A Bounty…

There's SO much you can learn about eBusiness before you have to spend a DIME. And that should be great news for people that are trying to start a business when finances are tight.

In fact, there's a Bounty of great information and resources available to you when MONEY is more important than your TIME. Oh, don't worry – there will come a time in your eBiz career where your TIME will become more important than your money, but until it does, take advantage of the Free-Line education that's available.

At the end of this post, there's a link to some great free educational material which is absolutely worth your time – and even if it DID cost to attend, that would be worth it too.

As I said, we're in the days of Bountiful information for eBiz success. Don't miss it just because it's free.

Now, on with this post…

Your first dollar from your first online business.

You know, I'm pretty fortunate. Over the past 8 years that I've been running my online business, I've built a component to my business that allows me to get fast feedback. When I open a store, start a web site, create a new product or even write a newsletter, I can start to evaluate its effectiveness, sometimes in just a few minutes.

Having talked to thousands of other eCommerce Store Owners, webmasters, and Internet marketers, I can tell you that lack of feedback is why most folks fail.

Here's the owner's mindset of 90% of Internet Business Failures:

1) They are irrationally afraid of making a single mistake.

This might be the single biggest factor in a new Internet business false-start. Even though a new eBusiness owner has great information, a great eEducation, and desire to succeed, they are so afraid of committing an un-recoverable mistake that they don't do anything.

Here's a tip – there is no such thing as an un-recoverable mistake.

2) They execute their business plan backwards.

They spend time looking at technological solutions instead of market opportunities. I get more emails for people asking me what the best shopping cart solution, merchant account service, or automatic search engine optimization tool is than any other correspondence.

Here's my one and only answer for the new eBusiness owner:

Use services that require the LEAST amount of maintenance. Use the service that allows you to concentrate on selling your products. In other words, use the service that allows you to set up quickly, easily, and then forget about it.

These kinds of services are only a means to an end!

What counts is marketing your product.

3) If they can't find the perfect product to sell, they don't sell anything.

To that mindset, I have a few questions… If you're new to eCommerce, how would you know, beyond the shadow of a doubt, what the perfect product is? More importantly, what sort of evidence do you have that a product isn't going to sell?

Sure, there are 4 ways that you can research a product's potential in the marketplace, but the only way to move out of the research phase and into the proof-of-concept phase is to actually try to sell the product online.

Bottom Line? You've got to try it before you know if it works.

4) If they don't have instant success, they declare a failure.

Let's put an end to this mindset, shall we?

Most of the time, your first effort at an eBusiness is going to be mediocre. That's just a fact and it applies to everyone!

I mean, the first time you swung a baseball bat, tennis racquet, golf club, even the first time you rode a bike, did you do it like a pro?

Not likely.

How about your first day on the job? Did they train you first, or did they just put you in charge of a major project and say, "Do this perfectly or you're fired"?

Probably not.

So, why would anyone think that they can "hit it out of the park" their first time at bat?

A very few do, but MOST don't. The ones that haul off and create a successful eBusiness their first time out do it because they bring with them ALL kinds of other business testing and feedback experience.

A friend of mine runs the marketing department of a very cool technology company. They've had a marketing campaign going for the last few months that's cost their company about $100,000. That campaign hasn't broken even yet, but they're declaring it a smashing success. In fact, they knew that it was going to lose money during its first 5 months. But because they've been actively seeking and tracking feedback, they know that it'll pay off in the medium-term.

Here's my point to all of this.

You need feedback and constant input from your business and your industry in order to determine how successful your business can be.

Here's a few examples in practical terms:

1) Lack of sales does not indicate failure! – What if you don't have any traffic? How can you tell if your site is converting visitors to sales or not?

2) Lack of conversion does not indicate a poor product choice! If you're getting traffic and no sales, it's a sales copy issue, a lack of credibility issue (does your web site look professional?) or a price issue.

3) Lack of traffic does not indicate a failure! Do you know how to get it? Have you educated yourself? Have you tested different traffic-generating methods?

And lastly, do you test?

You must test. You must track your test results. You need to test everything!

Different pictures

Different sales copy

Different on-page search engine optimization

Different off-page search engine optimization

Different price points

Different guarantees

Different web designs

Different headlines

And track it all.

If you get 100 visitors and one sale, and you do that consistently, change one thing about your web site and track the results of that change for a week.

Are your results better or worse? If they're better, make a note of the change, and then change another! If the results are worse, change it back, make a note and then change another!

Feedback. You see – it's all about what the marketplace tells you.

You can, CAN track visitors to sales, to page views, to abandoned shopping carts, to email newsletter open rate, to… to… to… everything!

And guess what? That's the ONLY way to know for sure what you're doing is going to work.

Proof of concept is only valid when matched with empirical data.

Feedback – it tells you what's working, and why.

So, test.

You also need to keep informed about the changing marketplace. And in most cases, you can do this without spending any money.

Here's a perfect example:

Rich Schefren and Jay Abraham are holding a Free Teleseminar (see, it's a Bounty). Rich sent me an abstract of the call so I could tell you about the topics they are going to cover. Here's a few:

• Creating Joint Ventures in Any Marketplace for Any Product, even if you're not a big name.

• Recession-Proofing your business (That should get your attention, friend)

• The Top 34 Business Building Strategies.

• Scientific ways to leverage Other Peoples Assets to enhance your own business (This is pretty clever – it has to do with citation and attribution. I've used it before to get out of a jam)

• Not just understanding, but ARTICULATING your customer's pain in your sales messages to create a bond of trust.

• Finding Start-Up Cash ( Woo Hoooo!)

Rich actually sent me 3 pages of notes on the call… Those bullets above really caught my eye, but I'll bet that there's a bunch more that you'd be interested in.

Here's a registration link for the call:
Registration for Rich and Jay's Teleseminar

It's cost-free, or cost-less – the only resources of yours that this will consume are Time and Ink (for your notes).

Jay is pretty much a legend – if you've never heard of him, just do a Google Search for his name. It's extraordinary. And Rich… What's there to say?

He became “All The Rage” a few years ago and just never stopped being that.

Smart, Smart Guys to be sure. And I'm glad to see them giving away great content.

Check it out – and after the call, leave a comment to tell me what you thought.

Okay, that's it for this post. Talk to you in a few days.

Andy “Test THIS” Jenkins
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