Because you have no choice but to start your online business slowly. Sure, there are always stories about the runaway app on the iPhone, or the social website that caught fire. But 90% of the websites on the Internet are nowhere to be found on search engines. And nobody is going to them. The Internet is a massive graveyard!

The last I checked there are over 30 billion websites indexed by Google. You have to be on page one of your search terms to even have an online business. And doing that has become a tall order for most niches.

It is not hopeless. You can be at the top of your niche, by putting in a steady part-time effort within one year’s time.

To be continued…

Your Internet business ideas are coming into focus. Your website or blog may already be in progress, and you’re writing articles to toss around the Web like delectable tidbits to the hungry readers who will soon become your loyal customers.

But first, entice them to read your articles. What to put into your articles is the subject of another post. For the moment let’s focus on How to get them read your articles:

1. Set a clear objective

What would you like your reader to do? Whether it’s sign up for your newsletter, click for your free report, or respond to your email, you must let them know. Use specifics to create images in his or her mind. Subject lines and post titles are an opportunity to grab their attention and stoke their curiosity. “How to Determine the Value of Your Beanie Baby” is going to invite a lot more click-throughs than “The Value of Toys.”

2. Show how your system (or product or service) resolves their issue.

Create a checklist for your reader. Assist her in taking the next step. It’s as though she wants something from the top shelf. Bring her a ladder so she can get there without having to take a leap she doesn’t feel comfortable with, or wave it off as too much of a hassle.

In your article, follow this sequence:

• 1. Align with your customer’s needs by articulating their challenges from their perspective.
• 2. Lay out solutions, everyone else’s. Not yours. (Not until step #3).
• 3. Convey the benefits of your solutions. Help your visitor make the link that your product makes their problem go away.

Learn more about this counter-intuitive yet highly effective method of persuasion.

3. Tell them what they just learned

This part is a little like the final step in writing a persuasive essay in college. You’ve stated your objective, made it crystal clear what you want your reader to do. And you’ve shown, by illustrating in a rational way, the reasons they should do so. Your job is almost done. Now, restate or review the salient points you made in steps 1 and 2.

Your internet business ideas are like the goose that laid the golden egg. Remember that story? To get your online business to take flight, first write persuasive posts and articles, and soon those golden eggs will begin to hatch.

Please leave a comment and tell me what you think. I love hearing from you!

Once you’ve got a strong hunch about an online business idea you want to pursue, what is the next step?

Say you’ve decided on the product or service you want to deliver. You’ve also got a good sense of the sort of people you want in your target market.

Is there a foolproof way to figure out how realistic or viable your online business idea is?

Yes.

The key to examining your idea is to ask the right questions.

Huh? Hang in there. I will explain how to figure out what the right questions are. But bear in mind that this model is deceptively simple, so you might not understand its usefulness until you apply it to your own online business idea.

Tools are at their best when they’re in action, and this is a particularly powerful tool you can use to examine and test your business idea for viability. In fact, it’s so central to our online business success, we call it the 4 Essentials.

Ignore one of the four essential dimensions only at the risk of losing your grip on your online business.

Are you reaching all of your customers, or only some?

A few months ago, the ninj and I discovered that new visitors weren’t looking at the old posts. We knew they were looking for all that rich content. But getting readers to go backwards in a blog is a challenge.

We decided to make it easy for them, and did the work ourselves.

We collected all that relevant information and bundled it together into an uber-organized packet, gave it a name, and started offering our new product.

Find out how we did it, how long it took, and why we heartily recommend this method of re-packaging your proprietary information products.

Marketing an online business can happen anywhere. Not just online. Be prepared to give a concise, well planned description of your business whenever the opportunity comes about.

Write it, rehearse it to the mirror, your dog, and your best friend. That way, you’ll have it down next time you attend a Chamber mixer or a serious investor drops by.

Imagine this scenario: You step onto an elevator. Your mother (or someone who reminds you of her) steps aside to give you room. A brief and friendly conversation begins and she asks “what do you do?”

Her floor is approaching quickly. No sense in going into detail. Don’t waste the moment describing how good your service or product is. If she were to phrase the question more bluntly, she’d actually ask “what can you do for me?”

So, tell her:

• What your business does
• Who it serves
• How you make money
• Who you (or your team) are
• Who the competition is
• What gives your business an edge

While she’s listening, her brain is busy checking off a list to see whether she’s interested in getting your business card, or not.

Unless you carefully plan this thimble-sized speech, you’re going to be hard-pressed to deliver it in 60 seconds or less.

As an example, here’s our bare-bones elevator speech. This takes me 30 seconds to deliver:

The Online Business Cookbook offers recipes for starting a business online. We serve people looking to create income from a Web business. We earn a living through our business consultation services. We’ve started four profitable Web businesses, the first of which is now six years old and still expanding.

People have a lot of choices for help when they want to start an online business. They choose us because we’re people just like them. We started on a budget, learned how to blend the ingredients for success on the Web, and now we teach others how to do the same.

What’s your elevator pitch? Share it in the comments if you wish. I love hearing from you all. 

How are you at building online business traffic?

Perhaps you’re at this stage: Your website is up and working, and visitors are quick with positive feedback. But the trickle of people who are showing up clearly will not sustain you and your family of four.

You know that directing attention to your site is one of the most major things to achieve if you aim to create a thriving internet business. The trick is, how do you drive more profitable traffic to your website?

Here are the 5 top things to do that will help you build a buzz online:

5. Create media, audio & video.

4. Exchange links one-on-one.

3. Publish on other websites.

2. Set up your social matrix. Include Facebook, Twitter, and other relationship networking pathways.

1. Blog. Don’t assume it’s not necessary. You need active content, not static pages.

Building online business traffic isn’t brain surgery. On the other hand, it isn’t something you might simply intuit. However, you can learn how.

Hey, we did. Our first web business, Start a Cleaning Business, hovers between #1 and #3 on Google, Yahoo and Bing for many of the search terms entered by people looking for that specific start-up business niche. It’s been at the top for almost six years now, and not due to a miracle or a gamble. We engineered it to rise up in the ranks.

• If you’re serious about making money online, don’t let your efforts to build online traffic be slapdash. Get up to speed. Take a look at the system we use.

Let me know what you think about building business traffic online. I love hearing from y’all 

Do you have an online business system that converts visitors to paying customers? If you could use a little help in this department, read on.

First, tell me where you talk about the benefits of your product or service.

Raise your hand if you said up front.

Most people think so. They figure the customer is looking for ways to benefit from your website, so you should spell out those bennies right up at the top.

• However, I want to show you that it doesn’t work that way. In fact, place your benefits and solutions at the top, and you risk losing your visitors’ attention.

This may sound counter-intuitive, because putting your benefits and solutions first seems logical. Answers are what your customer wants, and you’ve got them.

So why wait?

Here’s why: You risk losing your readers’ attention.

Your visitor is asking themselves, what’s in it for me? He’s looking for signs that you know what bugs him, frustrates him, or drove him to the Web in the first place. That’s when you need to establish a connection.

This happens in a very simple way, when you recognize their problem and articulate it from their perspective.

Your reader isn’t looking for your opinion. She knows you understand her perspective, and that is the crux of this biscuit. More importantly, she won’t leave your website while she’s looking for more information about a solution.

Why? Because he or she doesn’t feel like they’re being pushed.

Nobody likes that. You aren’t laying out your answers — not yet. Do that too soon, and your visitor feels pushed, not pulled or compelled along by his own volition. At this point, don’t break the spell you created by showing you understand their perspective.

People want to feel in charge of their own decision-making process. You know precisely what I’m talking about if you’ve ever been confronted by a pushy salesperson. Obnoxious, right? In order to get your visitor on your side, you’ve got to establish a genuine connection by getting on theirs.

After you have explained the problem, it’s time to mention a few solutions. Evaluate them, point out their pros and cons. Don’t talk about yours — not yet.

{Whistling}

Okay. Now you can talk about yours.

But only after you have done all of the above. Follow this sequence correctly for the best results in your online business system. (System is the operative term here!)

Point out the benefits, the ways in which your customers’ challenges will be solved by your products, your service, your membership site. Explain the features of your product and clearly connect the dots between your product and how it addresses their problem.

Don’t skimp on that last step. You might think it’s super apparent that your product is the answer to their frustration. However, you must spell it out so they don’t miss it.

Steps to follow:

1. Align with your customer’s needs by articulating their challenges from their perspective.

2. Lay out solutions, everyone’s but yours.

3. Convey the benefits of your solutions. Help your visitor make the link that your product makes their problem go away.

Have you used this method in your online business system? I invite you to leave a comment if you have. I love hearing from all y’all.

When you start an online business, should you announce it with a press release? Isn’t blogging about it enough?

Some very smart and worldly PR people suggest that press releases are outdated and useless, claiming that nobody reads them anyway.

Others contend that writing a press release is a neat way to clarify your own understanding of your business — the who, what, why, when, where, and how.

We use press releases as part of our online business system. They’re very helpful, especially when it comes to promoting an internet business. We see predictable sales spikes and increases in subscribers to our membership sites whenever we put out a press release, usually the very day it gets published.

In addition, first-time visitors to your website can view them as a way to take the temperature of your business — see that it’s still up-and-running, and scan them to check out your latest announcements. They’re looking for relevance to their business.

Remember, your visitors are always asking themselves: What’s in it for me? Press releases are handy because they put the focus on the benefits for your subscribers.

The reasons for writing a press release have changed.

When it comes to building online business traffic, the press release should be embraced as part of a vibrant SEO strategy.

A press release can:

• help spread the word about your web business quickly across the Web
• maximize your visibility on search engines
• increase the number of visitors to your site from news searches
• establish enduring links on other relevant websites
• generate publicity

If you want to try including press releases as part of your online business system, here are a few things to keep in mind.

3 tips for writing a press release:

• Write for the web. Use bullet points, make it easy to scan, and watch your Flesh-Kincaid score. Keep it at the 8th grade level. You may think this is low-balling your customer’s cognitive capacities, but it isn’t. We’re pretty smart in the 8th grade.

• Only include pertinent information. The press release is an opportunity to announce “official” information, such as a deal that was made, a change or addition to your business, a product launched. Give your reader a link to your “about us” page (or another relevant page) on your website.

• Add attachments — videos, docs, pictures. People are more likely to click on these to learn more about your announcement. They’re also more prone to share compelling videos and pictures with their friends and colleagues. These PR packages cost more, but they’re worth it.

Have you found press releases useful, or do you think they’re outdated? If you have tried using them in your online business system, please leave a comment about it. I love hearing from you

It would be the cat’s pajama’s if creating an online business were as easy as putting up a Web site or starting a blog. However, unless your content proves to be a worthy resource that people can find online, it’s doomed to sit alone in cyberspace.

Building a valuable resource takes more than just the initial effort, and something else that most blogs lack: Cohesion and usefulness.

When people search for information, they want relevant content based on the theme they entered. Think about the last time you entered into a search. You were probably not looking for somebody’s latest blog post, or someone’s latest 140 character tweet. You wanted a resource that yielded evergreen information based on your theme. You’d also be pleased if you found a website that had clearly organized categories (Web pages) where you could quickly and easily find what you were looking for.

Old posts = yesterday’s news

A blog may certainly be engaging and worth your time (many are). If the writing is clever or funny, you might linger and explore for a few minutes. But what do you explore? Going back through past posts creates the unfortunate feeling that you’re reading yesterday’s news. You keep wondering: How relevant is this info?

A content-based website is more fully fleshed out. It offers relevant information organized in categories and developed. It is useful and cogent. You don’t feel like you’re wasting your time while you’re there. You learn something.

Are we anti-blogging? Hardly. Blogs are great fun. They give you a way to sharpen your writing skills, deepen your understanding of your subject as well as your audience, and they can be very productive. For example, I’m using this blog to record and create the contents of the Cookbook, one post at a time.

Look at the Online Business Cookbook homepage (you’re on it). This is, by all accounts, a blog. However, we’ve categorized it into four sections: Recipes, Ingredients, Cuisine, and Appetite. These sections are updated and developed as the site progresses. Each of our blog posts are categorized, and in addition to appearing chronologically, they’re also and placed into one of these sections.

I’ll go into more detail about creating evergreen information in another post.

Meantime, if you’ve got a blog, how do you make it relevant so that people will find it online? And if you have a website, how do you keep it fresh? Tell me how in the comments. I love hearing from you.  

Anybody creating an online business knows that only one thing feels better than seeing a significant increase in your monthly income.

And that thing is: birthing an idea that translates into financial increase.

I will share the awesome secret with you in a minute. I can’t wait.

But first, I want to cop to a mistake we made, which helped us achieve the precise opposite effect we were aiming for: No increase in monthly income.

How did we manage to achieve no monthly increase in our income, you ask? Well, put simply, we underestimated our opportunities. Opportunities for what? For running a sale.

Creating an online business isn’t exactly like running a store-front business.

We know that. But when it came to running a special sale on one of our web businesses, we were acting as if we were a brick-and-mortar getup.

Mistake!

Our discovery?

Lean in people, this is the awesome-secret part: We could afford to run this big sale, not four times per year as we had been doing. Not double that at eight times per year either.

How frequently do we now run the sale?

Every three weeks. Every three weeks!

I  k-n-o-w-! It feels like we’ve woken up from a dream. More frequently run sales do not burn out, turn off, or annoy your customers as you may fear.

Believe me, we love and respect our customers. We do not dare trifle with their emotions. Oh, no. When it comes to creating an online business, relationship-building is ever-so-much more important than a one-off sale.

But when we stumbled across this principle, that more frequently run special deals (for us that means a Bundle Discount which is a heluva great deal, if you want to know), we were astounded that it didn’t anger or annoy our customers. No one complains that we’re running a sale too quickly after the last one. The fact is it just creates more buzz, which creates more business, which in turn translates into more money into the savings account.

The bottom line here is that there is a sweet spot that you can find, if you experiment a bit. A three-week gap between sales might not suit your business, or it might, just perfectly. Whatever it is, you can find it. Just start wide and narrow the scope until it feels just right.

What we learned from our mistake was that we cannot assume that our customers are tracking every sale we run, like you might do with a shoe store you pass every day. From an online perspective, there are always new people being exposed to your ’special deal’ for the very first time.

What mistake have you made while creating an online business? (Or maybe I should say “have you EVER made a mistake while creating an online business?” lol!) Please share it with us, and tell us what you learned from it. You can comment anonymously if you wish.     I love hearing from you!