Now, this doesn’t mean just pick yourself up and willy-nilly dive into things. You’ve gotten your education. You now know what is required in order to start whatever business it is that you want to start. However, things have to be done in a certain order. You want to be systematic about this.
Again, unfortunately, because there are so many things that you can do online, there is no way I can give a step by step plan for each one of them. We’ll be here until 10 years from next Tuesday.
However, there are some basic steps that I have found are common to any online business, whether it be copywriting, affiliate marketing or whatever.
1. Establish An Online Presence – Regardless of what you’re going to do, you’re going to need to establish an online presence. This means getting a domain. If you’re going to go into affiliate marketing, you’re going to want a domain name that reflects that in some way. If you’re going to go into affiliate marketing, same thing. You can’t run an online business without a place people can go to in order to either purchase your product, subscribe to your service or if for no other reason, to simply contact you with questions.
2. Set Up Shop – Make sure that you have all the things you need set up in order to conduct your business. For example. Let’s say you’re going into affiliate marketing and you want to make sure that if people don’t purchase the products you promote right away, that you have an autoresponder and lead capture page set up to build your list. You want to make sure that EVERYTHING is set up BEFORE you actually begin to actively work your business.
3. Advertise Your Existence – Once you’ve gotten your online presence established, you need to let people know that you exist. If you have a copywriting service, nobody will know that you do if you don’t actively promote yourself. If you’re an affiliate marketer and you want people to pitch their products to you for you to promote (assuming you aspire to be a super affiliate like Ewen Chia) then you also need to make sure that merchants can find you.
4. Test And Track – Monitor your results. See where you’re doing well and where you’re not. If you’re promoting affiliate products, see which ones are converting well. Try to determine where in the process things are fouling up. Is it the product? Is it you ad? Is it your autoresponder series? This step alone can take weeks if not months to get things running just right.
5. Make Adjustments – Whatever you’re doing, if you find things that aren’t working, make adjustments. Sometimes the adjustments will make things better, other times worse. If you’re a copywriter and you’re using a certain style that you find is only converting at 2% for targeted Adwords advertising, make adjustments to your style. You may find conversions go up or down. There are no guarantees. A lot of running a business is trial and error. However, if you’ve done a good job on your education, your sales copy should be relatively solid. This is why education is so important. You’re not groping in the dark as much if you’re properly educated.
6. Duplicate – Once you have things up and running and find that you’re doing relatively well, you then want to duplicate what you’ve done. With affiliate marketing, this could mean branching off into selling other products or even into a brand new niche. You have the basics down. Now all you have to do is duplicate your efforts elsewhere. This is what increases your income over time.
I realize that the above outline is rather simplified, but it’s all there is to it for the most part. Yes, there is a lot of work involved in all this and that work will vary depending on what exactly it is you want to do.
However, if you follow this outline, you’ll find that things begin to come a lot easier.But…There is still one final piece of the puzzle, and this is the deal breaker. With all the education, with all the steps with all of what I have said so far, none of it means a hill of beans without what comes in the final chapter. If you don’t do this ONE THING, you might as well take everything I’ve said so far and throw it in the trash.
If you’re ready, we’re now going to put the last piece of the puzzle together.