Are you killing your own online business?

Internet Marketing is a real business and much like any other businesses, some rises and most will fall. This is the natural order in the business world. The question then lies in if you are doing the wrong thing that will destroy your business right now.
If you are new to online marketing, then you might not know if you are doing the right things to help your business grow, or if you are actually harming your business instead. In fact, a majority of the newcomers deals with their business the wrong way and falls into a trap that will quickly kill their business.

This is also a problem with the mentality. If your mentality is all about earning that quick cash, then the stuff that you do can be very harmful to your business. Instead if you are treating your business as a serious business, then most probably you’ll end up alright.

Let us take a quick look at some of the things that you could be doing that is killing off your business.

Sending Emails without Permission

As the title says, sending emails without permissions is very bad for your business. Perhaps many years ago when the internet is still new and back when the days when everyone gets excited at every email they get, you could try sending out email promotions without any permission. However, nowadays, things are different.

People hate spam. And any emails sent to a stranger without permissions could potentially be marked as spam. And if you get ‘reported’ for spamming, you can kiss your business good-bye. You could even get blocked by our ISP and lose your internet connection.

Therefore, whatever you do, try not to send emails to people with the purpose of spamming. It is still ok to reach out and contact other people for genuine purposes but just make sure that you are not sending them offers and trying to sell to strangers because that will get you marked as spam faster than anything you can think of.

Not identifying your target market.

Another big mistake many online marketers are found guilty with is that they jump into a market without knowing anything about the market. How can you expect to sell to people who you do not know? Or how can you understand that the market really wants if you do not study them?

Therefore, the best way to go about starting a business sin a new niche is to understand the market.

Sure anyone could just jump into a ‘hot market’ such as weight loss. However, if you do not know anything about the marketer or the competition, you will find yourself trapped in a slaughter house where few make it out alive.

Therefore, knowing your market is not restricted to just knowing the demographics of your market, but also you need to know who your competitors are or you won’t survive. A good way to do market research is to join in the discussion on forums in your niche.

Learn their language, understand their needs and become one of them. On extreme cases, you could actually join them in real life. For example, you want to go into the golf niche, you could try taking up golf yourself and see first-hand what is really going on in real life.

Only then will you be able to come up with a good product that can last a lifetime. People will love it, and you can even share your own experience in the field. To find out more about your competitors, you should try to search and browse around in Google and analyze what they are doing. That way, you could easily see what works and what does not. Try it out and you will see the full potential in all this ‘hassle’ is actually worth it.

Marketing the wrong products.

This is a problem with most affiliate marketers. Since the very beginning of affiliate marketing, the question lies in what offers do you promote. Some gurus will say, “Well you should promote offers that is in a niche that you like” while some gurus swear that you should promote their own offers. The answer is that you should promote offer that converts.

And not only should the offer convert, it should be an offer that actually has a very low refund rate. An offer with a low refund rate often indicates that the product is of high quality, and customers are generally satisfied with the product. Therefore as an affiliate you should never try to promote a product that does not have a good track record.

Of course, this would mean that if you are promoting a brand ‘new’ product, you won’t be able to check out on its track record. What you need to do then is to put yourself in the shoes of a customer and go through the sales message and decide whether or not this is an offer that you will buy or not. If your answer is yes then that there is a good chance that the offer will convert really well.
This means we should not try to market to everyone as well. There isn’t a product that fits all sizes, and you will do well by remembering that. If you try to sell to everyone, you are bound to fail. Therefore, try your best to sell to only your own target market, and you will see tremendous results.

Spending too little or too much

Most newcomer marketers will have the trouble of either spending too little on traffic or too much on them. The key to success here is proper tracking. Without proper tracking, you will not know if you are spending your money on the right traffic or not. Buy small chunks of traffic first and do not over spend. Remember that you will also need a sizeable amount of traffic as well to have a more accurate data. Some people test an offer using only 100 or 200 clicks, which is just too little traffic to give you an accurate data.
Therefore, a good number would be to go up to 500 clicks to 1000. Do not go overboard at first. If by 200 clicks and you are not seeing any conversions at all than that is a sign to stop your campaign. If there are conversions, then go up to 1000 clicks to see how well it converts. By tracking and monitoring properly, you will be able to spend enough for traffic, which will reward you full in the many months ahead.

Are you killing your own online business?