Online Store Profits. Create success with an online store |
And now, a Stunning Admission! Here and now, I’m going to tell you my motivation for writing Yahoo! Store Profits.
I’ve made it clear in some of my other newsletters, and in the content of Yahoo! Store Profits that I’ve always wanted to own my own business. That feeling has been with me since I was 16 years old, and it never went away. No matter how cool my job got to be, I still wanted to be responsible for my own destiny.
So, I became a Get-Rich-Quick Junkie. I spent about $20,000 on schemes, systems and programs. It was such an addiction that in a bizarre twist of fate, one of my first directing jobs in the TV business was an infomercial about making money from home!
Ahh, the irony. Of course, all of the programs I bought turned out to be junk. And because of that experience, I don’t blame ANYONE for being suspicious of ANY system that claims to teach you how to make money from home – Even if it’s ours.
Yet, with all that money thrown out the window, I came to an extreme revelation:
My mind was not yet conditioned for personal success.
Even though I knew that I could dream about making tens of thousands of dollars a month working for myself, my MIND wasn’t ready accept that I could manage a business from ZERO dollars revenue to as much as $30,000 a month.
Maybe you’re saying to yourself, “I would have no problem dealing with that!” Good for you, but if you’ve never done it before, you’re wrong. Having a mindset conditioned for Big Success can only materialize once you’ve had “Little Successes”.
Suddenly, my goal changed from “Get Rich Quick” to the “Make Money Smart” Plan.
You see, I knew one thing for certain about the Internet. All things being equal (Realizing that everything I didn’t know at the time I could eventually learn), Marketing, in any form, is a numbers game.
Meaning: If you can develop a plan of action, and make that plan a habit, the same plan that makes $500 a month on the Internet should also make $5,000. The only difference between the 2 plans would be amount of marketing that you do – the numbers.
Now, with this little revelation burning a hole in my brain, I just needed to come up with the first stage of my plan to make that critical $500 a month. And it couldn’t be just any plan… It had to allow me to build on each success, re-invest profits, and re-apply everything I learned about Internet marketing to any other type of on-line business.
That’s why Audrey and I chose a Yahoo! Store.
Shocking! This is my shocking admission to you.
“Yahoo! Store Ownership taught us nearly everything we needed to know in order to effectively realize our dream of self-employment. And because of the education we received, we were able to expand into other areas of Internet Marketing and double our income.”
Owning a Yahoo! Store is just the beginning!
Today, we make almost 50% of our total home business revenue from our Yahoo! Stores, and the ONLY reason that we have other on-line business (The other 50%) is because of our Yahoo! Store education.
Once your first Yahoo! Store makes a profit, not only will you probably open another one, but you’ll also expand the entire breadth or your business model. You may branch out into Affiliate Marketing, to Auctions, to Join Ventures, and eventually, you may create your own products and form new partnerships…
Yahoo! Store Profits is the Battering Ram that gets you into the Castle. Once you’re inside the gate, it’s up to you to decide how to run your kingdom. It is the system that allows you to learn all of the critical aspects of marketing a product on the Internet, with out having to fight technology to get into the game.
Think about how Yahoo! Store Profits walks you through the process.
Your safety net is it’s brand name – On the Internet, there is none larger than Yahoo! There is no other company that a home based business can associate itself with that’s as big and well know as Yahoo! That’s a HUGE Credibility booster and an awesome first step.
The introduction to search engines is the Yahoo! Shopping Network. Think about how long it could take to be indexed in Google! Then consider that they only re-index once a month! You can be indexed immediately in the YSN, and every time you change your page content in your Yahoo! Store, you can look and see how the YSN spider reacts to it in 48 hours or so. That means you can get near instant feedback about your Search Engine Optimization Efforts.
There is no shopping cart or real-time gateway to program or have installed on your system. I’m going to go out on a limb and say that learning this kind of technology is a waste of time! It’s a must have, like petrol is in your car, but in order to drive your car you don’t need to understand how petrol works! To drive your car, you need to know how to DRIVE!
My point is, once your Yahoo! Store is successful, you’ll have the money to pay someone to install a shopping cart or merchant gateway for you if you branch out into other aspects of Internet marketing besides a Yahoo! Store.
Take it from me; I’ve wasted MONTHS trying to educate myself about E-Commerce Technology! It’s not worth it because while I was trying to understand CGI, I was NOT trying to understand how to get targeted traffic to my site. Remember, successful E-commerce is 95% “Commerce” and 5% “E”.
And half a hundred other educational and profit making exercises that do 2 things:
Condition your Brain for Success On-line.
Train you how to create an environment that allows a transaction of Value to take place.
Cave man say “Me have fire. You want fire? Yes? You have coconut. Me take coconut, you take fire. My cave is nice, yes? "
Once you see how the process works, once you’ve dealt with a bad credit card, or a customer’s lost shipment, 20th page rankings on the search engines, and a customer or 2 that re-define the word “vulgar”, you’re ready to multiply that $500 a month e-commerce tutorial into a $5,000 a month money machine.
Because with a successful Yahoo! Store under your belt, you will have Internet Marketing education and you’ll have the right attitude.
Then, it’s all a numbers game.
Yes, you probably will move into another facet of Internet marketing besides selling direct to consumer via e-commerce. And when you do, because you’ve prepared yourself by operating your Yahoo! Store Successfully, your mind will be ready for much more rapid, and even larger success.
A Squared – It’s a Simple Plan.
I’ll be honest, when Audrey and I first launched A Squared Artifacts, we didn’t have a business plan, and we paid for it in loss of time, loss of income, and loss of productivity.
Having a strategy for growth in place for your business, no matter how skeletal it is will accomplish at least one very important thing: Increase Your Productivity.
I often get questions from folks who ask if they can start their home-based business while they are still employed full time.
It doesn’t matter how much time you spend managing your business, it only matters how productive that time is. I can gobble up all sorts of precious, profit making time by clicking around the Internet looking for all sorts of new information when I should be writing an e-zine article, or optimizing a page on one of our web sites, or creating a new affiliate site, or testing some new pay per click keywords.
I realize that taken as a whole, the scope of those marketing fundamentals can put some people off. But the truth is, you only need to address them one at a time. Just make sure you do it consistently!
Getting sidetracked is in my DNA, so I can appreciate how hard it can be to stay the course. If you find your target falling out of focus, you need to make a plan and stick to it. A day-by-day, week-by-week, step-by-step plan. And it doesn’t have to be a time vampire!
Here’s an example:
Once you’ve got a site up and running, allot 45 minutes on Day 1 of your week for Search Engine Optimization. Then on Day 2 allot 45 minutes for copy-writing and sales page tweaking. Now, since these 2 things affect the content that appears on your site, you actually are doubling your productivity there.
On Day 3 give 45 minutes to researching new pay per click words. You can still find words in FindWhat and about a dozen other Pay Per Clicks for a penny apiece. Who cares if one of those keywords only got 100 searches that month? The point of low cost bulk keyword bidding is that it doesn’t cost much to get that traffic!
Consider this: if you’re bidding on 300 keywords that only cost you 1 penny per visitor and you make $25 profit per sale, and you turn 1 visitor out of 200 into a customer…
It just cost you 2 dollars to make that sale. Now, what if each one of those 300 keywords that you’re bidding on sent you 5 visitors a month. See? It’s a numbers game!
On Day 4 give 45 minutes to your newsletter. Tweak it so that it could be used as an e-zine ad as well.
On Day 5 give 45 minutes to finding an e-zine to advertise your site or your product in.
On Day 6 (you didn’t think you only worked 5 days a week did you?) submit the e-zine ad to the e-zine…
And on the next week, you can swap out 1 or 2 of the days to start some affiliate research, put up an ebay auction or 5, build a mini-site, or find a new source of products for your Yahoo! Store.
Anyone can execute a plan like this!
I’m not even asking you to give up an entire hour of television! But during those 45 minutes, you need to be focused like a laser! You need to become the model of productivity! Think in terms of a NASCAR Engine…They can only go 500 Miles before they need rebuilding, but they go those 500 miles at 200 miles per hour. Spend that time being as efficient as possible.
A Squared Artifacts uses basically the same structure outlined above. We work on projects in blocks of time, and we know exactly what needs to be accomplished in that work period.
Why so much structure? Well, consider how good it feels to complete a home improvement project, or a painting, or even the feeling you get when your house is clean or your lawn is mowed.
It’s the feeling of reaching a goal. We keep our daily duties contained in little bite-sized chunks because it lets us have the feeling of accomplishing something, of reaching a goal, every couple of hours.
Try this strategy. It will save you from becoming a work at home zombie.
The Overall Plan.
Once Audrey and I realized success with A2ARMORY, before we did ANYTHING else, we spent 2 days brainstorming a business plan. I realize the phrase Business Plan and Brain Storming isn’t used in the same sentence often, but in our case, it makes perfect sense.
You see, once you understand Internet marketing, once you have your brain conditioned for success, you need to dream about the kinds of things your business can do to make a profit AND satisfy your own personal desires. If you’ve ever dreamed of being a full-time writer, then make that a part of your brainstorming session. If you’ve ever wanted to teach aerobics, then factor that into your business plan.
The point is, once you have proven that your online business can be successful doing things that you like, you can start to figure out ways make money doing things that you’ve only dreamed about doing. That’s why you need to brainstorm right up front.
Here is the Gist of our plan: Our 2 year goal is to live in Florida in the Winter and in our current home in the Summer. We’re 6 months ahead of schedule and our plan is only 6 months old.
We use Yahoo! Stores as a means of generating a regular monthly income. The major majority of all of our products in all of our Yahoo! Stores are drop shipped.
After our bills are paid, remaining revenue is allocated towards expanding our business model. We re-invest just about everything.
Our first area of expansion is in the Affiliate Marketing Industry, for a couple of reasons.
First of all, any profits that are realized from our Affiliate Marketing Efforts are considered Passive Income. That means that money generated here was worked for one time – the time when we did the research, joined the affiliate program, built the site, and hosted it.
Once we see the site making money, we leave it alone.
“Work once” profit many times…”
Now, consider the power of this profit replication.
Phil Wiley paints a pretty neat picture:
What if you created one little Mini-Site each week for a year. And each one of those affiliate mini-sites makes $50 profit a month. At the end of your first year, you’d have a passive income of $2,500 a month. Now, what if it only takes you 4 hours to create that mini-site? That means you work 16 hours a month for a $2,500 monthly paycheck in the first year. In year 2, you work the same hours, but your Affiliate revenue doubles…
That’s why affiliate marketing is part of our overall plan.
We also try to tie in our affiliate products with our Yahoo! Stores.
For example, if we create an affiliate web site that pitches Movie Memorabilia, once that site is getting traffic, we may decide to open a Yahoo! Store that sells Movie Memorabilia, and then make our Yahoo! Store an “Affiliate” of that site. No coded URL, just a straight-up link from our Affiliate Site to our Yahoo! Store.
A key component to that plan is to capture the name and email address of the visitor to that affiliate site. We want them to sign up for that affiliate site’s newsletter, so if we do decide to open a Yahoo! Store that compliments that site, we can send a mailing to that list and tell them about it!
Just a little side note: Permission Email marketing is a vital ingredient to ensure long-term success. There are so many advantages to capturing a visitors email address that I’m sure I’ll eventually write an entire newsletter series about it.
The short version is: If you don’t get the email address of your visitor when they visit your site, and they leave without buying anything (which happens 99% of the time), all the energy and effort that you placed into getting that customer to visit your site in the first place is wasted.
But, if you have their email address, you can follow-up! You can try to close the sale multiple times! And if the newsletter was generated from an affiliate site visitor or a Yahoo! Store visitor (any site selling multiple products), you can always let them know when you introduce new items, or bring on new affiliate merchants.
Our 2nd area of expansion is creating our own products.
Yahoo! Store Profits is ONE of those products, and at this moment, there are 3 others in the works. I only expect one of them to make any kind of serious money, but considering that we keep all of the profits because we own the products, it’s a risk I’m willing to take.
Information product marketing is a very viable business expansion plan. And once you’ve learned the ropes of Internet Marketing with your Yahoo! Store, it’s something that you should consider.
Our 3rd business diversification strategy is through Partnerships.
Not Joint Venturing, but real partnerships. Since A Squared Artifacts began, it’s now a shareholder in 3 other business start-up entities.
Remember reading about Audrey’s accounting and business background in Feature Films? Well, because she knows the money business, she has collaborated with another businesses to create a Discount On-Line Mortgage Company.
Meanwhile, I’m in the process of creating a 5 part series of Training DVD’s that teach budding Video and Film Editors how to use very popular Commercial Editing Software. Video and Film editing remains one of my professional passions, and these training DVD’s are some of the easiest material that I’ve ever created - All I have to do is remember…
All of our expansion is the result of our first Yahoo! Store Success.
The process of operating a Yahoo! Store as taught us all of the critical Internet marketing techniques that we needed to expand our business in many profitable and enjoyable directions.
Yes, you need to condition your Brain to do this. I use the word condition because conditioning anything means using it repeatedly in the circumstance that you want it to function efficiently.
Okay, I’ll stop beating around the bush. You need to put a plan into action so that you can learn from it. When you see the telltale signs of success, believe me, you’ll quickly start to examine every little detail of the process that you undertook to get to that little victory.
That’s the kind of Mental Attitude and Conditioning that you need in order to be a Mega-Success. It’s a sort of High Resolution Vision of the conditions that your business is running in. With a freshly conditioned brain, you’ll be able to take your $500 a month business and keep expanding it until you see fit.
Resources
For Your Plan: I've always been a big fan of Yanik SIlver's stuff, for a couple of reasons: First, he's a humble kind of guy. The only reason that he hasn't stayed under the radar of internet marketing is because he's so successful. Second, his products are "Non-Fluff". I realize that a 500 page system is nice to tear into every know and then, but I'm much more interested in "Do this - then Do that" kind of instruction.
Yanik and Jim Edwards have created an e-book that's become the seminal "Internet Marketing Step-By-Step Plan". It's widely regarded as one of the most succinct, straight-forward marketing resources on the web. It's called, "33 Days to Online Profits". It contains very plain and do-able advice and resources to help you manage a one month marketing plan, using the same techniques that he uses to earn a little less than a million dollars a year. 90% of what Jim and Yanik teach are applicable for Yahoo! Stores, and it's a wonderful resource as you start to expand your business. I own it, and if you need some serious help organizing a plan for Internet Marketing, you should too.
For Your Brain Think and Grow Rich! Maybe you haven't read the classic Motivation Text by Napoleon Hill? Let me just tell you that this book is filled to the brim with just about every single thought provoking, inspirational and motivational success law ever written. After reading this book for the 2nd time this year, it quickly re-conditioned my brain for short term and long term success. It's one of the most quoted and often referenced How to Succeed books, ever. It's finally available in electronic form, and can be downloaded instantly. Every single web entrepreneur that I know owns this indispensable material. Please give it a good, hard look and start applying it's principals to your business the moment you finish reading it. You will NOT regret it | |
|
Copyright © 2002-2006 Online Store Profits, A Squared Artifacts LLC. All Rights Reserved. 39 Shelburne St. Burlington, NJ 08016 1-866-647-1645 |