engaged in a new idea.
That said, there’s a difference between thinking big and pursuing pie in the
sky ideas. That gets us to our next step.
Step
Two: Start Small
I
once met a guy who wanted to revolutionize the study aid industry by changing
the way that content was created, marketed, consumed, and purchased. He wasn’t
alone in his view, but he was pretty uniquely positioned to get something done.
He’d been in the industry for decades and knew it inside and out. He wanted to
raise a few million dollars to launch a new venture. He clearly was thinking
big.
When
I asked him what inspired the idea, he told me his former employer had just
discontinued selling a series of very successful Advanced Placement (AP) study
books for high school students and reverted copyright to the authors. After a
bit of discussion, I learned that he could buy out those copyrights and sell
secure PDF copies of these books on Amazon for a few thousand dollars and test
the waters.
That
wasn’t big enough for him. A year later, someone had started even
smaller—buying warehouses full of printed materials and liquidating them on
eBay, generating a few hundred thousand dollars in sales—while this guy I met
was still looking for funding.
There’s
no shame in starting small. No big successful company ever started out that
way.
Step
Three: Fail Fast
It’s
a cold, hard fact that failure and hardship are the means by which people learn
and grow. Failure teaches us what not to do and hardship allows us to truly
value the rewards we earn. The beauty of starting small is that our failures
are then equally small. The key here is to understand when an experiment has
run its course, cut bait and move on. Small failures are easier to walk away
from as there’s often less of an emotional desire to “turn things around” or
throw good money after bad. The goal is not to succeed the first, second, or
third time but to identify ten or twenty things that might work and then cycle
through them as quickly as possible. Think of it as A/B split testing for a new
venture.
Step
Four: Succeed
This
isn’t meant to be funny; very few ventures succeed in their first iteration.
Success is a process of trial and error. The key to success is longevity, and
unless you’ve got a bottomless pit of money (or an unlimited corporate budget),
you’ll need to stretch your resources as far as possible.
In
my own travels, I’ve had more than my fair share of clients who have turned to
me after having dumped enough money to buy a house into a failed digital
venture. In many cases, my clients believed that they had a flawed strategy or
a bad idea. In most cases, it was more about execution.
Sometimes
people are shocked to hear that a few free web services and a five page micro
site can serve as a pretty good internet marketing starting point for a new
venture. Consumer grade web services may not be scalable, but until you know
that your venture will succeed, what’s there to scale?
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