Online Success Strategies

Whatever your business is, online success strategies can help to improve it. Whether you want your own purely online business, or simply to improve your current business with online advertising.  Wherever your business is at the moment, you can be sure there is a limiting factor which holds it from improvement. If you’re the owner of your business, you can pretty much guarantee it’s you!

Online Success Strategies – Developing The Owner

online success strategies

For the most part, business owners concentrate on the ‘mechanics’ of their business, rather than themselves. It makes sense to work on your business, of course. However, when the decisions of your business fall upon you continually, unless you are growing, your business isn’t. If a persistant problem continues to raise its head in your business, you can bank on it being a limiting idea you have which holds it back.

That’s why top business owners continually strive to improve themselves by attending workshops and seminars within their industry. They have masterminds with other business owners to continually challenge their thinking. This is what seperates the top business owners from the struggling ones. Top business owners seek out professional trainers who can help them push their business to the next level.

Online Advertising

Online success strategies, to most business owners, will consist of online advertising techniques. However, if your mindset is that of ‘penny pinching’ and holding back with a belief of “there’s not enough”, no amount of online advertising will enable you to change your viewpoint. The contradicting ideas you hold can prevent you from taking the necessary action to move your business to the next level.

An Example

For example let’s take pay per click advertising. You set up a campaign and it’s bringing in new customers. You are paying $100 per day, let’s say, and you notice a few extra customers coming in. You decide that $100 is your limit. However, when when you hit a difficult month you decide to ‘default’ back to saving money and this is the first expense to get cut back. It’s a mistake.

The $100 might be brining in a new customer each month who only spends $50. However, you’ve also made a potential recurring customer. That customer might come back again and again and spend thousands over the next few years. The return on investment over time is/could be larger than the initial investment of getting in a new customer. This is why many business owners fail. They fail to look at the return on investment and instead only look for the immediate return in sales.

Return On Investment

The return on investment is a vital part of an online success strategy. Looking forward to the potential spending of the average new customer lets you focus on the long term growth rather than the immediate return. In many instances, this means it makes sense to break even on advertising, and even make a loss in the short term. Of course this depends partly on your business model too.

Testing And Measuring

qualities successful entrepreneurs

When setting up an online advertising campaign through the various online platforms (more on this later), you should always be able to test and measure your results. This way you can see whether or not an advertising campaign works. For example you spend $100 a day for a week and get a few new customers. How do you know whether it was your new advertising campaign which brought in your new customers? You might have many sources of new custom. By measuring the response of your advertising, you can determine how effective it is. If it’s effective, you can scale up. If it’s not working, you can discount it.

By setting up multiple advertising methods and testing and measuring each one, you can ‘tweek’ each one to bring in the most benefit for your business. Once a campaign is working well and bringing in new sales and a good return on investment, you can increase your budget.

The False Ecconomy Of Saving

Depending on your individual background and experience, you may have been ‘programmed’ by your past to save money by not spending. It makes sense when you don’t have much money to be spend ‘thrifty’. But not with direct response marketing. In the first instance this makes sense. When you first set up an advertising campaign, it pays to be cautious. You might make mistakes and waste money on irrelevant clicks/adverts. However, once you have a proven campaign which brings in sales, it doesn’t make sense to limit your budget any more.

If you have an advertising campaign which proves itself time and time again, it makes more sense to increase your expenditure over time.

This is a major contradiction to a ‘spend thrifty’ mindset which continually looks to save money, cut back and avoid further spending.

Given online success strategies which pay out $4 for every $2 spent, wouldn’t it make sense to scale up this advertising method and pay more? This is where many business owners get stuck. They become limited by their inability to spend over a certain ‘comfortable amount’.

Self Image – The Invisible Barrier To Change

online success strategies

Here’s another limiting factor which could be holding you from a larger business and a better life. It ties in with the limited spending too. Your self image is the anchor from which many of your decisions are made. If you keep hitting a brick wall in your business, this could be the answer. Read Psycho-cybernetics by Maxwell Maltz. Maltz is a plastic surgeon who discovered the connection between self image and limitations. In many of his patients, even after the surgery, patients still perceived themselves as ugly due to a negative self image. In many cases, simply by altering the self image, their circumstances changed because they changed from within.

If we somehow feel unworthy of change and success, in our sub-conscious mind, we will often sabotage our best efforts for achievement. Often because of how we feel about ourselves.

Online Success Strategies – Shifting From Technician To Owner

online success strategies

Many business owners were first employees in either their own business or someone else’s business. They got good at their role as a ‘technician’ and moved into owning their own business. However, the same skills for being a ‘technician’ don’t always translate very well into being a business owner. As a technician you know your role. You may be given instructions and have a very specific set of things to do.

As an owner, you need to take a larger overview of the business you are trying to ‘drive’ forwards. Profits are in your hands. You don’t get paid for working as a ‘technician’ when you’re a business owner. Technician’s get paid whether a business earnes money or not – at least as long as they have a job! Business owners have another role. They need to ensure the business not only survives, but thrives. This calls for an entirely different skill set.

Are you trying to apply the skills you learned as a technician to owning a business? Working harder and harder but still running a ‘struggling’ business?

Aligning Your Values

If success in your business isn’t in line with your deepest values and ideals, no amount of ‘success’ will work for you. Each step towards the successful completion of a business you hate is only a further step away from your true purpose and from a life aligned with purpose.

The truly ‘succesful’ are so because they have found a purpose which fulfils them on every level. Money isn’t their ultimate goal and so they can pursue it for much longer and with much more passion.

Online Success Strategies – The ‘Nuts and Bolts’

online success strategies

If you’re looking for online success strategies you probably expected this bit first! Here’s the nitty gritty of online success strategies. You need the right mindset as a prerequisite of course, which is why this part is coming at the end.

Google Adwords

Google Adwords is a great online advertising platform which any business owner can use to increase their customer base. Set up an advert directing website traffic to your website or landing page. Use your main keywords to build a basic advert and then use Google’s keyword planner to find other, less competitive and less expensive keywords. Initially you should use [exact match]  keywords.

This can help you avoid getting found for random searches which include your keywords plus a bunch of unrelated keywords. Using exact match means your advert will only show for those keywords which you specifically want to get found for, and no others.

Many people start off using Google’s Adwords and then give up. This is a mistake. It takes time and effort to learn how to use the platform. Use negative keywords to avoid getting your advert shown for the wrong kinds of searches. It’s worth putting the effort in to learn Adwords. It may not happen straight away but once you have a successful campaign, which you measure, you can scale up and increase your return massively.

online success strategies
Read more on paid advertising techniques in “The Ultimate Guide To Online Marketing”

Google Places

Google Places lets you promote your local business for free on its serach engines. If you have a locally based business and aren’t already using this service, it’s a no brainer to set up an advert. It’s free and will bring you targeted website traffic for years to come, if you have a local business you can verify to Google. Bing do a similar service as does Yahoo. It;s well worth taking the time to set up a free advert for your busienss for each one.

Facebook Advertising

online success strategies

Facebook offer a superb advertising platform. It’s a total dream for any business once you get to grips with their platform. You need a Facebook account and a business page to advertise from. With this platform you can super target your audience by location, interests, sex, age and a number of other demographics.

This is great especially for targeting your audience to a certain location. You can, for example, target a radius of 10 miles around your business location. This immediately means you have a higher chance of finding a customer and is much cheaper to do than the old style of doing a leaflet drop using your local delivery service.

Again Facebook takes some getting to grips with but it’s well worth the effort. Plus you should always test and measure your results so you can drop ones which don’t work and scale up those that do.

Other Online Advertising Methods

online success strategies

Online success strategies for thriving businesses include using multiple tactics. Start off with one of these strategies and ‘tweek’ it until you have a winning campaign. Then scale up and move on to the next one. Bing, YouTube, Yahoo and Linkedin are just a few other online advertising platforms which you can use in a similar way to Facebook and Google Adwords. Remember with social media advertising it’s a different strategy than Google search advertising. With social media you are using ‘interuption advertising’. As such your style of advert should be slightly different to that of search advertising since the users are not actively seeking your business.

With Google’s Adwords adverts users are actively seeking your business, or something like your business. With social media advertising platforms, they are using social media and so you are ‘interupting’ them with your adverts.

Organic Advertising Methods (SEO)

Search engine optimisation is a simple way to give your website the best chance to rank for your main keywords. However, even with the right configuration of your site, noone is guaranteed ‘top place on Google’ for their top selling keywords. Don’t be fooled by the companies who promise this! You can set up your site so that you use your best performing keywords with the header and title tags of your site. If you have a WordPress website, I recommend a plugin called Yoast SEO. It allows you to write articles with SEO in mind.

Writing Articles For Search

You can create content which, if successful, you can get free website traffic from. By creating videos for YouTube and articles for Google, you can reach the front page for certain keywords and continue to get traffic to your site from your content. Depending on the relative competition of your business, you may or may not gain any traction with this method. Plus Google can change the algorithms any time they want. Don’t build your business on one stream of traffic. Instead have a few ‘trickles’ of traffic bringing you new customers. That way, if any of them fails, your whole business doesn’t suffer as a result.

You can read more about online success strategies, particularly ranking content for search in my ebook Niche Blogging For Profit.

online success strategies

List Building

List building is a fantastic business building tool and should be employed in your business, whatever it is. List building can keep you in touch with your potential customers on an ongoing basis, keeping them informed of your products and latest deals.

List building can also be automated so your subscribers continue to opt-in to your list and email continue to be delivered to them in a pre-determined sequence.

Access an online business training program for more information and download “Listbuilding For Profit“:

online success strategies

Final Thoughts

Online success strategies are also about how you think, who you spend time with and how you grow: both yourself and your business. What books do you read? How do you talk (and think) about yourself and your business? Grab some free pdf download books on my page entrepreneurship development ebook free download.

Start with Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill and The Science Of Getting Rich by Wallace Wattles.