How to Profit by Being On-line
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Growing Your Local Business Using the Internet How to Profit by Being On-line even in a down economy Business is down everywhere. The economy is hurting and its effecting everyone's business. New ways must be found to generate more business, to prospect, to nuture leads until they're ready to buy instead of loosing them, and to get more purchases from our existing customers. Used correctly the Internet can be a powerful tool for the local business not only to survive these difficult times but to grow and prosper. 70% of all buyers buy from the web. 36% of all customers use the web to find local businesses. Understanding the specific strategies to profitably use the Internet will help capture that business and become the backbone of a companies marketing program. Did you know that most business websites loose money? For a local business or an Entrepreneur to profit from the Internet specific strategies must be used—and used in the proper order. The purpose of this short article is to discuss these strategies and how to use the Internet to improve your bottom-line. Easily and Quickly I have to start with those two words because the Internet has been made into a confusing babble of indecipherable jargon, hype and bad advice. A local business has very different goals than in Internet Marketer or an eCommerce Business. To drive customers into your place of business you don’t need to know about ‘search engine optimization,’ programming, html, Adwords (Google’s advertising program), or traffic generation. You need to know how to converse with your customers using a new medium—the Internetand how to build a relationship with new customers. Additionally, the Internet offers ways of saving money and expanding your business. Those need to be the focus of a local business and entrepreneurs, not gobbly gook or any get-rich-quick schemes. Using the Internet profitably and quickly breaks down into three areas: improving existing business processes, growing the business with new customers and increasing the spending of existing customers. and by expanding revenue opportunities by selling on the web. Most businesses start at the expansion stage and end up loosing money. While each of the three parts—improve, grow, expand—are not meant to be sequential steps they are an effective execution strategy. Each step impacts and builds upon the other. They are 3 parts of interconnected puzzle. If not followed in order the likely hood of being successful diminishes. Complexity increases with each component so having the earlier stage under your belt makes the next stage easier. Let’s discuss each of these areas in depth and find out how to grow your business using the Internet—profitably. Improve While we most of our efforts are focused on increasing sales and the number of customers we have don’t forget that the Internet can also decrease costs, improve operations, and transform service, support and customer loyalty. The illustration below lists the principle goals of using the Internet for your business are for this vital—and mostly overlooked—stage. The ways to reduce costs using the Internet are only limited by a person’s creativity and imagination, which I suppose is true of most of these strategies. Shopping around for better supplier pricing, reducing your off-line marketing costs, and resolving customer problems automatically and without employee costs are three examples. What problems do customers call about? Can these be put into a troubleshooting guide and put on the web? This would reduce the time spent on the phone so that other import things could be accomplished. What about the common questions you get asked? Could they be put into an FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) paper and put on the web? The Internet can be a kind of automatic phone system on steroids. But instead of getting caught in the “voice mail hell” of not speaking to a person, web users are grateful for the immediacy of the response, their control over it, and the information that they are able to access. Instead of making a call, waiting on hold, waiting until the right person answers and then getting put into voice mail they get help, the right help immediately. Smart businesses are putting service request forms on the Internet, FAQ and manuals on the web. How many times have you looked around for some manual and couldn’t find it? How much time have you wasted getting customer support on the phone when just having the manual or a place to go on the web could have resolved the problem? The more you help customers to ‘help themselves’ the happier they’ll be and the more likely they’ll buy from you again. Anticipate your customer’s problems and needs and put solutions on the Internet. These include: Include driving directions, or better yet use the free services of Yahoo Maps or Mapquest to provide door-to-door instructions complete with a map. Full contact information, including hours of operation, emergency contacts, and other critical information—like being closed because of the weather. How many times have you gone to a store only to find it closed when it should have been open? Did you go back? Customer support is an overlooked area for most businesses. Even services that can be only given off-line, such as hair dressers or photographers can improve their customer support on-line. Customers can look at your products, make color selections, make design choices and do all kinds of things before ever entering into a store or calling for a visit. Instead of having to educate the customer or hard sell them they do the work. When they contact you they’ll be qualified and ready to purchase. Customers can book their own appointments, get notified when work is done, order additional work, and resolve problems— all without you or your employees lifting a finger. The Internet can improve operations as well by outsourcing and by replacing manual systems with automatic processes. Less and less people are using the Yellow Pages, dictionaries or even print encyclopedias. Use the Internet to streamline and optimize what the business does. Order items on-line, resolve vendor problems and well, use searchable media instead of catalogs, the list is endless. Costs will go down and productivity up. Use your creativity. Everything done for a customer builds a brand and the customer’s loyalty. Most importantly they leverage resources and time. You can stop doing many of the things you now do in order to make and keep customers happy. Let the Internet do it for you. Grow Growth is what we all want. Growth of our sales, growth in the number of customers we serve, and most importantly profit growth. Unfortunately this is where most Internet efforts start and it is exactly wrong for two reasons: It’s much easier and far less costly to get repeat business from existing customers than finding new customers Unless costs are decreased—which goes directly to the bottom line—and have optimized business processes (support, service, etc.) you’ll end up getting more customers but not necessarily happy ones. Both of these mistakes cost money. That is why IMPROVEMENT comes first. By starting with IMPROVEMENT you’ll develop familiarity and specific skills with the Internet. The business will be on the web—complete with a website and people using it.Many off-line resources will now be converted and on the web to attract new business. Now you’re ready to blast off for phenomenal growth. We’re going to look for growth in three areas: with existing customers, by getting more referral business and by getting new customers. These three areas are not mutually exclusive but like dynamite combined with a fuse make for an explosive sales engine. One of the areas I didn’t cover in the IMPROVE section was the establishment of measurements. It is important to know what the current lifetime value of a customers is. By taking the time to establish some important benchmarks about your business you can improve them. What is the current store traffic? What percentages of leads are converted to sales? As these metrics are monitored you’ll not only know which efforts are effective but how to adapt and improve them. They become the foundation from which to manage Internet efforts and move into the Growth Stage. In the Growth Stage we want to get our customers to buy more from us and more frequently. We want them to provide us with referrals. Lastly we want to get new customers. Aside from the last item—prospecting for new business—how many businesses have processes in place to get referrals or customers to buy more? Almost every technique used in the off-line world can be used effectively on-line—perhaps even better. Advertising, Direct Market Messages, Coupon Distribution are just a few that can be done on the internet. Plus the Internet costs less (email is free) and it is targeted and measurable—things that conventional marketing often aren’t. Here are just a few examples of how the Internet is currently blowing the socks off any other type of advertising.. ? A Physician generates 22 new patients per month with an ad budget of only $500 per month.. ? A restaurant averages built a 6,000 person subscriber list and when business is slow they email out a coupon...packing the room within hours. ? A Dry Cleaning Business has created a family of loyal customers using the Internet and email, who not only use his business exclusively but bring in their friends and family ? A motorcycle dealer increased sales by 500% when he began offering online customizations...selling 30 to 50 units per month to local customers. ? A local clothing store generates 2,000 to 4,000 visitors per day online ...and eventually expanded past their geographic area into selling clothes nationwide. Right now there is a important trend happening—quietly. The web is going local. It's not fancy. It's certainly not flashy. It's just a fact. The biggest Internet names are creating local sites….Yahoo Local, Google Local, and MSN Local. It is now possible to target consumers by city - even down to zip code. Today’s technology even enables us to use the Internet to narrow our efforts to a tiny geographic area of just a few miles around our place of business. This wasn’t possible before and so only large national companies concentrated on using the Web. Other companies, if they went on the web at all, simply used the Internet as an electronic brochure offering a lot of “me too information.” Getting directions and some contact information was nice but it didn’t really help drive customers into a local business or nurture prospects into a relationship that lead to getting a sale. Did you know that 70% of buyers now use the Internet when shopping locally for products and services? Here is another amazing statistic 36% of all internet searches are about Local Businesses—36%! What this means is that if your looking for growth the Internet is the place to get it. We need to do three things to accomplish our growth goals: Provide an incentive for existing customers to do more business with us Create processes that deliberately and consistently produce referrals for us Prospect and nurture new business leads/opportunities until they become customers We should be experience and increase in customer spending because of our efforts in the IMPROVE stage. Now we want to employ specific tactics to increase the amount of business they do with us. Sending out timely coupons, emailing people when your business is slow, offering an on-line newsletter with ideas they can use (and need your products and services for) will all increase customer spending. The great thing about the Internet is that everything you do can be used in many ways. Or it can be tweaked to provide a different result without having to reinvent the wheel. Sent out a coupon to get someone into the store—change it to get a referral, offering a discount for every new customer they bring to you. Use your newsletter as a free bonus to new customers on how-to do something. Be creative. It costs nothing to try a new idea out on the Internet. The biggest reasons that customers don’t give us referrals are that they don’t know how, we don’t ask or that they’re not happy. Create a referral program using discounts, coupons, membership benefits and other tactics. Be deliberate and persistent. Message this to your customers. Make them partners in your business success. They’ll be happy to do it if you make the process easy and if they’re happy about the products and services being provided to them. Prospecting is more complicated and involved than increasing your customer share of wallet or referrals. While the Internet is going local it is still a vast marketing space and strategies of getting customers in to visit your website must be used. Fortunately there are many of ways and resources to do this with, many of which are free. We’ll only touch on two here: directories and community websites. The Internet has hundreds of directories which want to list off-line businesses for free or at a very low cost. If you’re spending money on Yellow Page ads now it may be able to combine a print ad with an on-line ad. Many Yellow Pages feed their information to other web directories, including search engines such as Google and Yahoo. Below are some of my favorites: http://www.infobel.com http://local.yahoo.com http://local.google.com www.switchboard.com www.infospace.com In addition to the national and Yellow Page directories there are local sites that exist solely for the purpose of promoting your town and the businesses in it. The local Chamber of Commerce (the national website for locating a local chapter is: www.chamberofcommerce.com) and your local government most likely will have a website. They need information. They will post community events, business events, specials, anything that brings in business and tourists. Do a Google search on city guides where you live to find these sites. For example, I would search Google for Pittsburg + Pennsylvania + +city directory” to find them for Pittsburg, PA.. Also check out: www.digitalcity.com www.WowWorks.com Expand At this point we have dramatically increased our revenue. We’ve gotten new customers, increased customer value and have a system in place to continue growing. The last step is to expand our products and services directly on the web. There are many ways to make money on the Internet. Some of the ways that we are not gong to cover here are selling leads, advertising space and other pure ‘eCommerce’ methods. Frankly there are too many scams and get rich quick schecmes in these areas. There are are also hundreds of websites, books, and courses dedicated to these subjects. Just do a web search if you’re interested in these topics. That said, increasing expsanding what we do is an important part of successfully profiting from being on the Internet. The Internet can reach a vast audience far outside of your existing customer base. Existing products can be digitized or tweaked for the web can be sold nationally, even globally using the Internet A Piano teacher wrote music instructions and sells them on the web A Yoga instructor wrote a course on how to become a Yoga instructor and sells it on the web An auto parts store sells specially car emblems on the web and plans to offer other hard to find items on the Internet An Amish Restaurant in Pennsylvania offers its unique and well loved recipes on the web, as well as mail order baked goods. It expects its on-line profits to exceed those of the restaurant within the next 6 months Generating additional revenue on the web includes selling your own products and service on the web. This may mean creating those products as the entrupenurs above. More money and sales can be created by getting others to sell for you, including other local businesses. Find other businesses that will send out your emails, coupons, and newletters in exchange for distributing their information or a piece of the profits. Sell other peoples products on your website and form joint-ventures with other businesses. There are many companies that specialize in putting partners together. Find other products, both on-line and off-line. Find places and people who will sell your products or send web traffic to your website. Two of my favorite resources are www.clickbank.com www.commissionjunction.com Summing Up There are three interlocking strategies for growing a business using the Internet: improving a business, growing a business, and expanding a business. Done sequentially they build upon one another and increase revenues immediately. 70% of all buyers buy from the web. 36% of all customers use the web to find local businesses. Understanding the specific strategies to profitably use the Internet will help capture that business and become the backbone of a companies marketing program. Where to Go from Here Executing these strategies will take additional information, tools and resources, which is why I wrote “Growing Your Business Using the Internet” Mastery Course. This Home Study program consists of: THE BLUEPRINT Instructions for driving monumental amounts of new customers into your business and mining the gold in your existing customers THE ACTION PLAN A 30 Day Step-By-Step Action Plan with pictures of each activity, from creating your website in UNDER 30 minutes to creating incredibly profitable email marketing campaigns DIRECTORY & TOOLS There are hundreds of websites where you can promote your business. This directory makes them easy to find and tells you which ones are the best. Also included - FOR FREE - are several tools, software, extra books, and tons of useful information, most of which you can use to create interesting emails and web copy Having it Done for You! A big obstacle that keeps many businesses off the Internet is getting started and having the materials to put into a website. “Growing Your Business Using the Internet” Mastery Course does the work for you. We will digitize your company's marketing literature, brochure, and photographs, Up to 7 pictures and 10 pages of copy. This is what often stops people from getting started - having content to go online with. (A Real $195 Service that we perform every week for customers) We will speak on the phone and together set up your website and email marketing campaign. We'll spend about 2 hours consulting about your business strategies for using the Internet to rocket profits The cost of this Bonus alone exceeds the cost of this course (This costs my off-line customers $600) We'll get your email campaign rolling and off to a explosive start. With this course you'll get enrolled in Business Web Step's email program where we create the email and help you with your monthly campaign. Image one month free where you get your email written and have access to our member services, such as tele-training, webinars, and much much more. (This costs $150 for a monthly subscription) Do It Now!! Businesspeople are busy, often having to do the urgent before the important. Too often using the Internet profitably falls into the “when I get around to it category”. However if 70% of the market is buying from someone else and 36% of all local buyers are looking for a local business can you afford to delay? Action trumps good ideas. Have you ever lost a good opportunity because you failed to take immediate action? Have you ever had a great idea or an invention and see it somewhere else? Stop loosing money by not acting. Grow your business and propel it forward to greater profits and yourself to greater success. Do it now. Go to http://businesswebstep.com/GrowYourBusiness.html and get the information you need to profit from the Internet now. If you have any questions you can also reach me at Russ Emrick BusinessWebStep.com russ@businesswebstep.com 717-481-0876 Wishing you success and prosperity, Russ Copyright © 2008, WebStep, LLC, All rights reserved
About the Author
Russ Emrick is a salesman and small business consultant with over 26 years of helping local businesses grow. Entrepreneurs can use the Internet to increase their sales and profits using the Internet. With targeted strategies Russ Emrick shows how the Internet can be used get more business from existing customers an find new ones. In this economic downturn the Internet will be the key to not only growing but survival.
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