PlusOne - Marketing Musings

Set up a website and sell stuff on the internet - easy money right? Well not exactly…

I started in on-line commerce way back in the heady early days of the internet - 1997 - selling business books on-line through the Australian Business Bookshop. Basically I listed a whole lot of business titles, including the back cover blurb and the table of contents. Focusing on Australian titles I had between 150-200 titles at any one time. Business was OK, returning about $200 a week in sales.

But it was hard work. First the publishers had minimum shipment volumes, so if someone wanted one book, I had to top that up with 2-4 other titles in the order to reach the benchmark. Then I had to repackage all orders. By focusing on titles that sold the most I could move most of the ‘top ups’ but not all. After about 18 months I closed it down as my stockpile of ‘top up’ titles got taller than me.

One thing I did learn was how to get pages right, including descriptions and meta data. Also linking. That was in the good old days when links really counted and spam sites etc had not reared their heads.

Since that time I have started a number of new internet ventures, all of which are still operating. That’s them - listed to the right under links. The great thing about these is that I don’t have to hold any stock - so that overcomes the books hurdle. If drop shipping was available then, that business would still be operating.

So since 1997 what have I learned.

The main thing is that starting any on-line venture takes time. I do free website appraisals and not uncommonly I get emails from people who have started an on-line venture and after three months they are wanting an estimate of what their site is worth.

The cold hard fact is that after three months very few sites have been in existence long enough to have any worthwhile trading history. Heck, even to get out of the Google sandbox takes longer than that. Never mind if you like Google or not, prospective purchasers like to see a page rank and see it come up in the search results.

Prospective purchasers like to see that the site is making money. That takes longer than three months generally. The start-up cost of any on-line business is virtually nil. Domain name, a few bucks, hosting, few buck more, the software to drive the site - may have some intrinsic value if it has been purchased outright, but will certainly be well below what you paid for it because often people will want to run it from their own host server and there are changeover costs….

Which brings it all down to time. You have to give your web venture time to grow, to get established, to get a reasonable trading history so that any prospective purchaser knows they will be able to recoup their investment. Of course, by this time, making some money, you probably don’t want to sell it any more.

So if you are thinking of starting your own internet business, here are a few thoughts on what I think are key points:

1. Before you even start, plan it as a business, not as a website
2. If at all possible, try to avoid holding stock - or be prepared to park your car in the street when the garage gets full.
3. Think carefully about your market - tailor your business to meet their needs, not yours.
4. When looking at site options, don’t be sold a database interface. Its humans that you are dealing with, the database is there for your convenience. Sure it has functionality that helps the customer - just think through the buying process to ‘humanise’ it.
5. Again, thinking of your market. Are you competing in price, range, service…
6. Use all marketing techniques at your disposal. Search results are important, PPC can be used in the early days (watch the costs), plus linking with other sites (only topical ones!) and don’t forget offline advertising - posters in shopping centres, newspaper ads, bumper stickers etc. While your business may be 100% on-line - many of your prospective customers are not.
7. Give your site, and yourself time. 6-12 months is a reasonable time frame to assess the success of your venture.
8. Only a few people can give up their day job from the income from one web venture. Most people I know (including me) have 4-10 on-line ventures.
9. Don’t forget affiliate programs. This is a low cost, even lower risk way of getting into business. If you are good at it you income can be very high. If you go at it like most (just plonking banner ads on link pages etc, be prepared to do poorly.
10. Oddly enough with the internet information superhighway, information still has value. Sell your knowledge or leverage it with PPC ads from Google, Yahoo etc. There are some who make BIG money out of this…

Need guidance?

I offer a consulting service on new and exisiting web ventures. Please feel free to
email me or visit this page

Share your web-venture experiences via comments