My first Internet business idea was to share african music and other entertainment with Africans around the world. I thought all I had to do was learn web design and I would build a successful web business. I never thought it would take years of research and testing.
Forget all the hype about new tools, online secrets and so on. I believe all you need to build a successful business online is some sort of understanding. By this, I mean understanding the online market, what works and what doesn’t, combined with hard work and perseverance, you will automatically guarantee your success online. It's simple!
So how do you understand the market and know what works and what doesn’t work? And save all the time you would have wasted following one new marketing secret after the other.
There are two ways you can learn this, the first you go through almost every online lesson through trial and error by yourself, or the second, you learn from someone that has been in and out of the struggle so you save yourself a great deal of time. Please dont get me wrong here. I am not trying to sell you something, nor am I trying to make myself your mentor, I also dont mean you should start following every online guru. That is also another formula for failure.
What I am trying to do is have you relax for a bit, and then have you analyse a few successes online, not the success stories you hear, but the actual story behind the success story. Look at how someone that was once like you achieved success, and I am sure behind that you will see a staright to the point approach combined with persistence.
My time, I chose the first option (trial and error), not because I thought it was the better option, but because it was the only choice I had.
After a lot of hard work, I managed to put up a site on a free server, and that was when I began to learn some Internet marketing lessons.
I didn’t have any idea on how to get people to my site, I was completely new to the Internet and I already had a website. So I found a start page exchange program and I joined it hoping I would be able to get a lot of people to my site, make some sales and in the end realize my new found online dream.
It was never as easy as I thought. Web design became more complicated than I ever expected and I didn't have enough money to hire someone to do it. Getting website visitors became a very hard and time-consuming and making a single sale seemed impossible. Only one thing didn’t disappoint me, myself. I didn’t give up.
I kept trying, learning and getting better. Whenever I fail, I make a list of reasons why I failed and made sure I avoided them the next time I try something out again.
After the failure of my first attempt, the main reason that came at the top of my “reasons why I failed list” was the fact that my site was hosted on a free server. Such sites look very unprofessional, and distract the visitor with too many ads. Who would trust a web business that cannot invest a few dollars for hosting their site?
When surfers want to buy something online, they tend to go to an established online company, so if your site is hosted on a free server like www.yoursite.freehost.com, people wont buy from you. They get annoyed or carried away by too much ads on the site, unless if you are using a free non-ad supported platform like blogspot or wordpress.
So one of the first corrections I made was to invest about $20 for a web hosting account and a domain name, so that I would have my own address for visitors to remember and come back anytime and I would be able to post only what I want on the site, which gives a more established image of the web site and a focussed environment so that my prospects can focus on what I have to say and don’t get distracted by flashing banner ads.
I was still not making sales even though I now have my own hosting account and a domain name for my online business. I knew I had to make another list of possible causes. I needed to ask myself what I thought was going wrong and how to solve it.
I was not getting much traffic to the site, just around 300 visitors and the big problem is the source of my site visitors. I had not been indexed by any search engine, so I was using a startpage exchange program for my traffic which were popular with newbies and marketers then (2002). I soon realized that was part of my problem. I was not targeting any market, I was driving traffic to my site without asking myself if they want my product or not.
My site was a niche web site, but I was not targeting that niche market. The people that actually went to my site were participants of the traffic exchange program I was using. They were all website owners or affiliates, they are not the perfect customers for my site, a music site. An internet marketing and website promotion site would do better in that program because most of the participants were interested in Web business promotion and marketing or just making money online.
When I realized that, I knew I had to change my strategy and target only those that I think would be more interested. So I turned to the search engines to drive more targeted traffic to my site.
After 2 months I got listed in Yahoo and immediately saw an increase of up to 200, then 400 site visitors a month, and a month later I got listed in Google and many other search engines like Alta vista, Hotbot, Askjeeves, Alltheweb, Overture and many more.
My traffic increased steadily. And then I got listed in the ODP (dmoz.com). I started getting hundreds of sign ups and everything got so big that I couldn’t even handle it. And that was just the beginning.
I am planning on writing my complete story so anyone interested would learn a lot from what I have been through. I welcome all comments, also if you have a story of your own you want to share, drop us a comment and we will publish your story as a complete post.
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