The barrier to entry into the online market is much lower than traditional businesses, which is great. But, it’s a double edge sword because the easier it is to do something, the more people try it out. This means that you have to work harder at distinguishing yourself from the melee of other startups out there – because, believe me, there are a lot.

Less than 5% of all purely online businesses (i.e. business that have no traditional, physical counterpart) ever actually make any money. It’s hard to draw a decent living from the Internet, but because it is easy to setup, the allure is great enough to keep people trying. If you are to be successful it is imperative that you avoid the mistake of not being disciplined in your approach.

Here’s a checklist of all the things you need to consider before starting a business online (I’ll explain each step after):

• Understand your value offering
• Identify the market
• Market discovery & research
• Identify the needs of your online business
• Select a suitable web platform
• Design and develop your web presence
• Generate content
• Deliver content & drive traffic
• Convert traffic
• Monetize
• Traffic analysis
• Refine

Starting a business: Market research

The first three points in this startup checklist basically require you to do adequate research into your market. You have to know what the value of your offering is to the people you are offering it to. For example, there’s no point in pricing your premium content at $3 a posting when the exact same content is being given away at a larger, more established site.

It might sound redundant, but often small businesses take far too long to understand where value lies in what they offer. By understanding:

• what you offer
• who you are offering it to
• why there is a demand for your offering
• where those people are
• how to get your message through to them

you are well placed to start a business.

Starting a business: Online implementation

The following three steps in the Internet business startup checklist deal with setting up a suitable web platform from which to start generating revenue. You know what your business needs to deliver and who it has to go to, so now you need to decide on the best way to meet those business requirements.

If you are an affiliate marketer, then a free WordPress blog might well be suitable. However, free online tools might be easy to setup but they are not as flexible and powerful as other web platforms.

If you want to take control of your own online advertising, create an eCommerce website, operate a forum, support center, and so on, then you will most likely need to use a good CMS platform like Drupal. You might also need to speak to a professional designer or developer to help you set up your website quickly and efficiently.

Remember that it is really important that you look to the future before deciding on a web platform. You will have to do some marketing, so make sure you can easily add new content to your site. You might want to make revenue from advertising down the line, so make sure you have the facilities in place ahead of time… you get the idea.

Starting a business: Internet marketing

Recall that at the start of this article I mentioned how easy it was to start an online business? The other side of that coin is that every man and his dog is doing exactly that. Online consumers are jaded, and impatient. It is not easy to convince them to spend their dollars with your relatively unknown startup because there are millions of relatively unknown startups, and most of them are complete rubbish.

You distinguish yourself from the sea of competitors by creating great content. I’m not joking either. Creating high quality, highly relevant, engaging and SEO enhanced content is arguably the most important marketing exercise you can undertake. It takes a while for your content to be indexed by Google, but once it is the effects are cumulative (the more content you add, the more traffic you generate) and persistent (unlike online advertising, which offers no long term benefits).

Good content can also have incredible short term effects using social media. Write an informative article relating to your niche and spread it around twitter, Facebook, Digg and so on. You never know who might pick it up. Your article could lead to thousands or millions of hits, news articles, radio interviews and so on – and this can happen overnight. The world is changing rapidly and good content with a sound methodology for disseminating it, is the most powerful marketing tool you have.

Starting a business: Convert & monetize

You must make your site as easy to use as possible. Potential customers won’t waste their time trying to work out how to use your site. If it’s not immediately obvious how they can get what they want, they won’t do it. Not only should the UI (User Interface) be optimized, but the site itself should be designed to make it as easy as possible for visitors to convert to customers – i.e. it should be optimized for conversions.

Apart from converting customers, there are other ways to monetize a website. If you have done a good job of persistently creating engaging, highly relevant, SEO enhanced content then it is likely your site will begin appearing on the first page of the search engine results. When this starts happening, advertisers sit up and take note. You might find offers to advertise on certain high ranking pages start trickling and then flooding in.

The beauty of content based marketing is highlighted by this situation: You create content that helps you to market your business. The content then becomes so desirable that other companies are willing to pay you to advertise on it. In other words, you are being paid by other companies to market your own website.

Creating great SEO content is not simple. It takes time, patience and plenty of practice to get the hang of doing SEO keyword research, structuring your documents to be SE optimized, and so on. It’s not hard, certainly not impossible, but it is a skill you need to learn.

Starting a business: Analyze and refine your business

On paper, this whole checklist might seem like your business should run like clockwork. In reality, you will not get everything right the first time (no one ever does). You might be losing customers during checkout, your content might not be competitive enough to show up in search engines, your business value offering might be misdirected , and so on.

It is important to regularly analyze how your online business performs and look for areas of improvement. In particular, you will need to implement some form of traffic analytics for your website. Analytics (I recommend the free Google analytics) allows you to see where traffic has come from and what it does on your site. This helps you position your marketing efforts and improve on under-performing areas, while driving home your advantage in areas you are succeeding.

For the past 10+ years, Google utilized its PageRank methodology to rank websites. If you had a website about basketball, and you got a link from ESPN.com – Google would notice that your site is a quality site about basketball.  It was similar to a voting system, when a relevant and high authority site linked to you, it would count as a vote.  And the more votes your website received, the better your website would rank.  Of course relevance played a roll, as Google gave more value to sites linking to you which were about a similar topic as yours.  In addition, authority mattered, so one link from ESPN.com may hold more value than 5 links from sports related blogs which weren’t as popular.

Two other major factors that Google considered were unique content and the “Title Tag”.  Google wanted content that was unique and not displayed on other web pages across the internet.  If duplicate content was found, Google would determine which site was the original author of the content, and it would penalize the other sites which had scraped the content.

Google also factored the “Title Tag” as it was a way for web publishers to tell users and Google what the given webpage was about.  This helped Google to organize and rank web pages for given keyword searches.

This methodology for ranking web pages worked, and Google utilized the above methods in addition to several others to display highly relevant search results.  For years, Google results were of a higher quality than all other search engines, which is why Google continued to command over a 65% market share.  However, over the past few years, other search engines such as Bing caught up, and Google wasn’t so special anymore.  At the same time, web publishers became savvy and they figured out ways to sneak into Google ahead of more relevant results.  For example, earlier this year, JC Penny was accused of purchasing links on websites across the web to make Google think that these links were natural and thus a vote for JC Penny’s websites.

As more and more users complained about search results, Google realized it needed to shift, and in came Google Panda. Google Panda is an entirely new way for Google to evaluate websites.  And while Google will still factor in many of the same criteria it has in the past, Google Panda adds an entirely new element to Google’s ranking methodology.

Panda wants better quality websites in its results.  It is less concerned with signals that other websites give it and more concerned with what the actual users think about the website.  Think of Google Panda as an automated way for Google to have users power its search results.  The brilliant part is that it is user powered without the user having to do anything different.  Panda is not only genius, but it makes sense as it should prevent lower quality sites from tricking Google into thinking they are of higher quality.

Panda factors in a wide variety of user signals to help Google determine the quality of a website.  It looks at “Time on Site” as a way to determine how quality of an experience the user is having on a given site.  It looks at the bounce rate, which is a measure of the percentage of people that leave a site without doing anything.  It looks at social signals such as shares and +1′s as a way to see if people are recommending a given webpage.  It looks at page views per visit as a way to see how people are navigating through a given site.

Google also looks at Branded Search traffic which is the amount of people that are specifically looking for a given site. So, if your basketball site is called “Fun Basketball Dude” – and Google notices that an increasing amount of people are searching for “Fun Basketball Dude” as a way to get to your website, that is a way for Google to recognize that your site is enjoyed by users.

Overall, these are “usage metrics” and they signal to Google how users value a particular webpage or website.  In the old days, unique content was important, but Google Panda wants unique content that is also high quality content.  And the usage metrics Google has in place will help it to determine if the content that the reader lands on is truly high in quality.

If you are trying to rank well in Google – I think you should listen to what Google is saying.  Instead of trying to trick Google with Black Hat techniques, utilize Google’s tips which will essentially improve your site while boosting your chance at increased referral traffic from Google.

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Over the past decade, I have had the privilege of interviewing thousands of top business-to-business salespeople who sell for some of the world’s leading companies. I’ve also administered personality tests to 1,000 of them. My goal was to measure their five main personality traits (openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and negative emotionality) to better understand the characteristics that separate them their peers.

The personality tests were given to high technology and business services salespeople as part of sales strategy workshops I was conducting. In addition, tests were administered at Presidents Club meetings (the incentive trip that top salespeople are awarded by their company for their outstanding performance). The responses were then categorized by percentage of annual quota attainment and classified into top performers, average performers, and below average performers categories.

The test results from top performers were then compared against average and below average performers. The findings indicate that key personality traits directly influence top performers’ selling style and ultimately their success. Below, you will find the main key personality attributes of top salespeople and the impact of the trait on their selling style.

1. Modesty. Contrary to conventional stereotypes that successful salespeople are pushy and egotistical, 91 percent of top salespeople had medium to high scores of modesty and humility. Furthermore, the results suggest that ostentatious salespeople who are full of bravado alienate far more customers than they win over.

Selling Style Impact: Team Orientation. As opposed to establishing themselves as the focal point of the purchase decision, top salespeople position the team (presales technical engineers, consulting, and management) that will help them win the account as the centerpiece.

2. Conscientiousness. Eighty-five percent of top salespeople had high levels of conscientiousness, whereby they could be described as having a strong sense of duty and being responsible and reliable. These salespeople take their jobs very seriously and feel deeply responsible for the results.

Selling Style Impact: Account Control. The worst position for salespeople to be in is to have relinquished account control and to be operating at the direction of the customer, or worse yet, a competitor. Conversely, top salespeople take command of the sales cycle process in order to control their own destiny.

3. Achievement Orientation. Eighty-four percent of the top performers tested scored very high in achievement orientation. They are fixated on achieving goals and continuously measure their performance in comparison to their goals.

Selling Style Impact: Political Orientation. During sales cycles, top sales, performers seek to understand the politics of customer decision-making. Their goal orientation instinctively drives them to meet with key decision-makers. Therefore, they strategize about the people they are selling to and how the products they’re selling fit into the organization instead of focusing on the functionality of the products themselves.

4. Curiosity. Curiosity can be described as a person’s hunger for knowledge and information. Eighty-two percent of top salespeople scored extremely high curiosity levels. Top salespeople are naturally more curious than their lesser performing counterparts.

Selling Style Impact: Inquisitiveness. A high level of inquisitiveness correlates to an active presence during sales calls. An active presence drives the salesperson to ask customers difficult and uncomfortable questions in order to close gaps in information. Top salespeople want to know if they can win the business, and they want to know the truth as soon as possible.

5. Lack of Gregariousness. One of the most surprising differences between top salespeople and those ranking in the bottom one-third of performance is their level of gregariousness (preference for being with people and friendliness). Overall, top performers averaged 30 percent lower gregariousness than below average performers.

Selling Style Impact: Dominance. Dominance is the ability to gain the willing obedience of customers such that the salesperson’s recommendations and advice are followed. The results indicate that overly friendly salespeople are too close to their customers and have difficulty establishing dominance.

6. Lack of Discouragement. Less than 10 percent of top salespeople were classified as having high levels of discouragement and being frequently overwhelmed with sadness. Conversely, 90 percent were categorized as experiencing infrequent or only occasional sadness.

Selling Style Impact: Competitiveness. In casual surveys I have conducted throughout the years, I have found that a very high percentage of top performers played organized sports in high school. There seems to be a correlation between sports and sales success as top performers are able to handle emotional disappointments, bounce back from losses, and mentally prepare themselves for the next opportunity to compete.

7. Lack of Self-Consciousness. Self-consciousness is the measurement of how easily someone is embarrassed. The byproduct of a high level of self-consciousness is bashfulness and inhibition. Less than five percent of top performers had high levels of self-consciousness.

Selling Style Impact: Aggressiveness. Top salespeople are comfortable fighting for their cause and are not afraid of rankling customers in the process. They are action-oriented and unafraid to call high in their accounts or courageously cold call new prospects.
Not all salespeople are successful. Given the same sales tools, level of education, and propensity to work, why do some salespeople succeed where others fail? Is one better suited to sell the product because of his or her background? Is one more charming or just luckier? The evidence suggests that the personalities of these truly great salespeople play a critical role in determining their success.

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Here are ways to measure returns on your social media efforts.

1. Don’t get trapped in jargon. Each social site is different. Facebook “likes” and Twitter followers are important numbers. But don’t just track those. Track business results. Did you generate leads? Traffic? Did you turn detractors into promoters?

2. Quality matters. Who are your Twitter followers? Are they relevant? Spammers? Lots of people may follow you quickly, wanting you to follow them. If someone looks irrelevant, you’re not obligated to follow back.

3. Measure the conversation. When was the last time you forwarded a vendor e-mail? Measure the rate of shares, “retweets,” and comments as a way to gauge your reach.

4. Not all social media count. Not all sites are equal. Are there critical influencers in your market? Have you built relationships with them? Are you reaching out to Yelp commenters?

5. Know your visitors. Measure and score those who come to your site, and watch what they are doing. If you do this across all channels, you’ll know what’s working. If you do it right, social media will power your business to the next level, one customer at a time.

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