If your business idea fits these next three points – then you have a winner.

I realize that this is a very light look at an important issue – thinking about starting up a small business, and you need to do what they call “due diligence”  very carefully.

However this short post will give those of you who are new to the idea of owning your own business a basic idea as to what you could have to do before you start

Business start-up point number one.

Supply and demand 

The very first – and most important factor is demand.

If there is a demand for a product or service then you have a perfect starting point.

What you need to do here is to see how hectic the demand is for that specific product.

Your research needs to be very carefully done here, as an over saturation of suppliers is not the worst thing. Remember that if you can supply the product or service cheaper, more efficiently and with top notch service – the level of competition is not that important.

What you need to ascertain is how big the demand for the product or service really is, and will there be a limit to how big your business can grow to.

Where I operate the most (from a small business marketing point of view) is online, and it is extremely easy to see the strength of your competition.

I can do a detailed enough assessment of the levels of demand/levels of competition/strength of that competition very easily online. In fact I could get a 90% accurate report (that could be safely relied upon) within 15 minutes.

Business start-up Point number Two

Supply and demand

Now if the demand for a product is high, the next crucial item is supply.

If you can source and supply that service or product at a competitive level – you more than likely have a winner.

Naturally this is not that cut and dried, as you need to take into account a ton of factors here in the details.

Things like -

• is the interest for that product increasing or decreasing?
• Is it a local or international trend or need?
• Are you relying upon a single supplier?
• Can you “up-sell” your clients?
• Is there potential to get those clients onto a second income stream? (IE a monthly maintenance plan etc)

Business start-up Point number Three

ROI – Return on Investment

Your return on investment is the final assessment point.

Naturally this one will decide if your business will make a profit or not.

The first two simply tell you there is a need for the product and you are able to meet that need.

This last section will be the vital one.

Here you need to do professional Business planning and cover all details and aspects that make up the nuts and bolts of owning a business.

The accounting side of a business is where they stand or fall, and knowing every detail down to the smallest points will be what will prove the viability of your business idea and equally give you the confidence to survive the tight spots – when they get to you.

Final comments

The research that you need to apply to planning a new business is very important, but you should not let it stop you from getting started.

I offer a service where I sell complete businesses that are Internet based, and you could order one of these from me.

Click on the image above and you will be taken to the page that explains more about that.

You do need to know that I have very limited spots available, so if you are interested we will need to discuss this at a detailed level.

Thank you for reading this short post, and if you enjoyed it or found it interesting I ask you to please “share” it below using the social buttons.

 

 

Small Business Online Marketing explained

This short post is not all about excuses, but it helps that I show you what has been happening online.

REVISION – Hi – this is a quick revision of this post. It is now a few weeks later, and two big changes have happened. I have reopened the orders for you to order websites. I needed to be sure that I could still generate traffic to websites, and I have done this again. Secondly – this website dropped as far down as 20 visitors a day, and it is climbing back up the SERPS very quickly, so it is nice to see that, and see the resulting clients that are coming in with it

Google is the king of the search engines, and this means that for anyone to get good search engine results positions - they need to start to obey Google rules.

What this means is that for Google to give the searcher the highest quality results for a searched for keyword term, they need to have complicated search algorithms in place to filter out any website that is of poor quality.

This basic understanding of how the search engine ranks your website for search queries is what online marketing is all about.

Now – over the last 7 months Google have introduced some of the biggest changes ever seen.

This has put millions of websites “out of business” and in a lot of cases this was deserved, and in other cases innocent small businesses have suffered.

COMPARE THE NEXT TWO LISTS

I believe in being honest online and never lying to my visitors, and always oversupply decent content. I go to a lot of trouble to research quality information so that you the reader or visitor will get a quality experience from my websites.

Now I apply this same principle when building sites for my clients, and naturally teach everyone to keep it clean and honest.

However there is a lot to apply to a website online – if you want to get good search engine results….

This following list is what I used to need to have on my website to get me website ranked for keywords.

• High quality content
• A variety of media – Videos – written content – slides and images.
• Naturally everything original and well researched.
• Keyword orientated, this I try to stick to, but will also suggest that your content has variety related to what you need to show people about your services.
• Some social sharing. I never did a lot of this, as I feel that it is not natural for a website (business owner) to know how to do this social marketing
• Very little back-linking. Again – I feel that while “back-linking” can show the value of a website, this would only apply to the popular sites like 9gag or news 24 or Victoria’s secret, and is actually unnatural for a normal landscaping website to need these linking tools.
• Then naturally I used to spend a lot of time making the website look good, have a natural navigation layout etc. This user experience seems very important to me.

Now you need to know that this worked out very well for me, and all my websites and my clients website were very well ranked online.

BUT – THE MOST RECENT ALGORITHMS HAVE KNOCKED MY SITES FOR A BIG LOOP, AND HERE IS WHY…

These days you cannot just have what I used to use above as a guarantee that your website will hit page one online.

Cynical people (and I am included in this list) will say that Google is making it extremely difficult for a normal ordinary (offline) business to get visitor traffic online naturally and is forcing those businesses to have to pay for that traffic.

Now you need these extra thing to be happening on your website for you to stand a chance for rankings organically.

• Preferably NOT an exact match domain name
• Real contextual back links
• Blog comments with your page or post link in it (on other people websites)
• A lot more social activity, your site needs to be seen on all the big social sites all the time.
• A large video channel on YouTube
• A bunch of other fine details – like revised content, age of back links, age of website, Branding etc.

So why am I telling you all this?

Let me start with the most open and honest answer.

Your Prices are going to go up.

I now know that what I used to do to get a new website ranking on a few top keywords takes 5 times longer (not time wise – but work wise) This simple fact is ok, all it really does is increase the costs that I need to charge my clients.

That alone is bad, but because this online marketing thing has become that much harder, those SEO experts that used to rely on simple back linking software to get their clients websites ranked, will have disappeared and those new (well built) websites will rank above them forever.

Google are not playing fair to the normal business person.

By laying down all these complicated marketing things, it puts the ordinary mom and pop business at the end of the queue as far as getting business online goes.

This puts power back into the hands of big business and that is not good for the world economically.

MY FINAL COMMENTS

I am about to launch a very complicated marketing campaign onto about 5 or 6 of my own websites.

This would not only get those websites into the highly profitable end of the search results pages, but will prove that my new site building and marketing methods are working.

For this reason – ALL NEW ORDERS ARE ON HOLD WHILE I TEST THESE “NEW” MARKETING METHODS TO SEE HOW EFFECTIVE THEY ARE GOING TO BE.

Existing clients are already getting the benefit of changes that I am applying, and well done to them, they are gaining thousands of Rands of testing linking etc to their projects.

In your own interests I am doing this to protect your ROI costs, and before I tell you that what I do as far as marketing online goes, I personally need to be 100% sure that what I do and apply works.

I guess that if all you are needing is a well designed website and with no marketing I could still take your order, but we will need to discuss that, so contact me via the contact page to ask me that.

I personally believe that all the content that I have here on this website is of the highest standards, yet Google with its EMD upgrade blew away 90% of my visitors.

As of today (the end of October 2012) I will start to apply some marketing tools and methods that will either catapult this website back to where it belongs (on page one of the relevant keyword searches) or kill the website off completely.

I have never been a fan of needing to go and look for quality back-links, but that is the sort of thing I will be doing.

I will also be revising a lot of the older pages on this site and will start a very intense social marketing mission.

That alone is very time consuming (if done honestly – IE without software)

What about the future?

Well should these methods work, and I expect that they will.

I will be offering two new products and basically removing all the old offers.

ONE. I will be doing built for you website businesses in a big way. The “Buy a Business”  types. It would also be complete website builds for existing businesses.

TWO. Because the costs for doing those done for you websites is going to be high (time and effort involved) I will start a membership website where you can become a monthly member, and I will start to add video training, and a lot of input that will allow you to follow along and do what I do by yourself, without needing to pay the big bucks. This option comes down to how much time you have available. Time really is money online.

Naturally, if all of this is giving you a bad headache (and I can believe that) then you could simply go to Google and pay for your traffic (or Facebook for that matter) Perhaps R10.000 a month for clicks is easier.

You decide.

If you have enjoyed reading what I have written here please share it using the buttons below, that is exactly the sort of thing Google is looking for to rank the page better – your social stamp of approval!

Thank You for reading my post

Rob Anderson

PS I suggest that you go and get a copy of my newest free report – it explains everything you need to know about website marketing.

Click on the image below