Each week we will cover a topic related to internet marketing to help you with your business.

Creating Your Own Internet Marketing Plan

If you have a small business that you are attempting to promote and are having trouble, it may be because you have not first created an internet marketing plan. Internet marketing is extremely complicated and is much more difficult than simply putting some keywords in the text of your site. An internet marketing plan consists of 8 basic steps: strategic planning, situation analysis, customer analysis, market and product focus, product positioning, pricing strategy, product distribution, and internet promotion.

Step Number 1: Strategic Planning…
When promoting your business online, you need to keep some things in mind. Ask yourself the question, “what am I good at?” You need to discover how your business is different from the rest by discovering the advantages that you have over your competitors.

Step Number 2: Situation Analysis…
This is basically learning about the market that you are in. This can be achieved though various studies such as SWOT analysis, conducting an industry analysis, and analyzing your competition. The more you know about the industry you are in and how you can succeed in it, the better.

Step Number 3: Customer Analysis…
Simply put, this step involves learning about your customers. How you are going to effectively market to someone that you know nothing about? You need to know their likes, dislikes, hobbies, jobs, family life, etc if you are going to market to them effectively. In fact, some businesses do invent personalities that act as the target customer and develop a plan of marketing to them.

Step Number 4: Market and Product focus…
This step involves segmenting your market and making your company different from your competitors. This is often times referred to as the “Unique Selling Point” or “USP”.

Step Number 5: Product positioning…
Simply put, when a person hears a company name, certain thoughts come to mind. When somebody says your company name, what thoughts should come to mind? This is something you need to think about. You need to know how to position your business in your customer’s mind. If you haven’t learned about them yet, acquaint yourself with the 4 Ps of marketing: product, position, promotion, and price.

Step Number 6: Pricing Strategy…
This is also one of the 4 Ps of marketing. You need to know how to effectively price your goods or services. A good way is to take a look at what the competition is charging. If you are new to the business, you will need to undercut their prices.

Step number 7: Product Distribution…
This is the second P in the 4 P’s of marketing, also known as position. This is the physical location where your product or service is offered. And yes, if you have an internet business then you position is the internet.

Step Number 8: Internet Promotion
This is how you are going to advertise your business on the internet. There are plenty of different methods at your disposal including newsletters, search engines, article marketing and pay per click advertising. Experiment with each of them and try to find what best suits your business.

Hopefully, you can make use of this information to create your own internet marketing plan.
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Before You Do Anything: Try It Out.

So you know, roughly, what you want your home business to be. Before you go any further and start investing, though, you need to try it out. Here’s how.

Build a Prototype.

If you plan to sell physical things, or you’re going to do something like starting a website or making software, then you should build a prototype to see how your idea will work out. A prototype is a version of your product that is built quickly by you alone, and serves to show that your idea is feasible in the real world. If it would be too expensive to build the whole thing, then just building the new part that differentiates you from your competitors is good enough.

Show your prototype to a few people, to see what they think. Are they excited? Would they use it?

Get a Few Customers.

If your product is relatively low-value, or you’re providing a service, then it shouldn’t be too much trouble to get a few customers and do a few dry runs. Do them a generous discount (you could even do it for free), to make sure that everything runs smoothly and the customers are satisfied at the end of it.

For example, let’s say you plan to be a landscape gardener from home. You could borrow the tools, and volunteer to do a garden for some kind of charity project – this is good, since it means that you’re doing something nice for charity, but they’re not paying for perfection, so it’s not that bad if small things go wrong. You should then go through all the motions as you would once your business is established, and see what comes out at the other end.

Here’s another one. Let’s say you’re an Italian living outside Italy, and you plan to start a home business cooking pasta in your kitchen and delivering it to customers (you’d be surprised how many home businesses there are in the catering industry).
You could make a rough draft of a leaflet (with discounted prices) and deliver it to a small number of homes in the area, until you get a little response. You could then see if it really is feasible to make and deliver these things, and whether there would be any profit in it.

The best dry-runs, though, are the ones where you can get one client at full price. This generally happens in the kind of industry where most transactions are business-to-business, and go through a bidding process. If you’re doing something like freelance writing or artwork, this can let you take on one ‘job’ without being committed to any more afterwards. If you find it’s not for you, at least you haven’t lost too much – and if you love it, then you’re getting valuable experience before you try to take it full-time.

When you try your business out, make sure to do some kind of survey – you could hand it to the customer, include it with your delivery, or even phone up and say that you’re just calling to make sure everything is alright. Following up this way isn’t just good for you, it’s also good customer service.

Don’t Rely on Scale.

One of the most common things I hear when I tell people to try out their home business ideas is that a small-scale trial wouldn’t do the idea justice, since they ‘plan to make money on scale’.

Never, ever rely solely on scale. You think that supplies will get magically cheaper if you’re doing ten orders a day instead of one? Guess again. You think you’re going to save time by doing lots of orders at once? You might save some, but not as much as you might think. When you’re trying to see whether your business is viable, you should always err on the conservative side – the thinner your margins are, the easier it is for something unexpected to happen and destroy them altogether.

You’re cheating yourself if you don’t try out your business before you start it – you’ll be throwing yourself in at the deep end, and there won’t be a lifeguard. Trying it out gives you the opportunity to make your beginner mistakes (there will be a few, I guarantee it), and to build confidence in yourself and your business without taking pointlessly large amounts of risk.

Self Employment – Before You Start.

You? Start your own Internet business? Give me a break! You just don’t speak the language, so why even try?

It begins with ‘booting up’ your computer instead of just turning it on. And you can’t simply fill in the necessary information to get something connected: it has to be ‘configured.’ Also, it’s painfully apparent that computer tables and windows bear no resemblance whatsoever to the kind you have in your living room, nor is a browser someone meandering through your local bookstore. And the only directory you know anything about is full of telephone numbers.

Then, of course, there are all those blasted letters: DSL, RAM, ROM, POP, RSS, HTML, FTP, MLM . . . Good grief! How can someone like you even think about starting an online business? Hey, it’s for the kids. They understand all this jargon, all this technical stuff. But you . . .

Well, what about you? Okay. So maybe you don’t know what most of those letters mean. And it’s a safe bet you don’t know a tenth of what the average techie does . . . maybe not even as much as today’s computer-savvy ten-year-old. But does that mean you can’t do this stuff?

At least, before you decide to pass on the exhilaration of creating your own online business (not to mention the extra bucks you might have at the end of the month), let’s look at two possibilities.

First of all, the fact that you have no idea how a telephone works (unless you’re a Verizon repair person) has never stopped you from making phone calls. And you’re not afraid to turn on the television set because you don’t know how all those moving pictures get inside that little box.

And speaking of letters, even if you had no idea what ‘TV’ stood for, you could still watch “American Idol.” Nor is it necessary to know what ATM means in order to make a cash withdrawal.

Why, letter combos are positively old hat. RPMs have been around since before Sinatra, and mpg was a Henry Ford staple.

All any of it is, really, is that secretarial staple of yesteryear: shorthand. Only these letter codes are a heck of a lot easier to understand than all those lines and squiggles.

Just to convince yourself it’s no big deal, why not invent some code of your own? Certainly you have as much right to do it as any computer techie. So why not tell them to FTL and PHO . . . and be absolutely sure they NLFD. That’s Fold The Laundry, Pre-Hear the Oven, and make sure they’re Not Late For Dinner. Remember: sticks and stones can break your bones, but letters can never hurt you. Nor should they stop you.

Okay. That’s the first possibility: breaking the code may not be as necessary as you think it is, e.g., you don’t have to know that NaCl is salt in order to sprinkle some on your tomato.

Even so . . . whether you actually need to know all of it or not, maybe you’d be more comfortable if you did. And, obviously, it would be helpful if you knew at least some of it.

Which brings us to possibility number two. Why not learn a few new things? Actually, that’s what makes life an ongoing adventure: no matter how long you’ve been around and how much you’ve discovered already, there’s always something (in fact, plenty!) left to learn.

And the good news is that, with the Internet, learning just got a whole lot easier. You can’t use the excuse that it’s too cold to go to school, or too hot to go to the library. There’s information enough on the Internet for you to earn a PhD just by clicking on your mouse. So what’s your excuse now?

I remember, when I was a kid, looking at a piano, and thinking: “How could anyone ever know what all those keys are for?” Truth is, I was afraid to take piano lessons because I was convinced that I’d look foolish if I tried.

And therein lies the rub: we’re so afraid we’ll look foolish that we’re willing to be foolish instead! And how foolish would it be to refuse to learn new things – - things that could help us in any number of ways, brighten our lives, ease our financial burdens – - just because we’re afraid we’ll look foolish!

But that’s another great thing about the computer. We don’t have to walk up to the blackboard with the whole class staring at us. We don’t have to worry about tripping, or not knowing the answer, or . . . well, any of the things that seemed to go along with learning back in the good old days.

We can be clumsy and bumbling and slow . . . and nobody will ever know! Even if we do look foolish, it will be for our eyes only. The computer makes us blessedly, mercifully anonymous. It lets us learn and work at our own pace, whatever that pace may be.

And so, if those letter combos have you feeling a bit inadequate, go ahead and look up the definitions. There are plenty of free computer and Internet glossaries available online. My personal favorite is www.Webopedia.com.

Or, if you’re not exactly sure-fingered on the computer, check out some tutorials. Get up to speed on Word or Windows or whatever else you’d like to try. It doesn’t cost much. In fact, you can do it for free.

And then, you can move on to setting up your own online business. Yes: YOU!

After all, when you think about it, not getting your slice of the Internet pie just because you’ve let the jargon scare you off is like refusing a cruise to the Bahamas because you don’t understand the bar code on the ticket.

So why not hop on board PDQ. (That’s Pretty Darn Quick, in case you didn’t know.) You’ve got nothing to lose . . . and who knows what-all to gain?

Bob Brooker’s mission is to make home-based Internet business accessible even to Internet beginners. Bob — himself a devout non-techie — looks for and personally tests products that are the simplest to understand and use, even if your computer skills are limited to sending an occasional e-mail to your sister. http://www.makingmoneysimplified.com