Plan of Action for Your Internet Success
Being an Internet addict for a good fifteen years now, I’ve come across a great number of books, reports, ebooks, lessons and other stuff that claim to be the last thing you’ll need to learn the Net and become successful. No matter how good it sounds when I read the caption on the back of the book, 100% of the time this thing end up in a place where it will be forgotten. And the reasons are simple. They’re tool long, too vague or simply too stupid, and often all three combined.
Additionally I often come across these sites that claim to be from Gurus and promises to deliver reaches only if you were to buy the guy’s ebook. Often there’s the Ferrari and the mention in the background and this guy is going to give you all his secrets for $9.99. Of all the garbage that I’ve seen on the Net (and there’s a lot of it) this is the stuff that piss me off the most because this collection of easily attainable information on the Net is nothing than BS riding on people’s hope.
As a result, I decided to write an “abc” of how to put together a plan of action to succeed (or at least have the chance to succeed) on the Internet. I’ve been putting this idea in the back of my mind for quite some time until I came across “The Marketing Helper” (http://www.theimhelper.com/). Similar idea that offers great advices except for its length (all combine I guess that all lessons would fill 500 plus pages book). However reviewing it done on me that this would be a great idea if it was “distilled” and presented as an easy to follow and apply guide. The result is what I offer here and on my site and what I call simply my “Plan of Action to Success on the Web”
This Plan of Action is of course free to use and to pass on as long as whoever uses it does not claim it as its own or tries to sale it. The idea of this plan of action is to make it a “living document” whereby I will insert new steps to the plan, gather comments and additional information and update on a regular basis
The first steps that I cover this month are as follows:
1. Define your Business
2. Search for Keyword
3. Research your Competition
4. Pass your First Test
1. Define an Area of Business where Opportunity Exists and Find a Niche
Many websites and gurus claim to have the secret to that one but if they know something you or I do not, I would be very surprised.
Bottom line, you must have an idea for a business, hopefully original but, more importantly, something that you want to do because you care not because someone told you that you can make millions doing nothing. I’ve been around for quite some time and been an entrepreneur most of my life and have never come across something that was easy.
So, please, whatever you do, do not spend your money buying some “get rich quick” skim. Doing this is like going to Vegas. Bells and whistles with only one guarantee: You will loose your money! (and I’m not sure you’ll even get bells and whistles)
Resources:
http://www.ryze.com/
Once you’ve done your research and found something you’d like to pursue, try to drill down to the very specifics of what you could do that is unique as far as targeting a niche audience, niche product or service, etc. For example let’s say that you’d want to generate leads for cars. That’s a business idea that has its merits but defining what kind of cars would bête even better. For example
2. Search for Keyword
The critical part of keywords is to find the best possible keyword with least possible competition. Furthermore it is very important to identify keywords as well as key phases that people search when looking for your product or service.
This being said, the type of keyword you will use for your Meta Tags (see SEO) and an SEM Campaign like Adwords maybe quite different.
Resources: Keyword Popularity
https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal
While the first resource (worldtracker.com) will give you an idea of the volume of search and similar terms, the second (adwords.google.com) can give you a good idea of what the cost for buying these keywords or key terms maybe.
Finally, I would definitely recommend that you open a Google Adwords account (Adwords.google.com) and set aside a small budget for testing your idea, creatives and website. But not to worry this will be explained later.
3. Research Competition and Learn
The best and easiest way to do this is search through Google, Yahoo or via directories for competitors and see what they do well and not so well and make a check list of what to do to improve or what not do when you come across competitors that are not doing it right
Resources:
Same as 1.
4. Pass your First Test
So here you are with a business idea, you research on keywords and an idea of you competition. Before you continue, you need to review all this and ask yourself a few questions:
a) Is the idea still a good one?
b) Are the keywords that you found well searched and is the cost reasonable considering your potential margin. This is a huge topic and one that is specific to your business and I’ll be happy to help if you contact me. No worries, I do not charge anything for simple questions so send me an email at jeantouboul@jtouboul.com or go to the form below.
c) Is your competition the type of companies or entities that you can take on? If you are trying to go after a market that is cornered by Apple for example, you better have a unique product and a lost of resources.
If all checks then I suggest that you go over all the details once more and make sure that you have not inserted in your analysis some elements of wishful thinking. As a matter of fact, I would suggest that you take the time to write a short pitch (couple of paragraph) and present it to someone who has never heard of it before. If you need to explain what it is you just presented then, in all probability, your idea is not clear and you need to go back to the drawing board. And DO NOT dismiss any criticism no matter how trivial or “uneducated”. I’ve seen too many people, including myself make this mistake and pay dearly for it.
Read Part 2 of the Plan of Action for Internet Success by clicking here
5 - Selecting a Domain Name
6 - Design and Content for your Site
7 - Select an ISP
Also check out my on-going posts about Internet Marketing Success 101 at jtouboul.com
