Don’t Fall For The Shiny Objects

Developing a successful online business is not easy despite what you may have heard. You are going to need all of the help you can get and there are lots of tools available to assist you.

If you don’t choose the right niche for your online business then it is very likely to fail. There are thousands of different niches that you can choose from but you need to check that they have the potential for you to build a successful online business around.

In some niches, there are new product launches every single day. With the make money online niche there is usually more than one new product launched each day. All of the sales products for these product launches tell you that their training will show you that you need to use their tactics to be successful with your online business.

Choose The Right Business Model

There are several different online business models that you can choose from. It is very important that you choose the right model as you will need to work on this every day to achieve success.

Here are some of the most common online business models:

• Affiliate Marketing
• CPA Marketing
• Product Creation
• Your Own Online Store
• Amazon FBA
• Dropshipping
• Dropserviceing
• Freelance Services
• Self Publishing

You need to consider a number of different factors when choosing the right online business model and I will examine those in this blog post. It is very important that you do not make the wrong choice here as this will be a major barrier to your success.

Do You Have Money To Invest?

Do you have a few hundred or a few thousand dollars to invest in your new online business? If you don’t then you can forget about setting up your own online store or Amazon FBA. Unless you are prepared to do all of the work creating your own product then this is probably not a good choice either.

Whatever online business model you choose you are going to need a small amount of money to pay for a domain name and web hosting and an autoresponder service for email marketing. So take a good look at your budget to see what funds you can allocate to your online business.

You could borrow money to start your online business but that is probably not a good idea. It can take some time for you to see profits and in the meantime, you will have to make loan repayments. Only you can decide if borrowing money is a good idea or not.

How Much Time Do You Have?

All of the online business models will require your time, but some of the models can be successful with less time than others. For example, it is relatively easy to get started with affiliate marketing and if you are short on time then you can use paid traffic sources to generate targeted traffic to your offers.

If you have a full-time job that is currently paying the bills then I strongly recommend that you stick with this until the income from your online business overtakes the pay you receive from your job. Don’t put yourself under unnecessary pressure.

What Skills Do You Have?

Do you have skills that you can sell for a higher price by offering freelance services? Do you have a skill that you can turn into a high-demand product? Perform a skills assessment to see what you can offer and determine the demand for your skills before you make a decision.

If you are a good writer or copywriter then you can make a lot of money selling your services. Bear in mind though that you will be selling your time for money and this can be really tough if you have a full-time job.

Creating a training package around an in-demand skill that you have could be very lucrative. You can record training videos and other resources to create a powerful package. Maybe you are an expert in a particular niche and can start a blog about this and create a YouTube channel. You can sell your own products or recommend affiliate products.

Is Affiliate Marketing The Perfect Business?

Affiliate marketing is certainly one of the easiest online business models to get started with. All I recommend is that you start with a domain name, web hosting, a WordPress blog, and an autoresponder service.

Once you have chosen your niche then you will need to find good affiliate offers to promote. If you choose a popular niche like making money online, weight loss, or personal development then there will be no shortage of offers for you to choose from.

Product Reviews

You will need to decide how you will promote the affiliate offers. One of the most effective ways to do this is to create product reviews. Your review needs to be honest and point out and disadvantages of each product as well as the advantages.

A lot of people look for product reviews before they purchase a product. If you can get your review in front of these potential buyers, and your review is good, you will make an affiliate commission with this approach.

Some product reviews are harder to rank for in search engines and YouTube searches than others. If the product has a good reputation and pays a generous commission then there is likely to be a lot of competition. Do your homework here and choose the right traffic strategy.

You can test the effectiveness of your product reviews by spending a little money on paid traffic. Measure the number of visits against the commissions you make to determine the conversion rate. The good thing about this strategy is that you can generate traffic fast and make tweaks to your reviews for higher conversions.

What Makes A Good Affiliate Offer?

First and foremost a good affiliate offer is one that converts. It is no good promoting an affiliate offer with excellent commissions if it hardly ever converts because you will not make any money.

The best affiliate offers will have the right combination of high conversions and good commissions. affiliate offers that have monthly recurring commissions are well worth considering. You just need to drive traffic that converts once and then you will receive commissions each month as long as the customer stays with the program.

Use reputable affiliate networks to ensure that you receive your commission payments on time. ClickBank has an excellent reputation for paying their affiliates for example. You do not want to put in a lot of hard work only to find that there is a delay in receiving your commissions or you don’t receive them at all.

Do You Need Approval?

With some affiliate offers you will need to be approved by the product vendor first. If you are in the make-money-online niche then you will find this to be the case with affiliate networks like WarriorPlus and JvZoo.

You have to make a request and tell the vendor how you will promote their products. When you are just starting out it can be tough to get approval as you do not have a track record. Start with ClickBank or Digistore24 as these provide instant approval.

It is easy to start with affiliate marketing but being successful with it is not always easy. You are always likely to face competition from other affiliates and you will need convincing tactics to convert visitors into buyers.

Avoid The Shiny Object Syndrome

Some niches have new product launches every single day, and in the make-money-online niche, there are usually several launches every day.

I’m not saying that these products do not provide any value. Some of them are really good and will reveal techniques that you will be unaware of. But a lot of these products are the same thing rehashed over and over again.

Wild Claims

It’s hard to believe that in this day and age some of the wild claims made by these product vendors are allowed. Again, the make-money-online niche is probably the biggest culprit with this. There are sales letters and videos that claim that you can make a fortune by using their software and there is hardly any work for you to do.

Turning your computer into an ATM is a classic claim that some of these sales pages make. This is total nonsense of course but it is surprising how many people fall for this. Getting buyer traffic to your offers in under 60 seconds is another classic wild claim. If it seems too good to be true then it probably is…

The Grass Is Greener…

A lot of sales pages for new products in your niche are going to tell you that you are doing it all wrong and that your current online business will never be as successful as you want it to be. They tell you that you need to join forces with them as the grass is greener over there.

The grass is rarely greener with these programs. There are always different techniques that you can use to improve your online business but what you shouldnät consider is changing it altogether. It doesn’t matter how powerful the copywriting is on the sales page you should stick with your current business and work on ways to increase your revenues.

Changing from one online business model to another is something that newcomers to online business tend to do a lot. They give up on one model very fast because they are not getting the results they expect. These people are always on the look for the next shiny object that will change their lives.

You will never have a successful online business if you keep chopping and changing all of the time. Stick with your original plan and see it through. If you have tried your best and it doesn’t deliver the results that you want then you can think about a change. Changing on the whim of a new shiny object is something that you need to avoid.

Limited Your Exposure To Shiny Objects

If you are being exposed to new shiny objects on a regular basis then cut out the source. Maybe you are a member of an online forum where this is discussed all the time. Either stop using the forum or avoid the sections that have shiny object information.

A lot of people hear about new shiny objects via email. Unsubscribe from the list that just keeps pumping out these offers to you. They are not providing any value and just cluttering up your inbox.

Tools For Developing A Successful Online Business

What do you need when developing a successful online business? Well, you will need a website or blog to promote whatever you are selling. There are free website services such as Weebly, Blogger, And WordPress, but I strongly recommend that you avoid the free services. Not that they are bad, but they inspire less confidence.

Internet users are a lot smarter than they used to be. They know that they can start a free website with Weebly for example. This is OK if you just want to blog about your life and let your friends know what you are up to.

But it is not OK for business purposes. In order to make money with your online business you will need to sell something or promote things for a commission. If people see that you have a Blogger site then they will know it is free and think that you are cheap. There is a very slim chance that they will purchase anything from you.

Get A Domain Name & Web Hosting

The best way to developing a successful online business is to choose a domain name and connect it with a web hosting account so that you can make your website live on the Internet. A domain name is usually available for around $10 from registrants like Namecheap and GoDaddy, but some web hosting providers offer a free domain. You have to renew your domain name each year.

There are thousands of companies offering web hosting services and it can be difficult to choose the right one. Page loading speed is very important for your visitors and for the search engines like Google. So do some research and find web hosts that have the fastest servers. Downtime is also very important. The web hosting provider should have almost zero downtime.

Nobody wants to wait too long for your website to load. there is so much choice available they will just go elsewhere. This is a disaster for your online business so make sure that you choose a web host with fast servers.

Other things to look for with a web host include:

• • Unlimited disk space
  • Unlimited Bandwith
  • The number of domain names you can use
  • Free SSL certificates
  • Malware monitoring and removal
  • One-click WordPress install

When you are starting out a shared web hosting plan is fine. These are the cheapest plans as you share resources with others. As your traffic increases, you can migrate to a VPS server or a dedicated server.

Install WordPress On Your Domain Name

The easiest way to create your website is to use the free WordPress content management system. This is why it is important that your web host has a one-click install for this (most of them do).

Once your domain name is connected to your web hosting you can then use the one-click WordPress installation feature to install the platform on your domain name. You just need to provide a couple of details and then click the install button and a few seconds later your blog will be ready.

The reason that I recommend WordPress is that it is so easy to use. You do not need any technical knowledge to set up WordPress or add your content to it- Change the look and feel of your website with a new theme and enhance the functionality with the numerous plugins available.

Your New Business Needs Traffic

One of the fastest ways to grow and developing a successful online business is paid traffic. The benefit of paid traffic is that it is easy to set up and you can receive new traffic very fast. Free traffic methods usually take a lot more to generate visitors.

There are a number of paid traffic sources that you can use and I will take a look at the most common ones here. It goes without saying that you need to monitor your spending with paid traffic. You also need to check your conversion rates to see what ads are providing the best results and eliminate those that are ineffective.

Search Engine Marketing Or Pay Per Click (PPC)

Major search engines such as Google and Bing provide the opportunity for you to place ads on the first page of their search results. You can also extend your reach to content publishers who run these ads.

In order to use PPC ads you need to perform keyword research for your online business. You have to identify the most common terms that people looking for what you have to offer will enter into the search box.

Once you have a list of keywords that you want to run ads for then you will need to arrange them in groups and make bids for the top positions. You will also need to write ads following the prescribed format.

PPC ads are a very good way to get targeted traffic to your site. You can set daily budgets for your campaigns so that you do not overspend. It is also possible to run split test ads to see which ones perform the best.

You will find that it is quite a bit cheaper to run PPC campaigns using Microsoft Ads than it is to Google Ads. That is because the column of searches on Bing and Yahoo is a lot less than they are on Google.

Social Media Ads

All of the major social media platforms have ad services that you can use to promote your products and services. These are not based on search terms like PPC ads. What you can do with social media ads that you cannot do with PPC is define the audience that you want to see your ad.

Knowing your target audience is very important. What age range are your target customers? Where do they live? What are their interests? What income levels do they have? These are just a few of the questions that will help you define your target audience.

Facebook and Instagram have an insights program where you can specify all of these things. Other social platforms are following suit. You can boost your social media posts and increase your following with social media ads.

Native Ads

This can be really effective as they blend in well with the rest of the content where they are displayed. They can work really well for you if you sell products and services that have a wide appeal such as weight loss and exercise products, make-money products, etc.

You need to add an enticing image with your native ad. The image is what gets the click. Once clicked, the visitor is taken to a landing page where they can be presented with an offer or enticed to join your email list.

If you are in the make-money-online business, your chances to use ads on search engines and social media are almost zero. So, before you set up your ad and spend money be sure that it is ok, if not you will be banned and your money will be frozen.

Free Traffic Methods You Can Use

There are a number of free traffic methods that you can use to increase the number of visitors to your website ´and I will take a look at some of the most effective methods here. But, you have to remember that free traffic methods will require consistent effort on your part to achieve the best results.

Always Add Content To Your Site

Adding new content to your site on a regular basis is a good way to generate free traffic. Your visitors will like the fact that you publish new content often and will come back for more. The search engines such as Google want to publish new content regularly too and in time they will probably reward you with a good ranking for some search sites.

Always publish content that is valuable on your website. Shoe people on how to do certain things in your niche or publish a case study about something you did that achieved a good result. Quality content is always recommended. If you don’t have the time to write your content then find a good writer to outsource this to.

Social Media

You should not ignore the power of social media. Social media is crucial when developing a successful online business. Facebook is the largest social media platform in the world and it is very easy to create a Facebook Page and post some good content there.

The main idea is to increase the number of followers that you have on your social media profiles. Posting valuable content is a great way to do this as it is very likely to be shared and this will help to grow your following.

You do not have to create a profile on all the social media platforms but I do recommend that you have a Twitter account and depending on what niche you choose also an Instagram account. Do your homework and identify which platforms are the best fit for your business. It can be really time-consuming managing different social media accounts so only choose the ones that are likely to provide the best results for you.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Whatever type of online business you are starting it should always be your aim to get free traffic from search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo. There are a number of things that you can do to provide yourself with the best chance of ranking your pages high in the search engines for specific keywords.

The first thing to do is comprehensive keyword research. You need to identify what terms people are using to search for the kind o information you provide. Then you need to optimize your content around these keywords.

If you are using WordPress there are some really good SEO plugins that will help you with this.

Email Marketing

You will need an email autoresponder service to perform email marketing so this is nearly free. the money is on the list so make sure that you build an email list for your online business. This means that you need to capture the email address of your visitors in exchange for an ebook etc.

Offer your visitors a free report or guide for joining your email list. If you run an eCommerce store you could offer them a special discount. Send your email subscribers regular emails that are a mixture of valuable promotional offers.

Social media is more or less a must. You should not underestimate the power of social media, also social media gives you when done right free traffic.

SEO should always be given some time, both to understand but also to optimize your page. Email Marketing is another powerful tool that should be used. You can start with the free subscription first, but don’t show a free provider. You should choose a provider that has a free alternative.

Wrapping Up

When developing a successful online business there are some things that you really should have in your mind. Your business strategy and business model are number one.

If you choose the affiliate marketing business model, don’t fall for all the shiny objects, avoid the shiny object syndrome.

These tips are the most common, effective, and important tips to generate traffic to your business. You should at least implement some of them in your strategy to grow and develop a successful online business. When choosing your domain name, ideally take a name that is as similar to your business’s as possible. But it should be short and simple, not too long.

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