Successful Entrepreneur on the Web
Becoming a successful entrepreneur in the online world is no different than
becoming a successful entrepreneur in the brick-and-mortar world. Both tasks
require vision, determination, and hard work.
The online world of the web offers many exciting opportunities for
entrepreneurship because it is fresh, new, and exciting. The cutting edge of
development has always been the most fertile ground for growing a new
enterprise. In the 1800's, the new frontier was the American west and many
fortunes were made there. In the 2000's, the new frontier is the web, where many
fortunes have yet to be made.
Jeff Bezos of Amazon.com is worth 4.85 billion dollars.
Pierre Omidyar of
eBay is worth just over seven billion dollars.
David Filo and
Jerry Yang of
Yahoo are both billionaires. These men made fortunes on the web, and so can
you.
Google's tale is a familiar one: Two Stanford doctoral students,
Sergey Brin and
Larry Page, developed a set of algorithms that in 1998 sparked a holy-shit leap in Web-search performance. Basically, they turned search into a popularity contest. In addition to gauging a phrase's appearance on a Web page, as other engines did, it assessed relevance by counting the number and importance of other pages that linked to that page. Officially, Google says that it processes more than 150 million searches a day, but the true number is probably much higher. According to Nielsen/NetRatings, 67.6 million people worldwide visited Google an average of 6.2 times last December. Analysts guess that last year's revenue was between $60 million and $300 million.
The path to becoming a successful online entrepreneur has changed in the last
few years. The over-optimism which characterized the late '90s and ultimately
led to the subsequent crash in the technology sector has matured into a cautious
and reasonable optimism grounded in traditional business values.
Is An Ebusiness Right For You ?
Starting your own eBusiness really can be that simple and that inexpensive. All you need to do is follow these straight-forward steps and you will soon have your very own internet business. And the best part is that it won't cost you a lot to begin achieving some very profitable results. You don't need to learn a long list of new skills or do a lot of research and setup work. Each step is easy to achieve even for internet beginners and once you are done you will have your own ebusiness. Not long after that and you will soon have your very own paychecks.
What Are You Going to Sell?
The #1 thing you need to succeed in business is the customer. Whether you
have one customer, fifty customers, or millions of customers, it is critical to
remember that customers are the foundation of any business. Without customers,
you don't have a business; you have a hobby.
Going into an online business, people usually either know what they want to
sell or know how they want to sell it. If the online business is an extension of
a brick-and-mortar business, the entrepreneur knows what he or she has to sell
and is looking for a new channel for their good and services. If the
entrepreneur is looking to start a new business online, they may not yet know
what product or service will offer the best opportunities for success.
Product or Service
Every business sells either products or services, a few businesses sell both.
Products are easier to sell online because they can be more easily commoditized.
People have become comfortable buying known commodities online. Services which
are sold online are sometimes delivered online and sometimes delivered
offline.
Selling Services Online
If you choose to sell services, the next decision to consider is how the
services you sell will be provided. You can choose to:
Sell your own services
Sell the services of others
Sell an automated service
Selling Your Own Services Online
Each of us has specific talents, abilities, and skills which can be useful to
other people. These things which we have can be offered to others over the web.
Perhaps you are a lawyer, a web designer, or a painter. It should be the easiest
thing in the world to create a web page to tell the world about who you are and
what you can do for them.
The key to success in selling your own services over the web is to focus on
the needs of your customer. For every sentence you write about yourself online,
write an entire page about what you can do for your customers.
Selling the Services of Others
Selling the services of others allows us to leverage a larger workforce, and
ultimately to build revenue more quickly.
Perhaps you run a lawn-care business where you sell monthly lawn-care
packages to home-owners. Your lawn-care staff may be employees, or they may be
independent subcontractors who do business with you at pre-negotiated rates. In
fact, you may not be in the lawn-care business at all, you may simply be in the
business of being paid for generating referrals to existing lawn care
firms.
Selling Automated Online Services
Selling automated online services presents a very lucrative business
proposition, because it represents a potential revenue stream with very low
maintenance costs. The trade-off is often in the form of considerable up-front
development cost.
If you have the right idea, and the determination to follow it through to a
successful conclusion, there can be no better business opportunity than selling
an automated online service.
The first step, of course, is to determine what people want and what people
are willing to pay for. Will people pay $9.95 for an online personality test?
Will they pay $19.95 for an online personal wardrobe analysis? What would
someone pay for a personalized online horoscope? How about an automated resume
writing tool?
Selling Products Online
If you choose to sell products, you are not limited to selling products which
you manufacture. If you are already in the manufacturing business, that is a
significant advantage and the web is an excellent sales outlet for many
products.
Greater opportunities exist for the rest of us by working with the
distribution channel. We may buy products from manufacturers and sell then over
the web, or we may buy products from wholesale distributors and sell them over
the web.
We may inventory our products and oversee their shipment to customers, or we
may send a request to have the products drop-shipped from our suppliers to our
customers. We may never even see the products we sell.
Setting up IT
Information technology is daunting to many entrepreneurs. Each little
sub-field of IT has its own culture and terminology. It is difficult for the
novice to understand all of the jargon and to determine truth from hype.
You will not be successful if you try to separate yourself completely from
the technology, but you will also not be successful if you immerse yourself in
it. You must understand IT decisions from a business level in the same way they
you understand decisions which your business makes in terms of setting prices or
acquiring real estate.
The most obvious need for your new online business will be a company web
site. This will introduce you to the professionals known as web designers. If
your business sells more than a few products online, you will also have to work
with database administrators. If you want to sell an automated service online,
you will find yourself working with software architects and software
developers.
From there you will learn about
shared and dedicated hosting and about the
plethora of services (and pricing) available to you as a hosting customer.
The key in these communications is that each of these professionals
owes you, as their customer a clear explanation of the business
value which they are providing for the money which you are paying them. This may
be an unfamiliar concept to many techies who grew up in the public school
system. Remember, there are always more vendors for a willing customer.
In many ways, IT is the easiest challenge you will face, because so
many entrepreneurs have trodden the path before you. An entire industry exists
to market IT services to entrepreneurs. You only have to decide what to buy.
Selling Online - Successfully
Once your have negotiated with your suppliers and you have you distribution
system arranged -- now comes the difficult part. Now you must bridge the gap
between your business and your customers.
Most Internet traffic is currently brokered by search engines, such as
Google, Yahoo, and MSN. To do well in business on the Internet, you must do well
in the search engines. This means appearing very early in the search results for the key words or
phrases your potential customers will use to shop for your good or services.
Very few potential customers will look for you by name. You must determine
the phrases which potential customers will type into the search engines and make
sure that you rank well in the result listings for those phrases. Product types
or names are common search phrases, such as "sleeping bags" or "bumper
stickers." Key phrases for services often include a geographic component, such
as "real estate kansas city" or "house painter colorado springs."
Once your key phrases are defined, you must make certain that your company's
web presence is optimized for those phrases. This consist of two sets of tasks:
on-site optimization and off-site optimization. On-site optimization is designing your web site to be focused on those key
phrases. This is where your web site designer will work with a professional in
the field of
Search Engine Optimization (SEO).
Off-site optimization consists of networking with others in your field to
make sure they know about your web site -- and that they link to your web site.
The top search engines use the number of links to a web site as one of the
criteria for determining which web sites to rank highly in the search results. A
SEO specialist can help you in this task, but no one will know your industry as
well as you.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is critical to the success of an online
business. The difference between ranking third and thirtieth for your key phrase
is significant revenue for your business.
The eBay Alternative
The tasks involved in setting up a web site and driving traffic towards it
can be time consuming and resource intensive for a small business. The time
delay imposed by website development and search engine marketing can require
many months to begin to deliver ROI. Many web entrepreneurs use
eBay and
other online auction houses to short-cut this process and begin selling to
online customers almost immediately.
On
eBay, you create auctions for the products you are selling and potential
buyers bid to determine what they will pay. You are able to set minimum prices
to ensure that you will not sell products at prices below your necessary profit
margin. You are also able to set up dutch auctions where you are able to
sell large quantities of the same item. The options involved in becoming a successful entrepreneur on the web are
extensive. Picking the right path for you own journey is your first step on the
road to online success.