Entrepreneurs-Journey.com Down-To-Earth Advice For Bloggers and Internet Marketers

Let’s jump straight into it – if you are reading my blog then you either already run an Internet business, you want to run one or you dream about running one (or you are stalking me!). With this article I hope to help you move from the “I want to start a business” category, to the “I am running a business” category. Here we go…

I Have A Business Idea (or several)

If you fall into this category and you already have ideas for Internet businesses but you haven’t actually started one yet, then I have some very simple advice for you – just do it! Put something into action, get some results even if the result is no result (that’s a result still!) so you can actually start to move forward. Stop dreaming/planning/thinking and start doing.

If you have several ideas and you don’t know which one to run with, pick the one that you can best leverage your existing skills, contacts and resources and do some testing. You may think one idea has “more potential” or you might earn more money from it, but that probably also means you face more risk and a longer learning curve. The thing with long learning curves is that if you don’t already have the chutzpah to even start a business a long learning curve is just going to be, well, too long for you. You don’t have the motivation or the courage or the experience or the conviction or whatever it is to push you through the slow process of failing that you must go through in order to succeed.

If you choose the perhaps less grand idea or the less risky business in the short term – the one that you can best leverage what you already have – you won’t face such a long learning curve and will earn results quicker. This will give you positive reinforcement and experience earlier – it will build up your chutzpah – and then, if appropriate you may be able to start up your original riskier or unique idea since you will have the confidence from the success you have already earned.

Think of it this way – a software programmer could have some amazing Web 2.0 idea which she could start, or she could do some software consulting as a self employed business owner. One business model is clearly riskier but potentially much more rewarding. However in almost all cases the low-risk consulting job will bring in financial return and positive reinforcement a lot quicker, while the end game with the Web 2.0 might be a huge superstar company, resources will be consumed (money, time) long before rewards start coming through. Obviously it comes down to your unique position and personality, but if you are having trouble even getting started then the path of least resistance is probably best for you – at least for now – you can still dream big for the future.

I’m not saying you can’t chase the biggest, baddest, craziest idea right from the start – some of the best entrepreneur stories start like this – but often the character behind the idea has some special qualities, those pure, somewhat deluded concepts that hardcore entrepreneurs have where they “just know” they will succeed no matter the odds against them or the reality of the present situation. That sort of blind faith motivation usually leads to one of two outcomes – tremendous success since the person never gives up, or tremendous failure since the person never gives up. It’s a fine line.

I Don’t Know What Business To Start, But Gawd Damn I Have Plenty of Information Products Full of Ideas, If Only I Would Pick One!

Ahh, the serial information product purchaser. I love you guys. It’s you opportunity seeking folks that keep the online marketers pockets laden with money – your money. They keep coming up with ways to make money online, release ebooks, videos, DVDs, courses, seminars, mailing lists, membership sites, all promising riches, and you lap it all up – all of it!

Yep, you are a crazy lot but there is one clear thing about you – you are not afraid to put money down in order to make money and you believe in education, either that or you are a sucker for a good sales page!

If this is you, you need to stop buying info products. Honestly, stop it now. If your computer and bookshelf is laden with online business ideas, all of which you have studied with enthusiasm but never gone much further than one or two steps into actually implementing something before you snap up the next “great online money making concept”, then you have to break the pattern.

Here’s what you need to do. Stop buying products, look at what you have already, what you have learnt and where you think you could best leverage your skills. If you like writing content and setting up blogs or websites then perhaps AdSense is the way to go. If you have something to teach other people and that doesn’t have to be in the Internet marketing arena, it could be any niche, online or offline, then maybe setting up a membership service or writing an ebook is the way to go. If you don’t want to bother with making a product yourself but you like the idea of selling products then perhaps drop shipping or affiliate marketing will be good to you.

Here’s the important part though – whatever idea you finally pick, you have to stick to it from start to finish. Complete every step in the course/book/tool you bought. Every step and then evaluate your position. And I can tell you, if you truly did complete every step that a quality information product teaches you to do then you are almost guaranteed success. Why most people don’t succeed is because it takes time and energy and let’s face it, unless we see money coming in immediately most people have a hard time sticking to something for longer than a few weeks – at most!

Realistically if you were to follow Internet business information products and implement all the steps you are looking at months and months, even years of work before you really can say you did everything well. That usually means completing long term search engine optimization on your website(s), setting up, testing and tracking a comprehensive pay-per-click advertising campaign, implementing other traffic strategies, networking, forming relationships and doing joint ventures, testing and tracking conversion on your website(s), writing content, blogging…there is so much to do to truly have success online. While it might be nice to blame the information product and accuse it and the author of being all hype and no substance – most reasonably good info products really do teach good stuff, there’s just a lot of work involved to do it all successfully – so the only person to blame for failure is you. It’s harsh, but it’s true.

Next time you buy an information product in the hope that it will be THE big idea for your online business (like all the others that have gone before it) be absolutely certain that you are prepared to implement everything it teaches, otherwise you shouldn’t buy it. Go back and implement the techniques in the other products you bought but never got around to using properly first.

Best of all, if you actually do implement well and create a business, you can then buy all the great info products that come out, write them off as an education expense in your tax and know full well that you will be capable of implementing the nuggets of advice you learn, increasing your income by leveraging the success you already have in your existing business.

Positive habits tend to reinforce themselves. Once you start implementing and getting results you will find that you want to keep doing it. The experience you will gain will give you confidence and awareness of the long term benefits of implementation and replace your old “get rich quick” opportunist thinking mentality, where you bought products because you were caught up in the promises being made and did not consider the reality of the effort required to make things work.

I Have Too Many Commitments – I Can’t Quit My Job To Start My Dream Business

Okay, you may be right, you have a lot of commitments and pinning your financial requirements on a new enterprise is too much to handle. My advice – don’t do it, do both. Start your business and keep working your job. In this case you need to have great time management and structure your life well so you maximize your work efficiency (of course this is a good strategy for anyone, but it’s particularly important for someone who wants to transition from working a job to running a business where the short term involves doing both at the same time).

Let’s think 80/20 rule. If you get 80% of the outcomes from only 20% of your efforts then you really only need to focus on a core few functions to handle this situation. You need to keep working your job so a good chunk of your day is gone to that. Then you have all the other “life things”. In my case that realistically probably leaves about 2 hours per day of real productive time for your new Internet business. You could start sacrificing sleep to get more hours but I’m not known to do things like that – you might be.

Two hours, you may be surprised to learn, is more than enough to get your business going, if you are 100% productive during that time and that two hours is spent on your 20% core productive functions – those things you need to get done in order for your business to start generating cashflow. After all it’s dependable cashflow you require so you can reduce the amount of time you spend at the job office and increase the amount of time you spend at the home office. Most people don’t spend much more than two productive hours in an eight hour working day anyway so you will be ahead of the curve if you can stay focused on your 80/20 activities for a full two hours.

From that point on you juggle. You balance your activities with getting your new business running and slowly change the ratios so you do less “job” and more “business” until that great day when you have enough business cashflow to finally quit your job. Of course that’s only the beginning of building your business, but at least you are past that not-really-that-scary-yet-it-stopped-you-for-so-many-years period where you were afraid of not meeting your commitments without your job.

It does take a leap and definitely a commitment but to be really honest with you, the only real obstacles you face are psychological, they are not reality. You don’t believe you can start a business because of all the fear that your commitments generate, which are tightly linked to your job income since it currently keeps those commitments at bay. Since you believe that it becomes your reality. Once you lose the fear and take action you realize the reality of the situation is not that scary and with some time and efficiency management anything is possible – you just got to believe and take action kid!

Do Something

Reading over the paragraphs I just wrote above it’s pretty clear that there is really only one piece of advice you need to follow to finally start your online business – you need to take action and do something. Everything else boils down to the way you think and the way it causes you to act but generally as long as you are taking action to move your business forward (and start something in the first place!) your outcomes are always good because you are learning and gaining experience, which all lead to greater motivation, better decisions and more taking action – a guarantee of success!

So go do something already!

Yaro Starak
Action Taker

The more I use the Internet the more amazed (and frustrated) I am at how so many people are putting online websites that are built to make it difficult for viewers to actually do what the website is designed to do.

Here’s a quick checklist for anyone working online, especially those in Internet business who want their websites to sell – try and avoid these issues.

1. State what the website is aiming to achieve in the space “above the fold”. Above the fold is the area that a person sees without scrolling down. In this space it should be obvious why your website exists. Is it to educate? To sell? To have someone enter a sales funnel? What is the niche you are targeting? All this should be clear in one very quick glance. You can’t solve someone’s problem if they can’t even figure out what it is you do.
2. Use large fonts with lots of white space. This is a no brainer. You want your website to be read by as many people as possible so don’t use tiny fonts, don’t use clever fonts, just keep it simple, double spaced and big. You wouldn’t whisper your sales pitch to a potential customer in real life, so don’t do it online.
3. Don’t get fancy. Graphics are secondary to text. The words on the page are primary. Graphics should only be used to enhance the presentation of text and never hinder or distract the visitor from what they are supposed to do at your website – read it!
4. Use headings and bolds and lists, etc. This is something that must be drummed in over and over again – break up long towers of words into nice manageable blocks with headings and highlights. Combine this with the aforementioned large font and your website will be an efficient read and effective at getting your message across to as many people as possible. You want as many people as possible reading your website right?
5. If you are limited in skills and resources, just use one nice text-based page. You can have tremendous success online by using a webpage that is just a simple letter format. Follow the rules above and tell your story using just words. If you can’t do website design yourself or can’t afford it, you can keep things simple and still have a very effective message. It won’t be pretty, but like I said, pretty doesn’t sell – the words do.

Yaro Starak
Simpleton

My business, BetterEdit.com, offers two services – essay editing and thesis editing. When I originally set up the business, which was nearly six years ago now, one of the hardest things to do was come up with pricing points.

Back then I wasn’t all that clued in to how important perceived value is and how closely pricing ties into you market targeting. My goal was simple, I just wanted to come up with a pricing point that met three conditions -

• I could pay editors to do the work
• Clients would pay the fee
• And of course, the business could make a profit from the transaction

If you think about it, those three conditions are the foundation for business. You need people to buy what you offer and you need to be able to produce the value at a profit. Back then it was simple maths and whether I could satisfy both groups of constituents, editors and clients, could only truly be determined by testing the market. So that’s exactly what I did – tested the market by setting up a website, hiring an editor and sticking up some prices.

How Did I Choose Test Prices?

I’d like to say I had some form of scientific method for coming up with my very first pricing scheme, but I didn’t. All I did was use some intuition and my own perception of the going rate of pay for contract editing work to come up with price. I figured that editors would be happy with anywhere from $15-$30 per hour and I hoped the market (the clients) were willing to pay more than that for the service.

I didn’t want to charge a “per hour” fee to clients because I knew that would get fiddly to negotiate and hinder sales. When a person comes to a website they want to know how much something costs immediately so they can make a value judgement instantly and not have to wait for a quote. You will lose customers if you force them to apply for a quote. Just knowing that they have to do something in order to find out a price is enough for a website visitor to surf away – remember that!

Whenever possible, if you can, come up with commoditized pricing for your products or services. By that I mean solid numbers you can display on a website pricing page. Some complex or high cost products and services must have a quoting process, including some form of contract, but if you can avoid these steps, do so. Certainly in my case with an editing service it should be possible to come up with a commoditized pricing structure…

…and you know what – I didn’t quite get it right first time. I had some good assumptions about not wanting to charge based on a per hour rate, but I still made it too difficult to calculate a price.

The first pricing structure I used was this -

$0.04 per word.

This meant that potential customers could calculate the price of their job by multiplying the number of words in their document by 0.04. This was still too many steps and I had created a sales barrier and made more customer support work for myself too, since I often had people emailing me for quotes because they didn’t understand how to calculate the price on their own or were too lazy to bother.

Nevertheless, for the first year or two of operations this pricing method was the foundation for the business. For the editors, how much they got paid depended on how quickly they could produce the service. If they were paid $50 for editing one essay and they could do it in one hour, clearly that was a good rate of pay. If it on the other hand they took four hours to do it, the rate of pay was not so good. Through the years we have had one or two editors drop out since it just wasn’t a profitable exercise for them.

Over time the best editors who worked quickly rose to the top. While not every job was ideal (every now and then a nightmare job came through which takes a long time to complete due to the very poor quality English), on average editors who were speedy and maintained a high level of quality could earn a good hourly rate. This would also result in greater client satisfaction because we could meet very tight deadlines and of course I was happy too, since the pricing structure was profitable.

The foundations for a business were laid and all I needed to do was increase the volume of work coming in and make sure there were always great editors available who were eager for the work.

The Pricing Structure Evolves

Over the next few years I played with the pricing structure by increasing or decreasing the per word rate based on the size of jobs and how quickly the client required the document back. However I was still doing too many quotes manually because many clients were confused, which wasn’t that surprising given most of the clients had English as a second language – hence they needed BetterEdit – but it also made it difficult for them to decipher the text on the website.

I knew if I was doing so many manual quotes there were probably other potential clients not even bothering to ask for a quote because they didn’t want to make the effort. People want instant gratification and having to wait for a quote to come back from an email address or even send an email or fill out a form in the first place is just too much to ask. You don’t have a very big window of opportunity when someone is in a buying mood so you must make sure the process is smooth, easy and as barrier-less as possible. In my case it had to be something that a ten year old could do given some of my clients had the equivalent level of English fluency.

The problem was when a person came to the pricing page they didn’t actually see prices, they only saw a formula for determining the price. That meant they had to do work. What I needed was an actual list of prices so it would take one glance to figure out how much the service costs.

Using a “per word” system was the best format because generally the amount of words in a document dictated the amount of time an editor had to work, so that wasn’t going to change, I just needed it to be easier to determine the price for a given document size. I used the same pricing system I had in place, broke down the job sizes into 500 word blocks and slapped a price on each “word bracket”.

While the prices have changed over the years the structure hasn’t and you can view it online here -

BetterEdit Editing Prices

Thesis Editing – Higher Prices

While there have been numerous tweaks to the BetterEdit pricing system since then I have been very happy with how it functions. After I instigated the block prices I rarely received quote requests except for one situation – large thesis jobs. Thesis projects can cost anywhere from $500 to $1500 per job and as a result I originally thought it was necessary to have a quoting system in place.

Previously I listed on the website pricing page that clients need to send through a sample or their entire thesis if the word count was above 10,000 words so we could determine a quote. This system was working well enough and I didn’t have to do too many quotes because we simply didn’t get that many thesis jobs.

Over time I realized that generally there were two types of thesis clients -

1. Those who wanted a quote because they were price sensitive. These clients almost never purchased the service.
2. Clients who were willing to buy but since we didn’t have a set pricing structure they had to go through the quoting process because I forced them to. These clients almost always ended up purchasing and were not very price sensitive (within reason of course).

The obvious thing to do given this situation is create some concrete prices for thesis projects. Once the prices are solidified the price sensitive clients simply won’t buy and we won’t waste time doing quotes for them and the clients who are the right target won’t have any resistance to make a purchase. It seems so simple now!

I’ve only been able to do this in recent months because I have had data available on thesis job pricing from previous year’s work. With the experience under my belt I knew what pricing points worked for all the usual constituents – the editors (adequately paid), the clients (willing to pay for the perceived value) and BetterEdit (make a profit) – so I could come up with pricing brackets.

Perceived Value

Nowadays we do more thesis work than ever before and it’s amazing to wake up to emails where a client has purchased thesis editing and sent through $900+ for a single project. Previously I thought spending that much money without at least asking a few questions over email to check out the business was not realistic. Of course, with a better understanding of perceived value it makes perfect sense, plus it certainly helps that 99% of thesis clients leave happy – it’s not *just* perceived value – providing real value does count as well, but doesn’t impact price as much as you would think.

If a person has been referred to our business by a friend or they have spent time reading the testimonials on our website or simply are comfortable spending money online for a service they need (or any other justification within the client’s perception), there is no difference between a person spending $100 or $1000 on our service. It all comes down to perceived value and target markets.

With hindsight this all seems very obvious to me now, but it took over five years of running the business, tweaking the pricing system, interacting with clients and editors and coming to understand the supply and demand marketplace for academic editing services, to reach this point.

Lessons For You About Pricing

The main lessons I want to get across to you are the following:

• Don’t make it difficult to determine a price, especially if it’s not a complex service or product. Reduce the number of steps to finding a price to 1 – a single page/mechanism for prices, if possible.
• When you attract the right target market to your website and you have the appropriate sales techniques/psychological triggers in place (testimonials, direct response copy, sales funnel, etc) then pricing is not an issue. Of course you need to be aware of market conditions (supply and demand) for your industry but in general if you have a niche and you position yourself well and your pricing reflects this, your clients will pay whatever you charge (within reason).
• If you are just starting a new business and you don’t know how much to charge start by looking at what the competition charges, assess their strengths and then use that data as the basis for your pricing. Don’t replicate the competition – be different – but use their experience in the marketplace to start with since it’s the only guide you have until you make your first sales.

  Ultimately the only way I knew how much to charge was to do some basic maths. The end result of this pricing structure was a system that worked and could produce a profit, however it was not necessarily the best system and certainly not the most profitable. That’s okay during the early stages when perhaps you are still figuring out exactly what your niche and positioning are (teething process). Over time you will have a better understanding of how much you can charge. The only way to find out initially is to start charging.

• Perceived value will determine price. Perceived value is a perception – it is not reality (but what is reality?) – you can make this stuff up! By that I mean if you can establish the perceptions in your prospect’s mind and at least deliver enough value to meet needs, distinguish yourself from the competition and have barriers to replication in place, then you have the formula for a highly profitable business.
• Experiment with your pricing structure. Try raising your prices and see what happens. I’ve raised prices as much as 20% in one go and noticed no decrease in sales volume. Sometimes my sales actually increase after raising prices and I have less “problem clients” because they aren’t as price sensitive or likely to expect miracles.

Pricing is an interesting topic because it crosses over two distinctly different disciplines. You have maths – the numbers – which never lie and are straightforward, and you have the psychology behind perceived value, which is by no means clear-cut – we are talking about human emotions after all. When you can work these two elements together the business potential is significant. There is not a single successful business operating today that doesn’t understand and leverage the delicate relationship between pricing, target markets and perceived value.

Yaro Starak
Perceived Valuer

SmallBusinessBranding.com

I’m not sure if you realize this, but Small Business Branding is really going off! The new authors are pumping out some amazing content and we have near-daily updates. If you are into small business then you will definitely like what’s happening at SmallBusinessBranding.com so check it out.

The RSS feed is: http://feeds.feedburner.com/smallbusinessbranding

BlogTrafficSchool.com/blog/

I’ve been quietly posting a few good pillar articles over at the Blog Traffic School Pre-Launch blog and if you are into blog traffic you might find some tasty tidbits to help you grow your blog readership. By the way – the actual blog traffic course is ready to go and I’m just waiting to get all the technical requirements set up to deliver it.

The RSS feed is: http://feeds.feedburner.com/BlogTrafficSchoolPrelaunchBlog

You know what my favorite way of making money online is?

Affiliate marketing.

I like affiliate marketing because it pays in significant chunks each time you make a sale, not in “per click” spare change like AdWords and similar advertising programs.

I like it because you don’t need hordes and hordes of traffic coming to your site, although it certainly helps, but affiliate marketing is certainly one of the best examples of quality over quantity. If you have the right audience, i.e. people who buy products you recommend and benefit from them, then you have a winning combination.

I like affiliate marketing because I can honestly appraise something before recommending it, where as a “paid for click” may lead to site I have never seen before.

I like affiliate marketing because you don’t have to do any support once the sale is made. You can set up a full ecommerce site that sells other people’s products and services, make great commissions – as high as 70% sometimes – and never ever deal with the customer again. You don’t deal with payment processing, or helpdesk queries or anything as an affiliate.

Probably my favorite thing about affiliate marketing is that you can set up residual and recurring sources of income. If you sell subscriptions as an affiliate you get paid for as long as the customer remains a paying member. Over time that can build up to some pretty huge recursive income that will continue to come in long after you stop promoting. Nice.

Are You Keen To Learn More?

To be honest I am not a master of affiliate marketing, but I am learning. There is one person in particular who I consider the master of affiliate marketing and once again I’m proud to say he is an Aussie, who in fact lives quite close to me down the coast here in Queensland Australia.

His name is Allan Gardyne. This is him here -

Allan has been in the affiliate marketing game for a long time and I suspect he has a fairly stable passive income as a result, which no doubt continues to build every day. I have to admit his business really inspires me and I think he makes a great testimonial for working persistently. He wouldn’t be where he is today without building things up over time.

Allan naturally has a website devoted to affiliate marketing and also manages one of the most well respected newsletters on the topic. I’ve been a subscriber for a few months now and I can honestly say it’s quality every issue. It’s so refreshing to get an email from an Internet marketer which actually has content in it. This is literally the only email newsletter I read from top to bottom each time it comes in.

AssociatePrograms.com Relaunched

Allan’s website is called AssociatePrograms.com and up until a few days ago was a bit of a monster to get around. It was clean and simple but packed with too much information and no really good way to navigate around it all.

Allan and his team have worked hard for over 6 months building a new site and just this week relaunched it. The new site is such a dramatic improvement over the previous design – it’s like poetry – I recommend taking a look just as an example of how to construct a massive content site for ease of use and navigation with some nice online marketing elements thrown in (the newsletter of course being the main focus).

You can sign up for Allan’s affiliate newsletter there, and as part of the relaunch Allan has also produced a new report titled – “77 Ways To Get Traffic nearly all FREE” – which is yet another brilliant resource full of stimulating ideas for website traffic generation that you get when you sign up to the newsletter.

I think you will enjoy this one folks.

Yaro