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The Best Ways To Kill Your Internet Business The following are some of the most common ways to make any Internet based business fail. Sending Unsolicited E-Mail This is the ultimate mistake! No matter what you read, there is NO such thing as a "safe-list" other than your own opt-in list. Any form of bulk email will damage your business reputation. Once it's damaged it's almost impossible to recover credibility later on. No House Mailing List You DO need to stay in regular connect with everyone who opts-in to your house lists. Making regular contact within your targeted niche is how people will remember you when they are in need of a solution to a problem, or if they have a question. Not Identifying Your Target Market One of the most common reasons for the failure of many on-line businesses is not correctly targeting your sales message. You can't be all things to all people. Narrow targeting is better and will deliver more sales. You can market to millions who aren't interested in your product and not earn a dime for your efforts. Marketing The Wrong Products Don't try to be everything to everyone. You won't ever sell ice to Eskimos because there is no demand or established market. Spend time choosing your products carefully. Sell products that will suit your ideal customer. Dump products that don't sell. Not Using Ezine Advertising If you built a 20 million dollar resort in the desert but no road to get there, you will not attract customers. You can't sell anything if no one knows you exist. The nicest thing about ezine advertising is you can really target your market. Advertising in newsletters and ezines is cheap. It works well if you choose the right ezines for your products. Here are a few places you can find subject related ezines. No Effective Promotion There are hundreds of things you can do to attract sales, and most of them won't cost anything but a little time. On-line it is usually better to co-operate with your competitors than to compete. Here are a few promotional activities that have worked for me. Spending Too Little Spending a lot of money is no guarantee of success but spending to little can be an even bigger mistake. If you don't invest anything in your own business, how can you expect others to buy anything from you? You don't need a big budget to be successful, but there are four key purchases you must make if you are to be taken seriously. Spending Too Much Test all your advertising on a small scale first. DON'T blow your whole advertising budget on one campaign. Test and track all your advertising. Make it pay - not cost. Don't trust anyone else to spend your hard earned money. Hardly anyone gets rich overnight. It's better to grow slow and keep everything under control. Not Following Up Enough Most of your costs are incurred generating the lead. It often takes a prospect 7 or more exposures before they purchase from you. Don't try to tell the whole story up-front. Effective marketers use a two-step marketing program. They work towards attracting interest first and then follow up with your prospect at least 7 times before you give up. This method will generate 200% to 400% more sales. Use a programmable follow-up system to automatically send a series of brief messages at regular intervals to your opt-in prospects. Programmable Follow-up Using Too Much Technology When I visit a site using Flash or other high-end programming I usually click away before the page fully displays, and I have high speed Internet access. Your site should be designed for your customers and not for other designers. In most cases you won't impress anyone using bleeding edge technologies. Using frames, too many or large slow-loading graphics, annoying music or sound can hurt your sales more than you can imagine. Poor Writing I am spelling and grammar challenged so I am probably not the right person to tell you about writing effective copy. I know first-hand how spelling and grammar errors turn many people off completely. I am told that long text sells better. While this may be true, I believe it's true only after you have developed a lead. I maintain that short concise text attracts more leads in the beginning. Long text works best to tell the whole story. Poor Customer Service Once someone purchases from you once you are in a good position to make more related sales without ANY increased costs. Getting a customer and keeping a customer can be two completely different processes. Its cheaper and easier to sell to your existing customers so don't blow them off by ignoring requests for customer service. If you want to sell more products & services take care of the customers you already have first. Do what it takes to keep them coming back for more. Not Responding A Timely Manner If you are going to make your email address available to your customers, make sure to answer the e-mail that you receive as quickly and as personally as possible. Each inquiry is an opportunity to sell a solution. Respond to questions quickly and suggest unique solutions. If you can't help them, refer them to someone who can. What goes around comes around - multiplied. Best Wishes Bob ROBERT SMITH helps thousands successfully market their Internet based home business. You'll find tons of free marketing tools & resources on his Internet Marketing web site at: http://www.smithfam.com/ You can reach him by phone at: (541) 689-1847 PST, and by email at. <mailto:bob@smithfam.com> TRAFFIC BUILDER SUBMISSION TOOL - FREE DEMO
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