Making money online – set up and sit back
Thursday, 23 December 2010 00:00
Many people dream of the perfect business where great profits are made with minimal effort. Chris Barling knows many people making a very good living with businesses operating online, and this article looks at a few hints on how to maximise sales with limited effort.
Look to the web
More than any medium before it, the internet allows potential to make money with your feet up. Marketing, providing answers to questions consumers ask, selling, taking payment and even delivery can all be automated. If something can happen electronically, it can happen without your intervention.
Finding a niche
If you want to relax, it must be the case that nothing threatens your business. If a market is very small, and you dominate it, then competitors will not be particularly interested.
So the simple rule is if you want to succeed more easily, you should find something that is in a small market and very specialist. Competition kills margins so if there are going to be new entrants (and there are if you are in a good size market) you will find it hard to succeed with your feet up.
Let buyers serve themselves
The great thing about the web is that you can get customers to serve themselves. The way to reduce cost and to save effort is to make things as easy as possible for customers.
Some tricks are to spend time considering the navigation of your site i.e. how sections are organised, where section lists appear on the site and how to search for items. If you get a few friends and colleagues who are not familiar with the site to buy something while you observe, you will learn a huge amount about how to make things easier to find.
Learn from these exercises, put the changes in place and increasingly your site will do the selling for you. Remember to make all of the information that people want available. This will not only save calls and emails, but lead to higher conversion too.
Automate your marketing
If you use pay-per-click advertising, then investigate automated tools to try to set up as much as possible to happen without intervention.
Ensure that your ecommerce software can automatically display your best sellers, new products and suggest products that other buyers also bought. The ecommerce software from my company, Actinic, has all of this built in, but so does the software from many other good ecommerce vendors.
By trial and error, you should also establish the best follow up marketing. For instance, send a discount voucher to anyone who hasn’t bought for six months, to remind them of your existence and trigger a response.
You have to experiment with how long before you send the email, what to say, the size of incentive and so on. Once you have found the formula, it can be used repeatedly with little effort, although it pays to re-run tests after 18 months or so as consumer behaviour does change over time.
Provide stunning service
While good service can’t be achieved with your feet up, it can certainly keep them there once it’s in place. If you can create a culture in your company where great service prevails, you’ll have less rude awakenings that disturb your day. And happy customers will cost you less.
Don’t be too greedy
Don’t take too much money from the business. In other words, don’t kill the goose that lays the golden egg. You certainly won’t be relaxed if you get a cash flow crisis.
Feet up and money flowing
Does the perfect business exist with millions flowing in with little effort? As ex-Apple CEO John Scully discovered, maintaining high margins without the continuous ingredient of the X Factor which Steve Jobs brought was incredibly difficult. So the short answer is no.
Do lifestyle companies exist with defendable niches that can make you moderately rich with limited effort? Yes, and there’s more in the area of web sales than anywhere else. But it does take skill and effort to find them in the right business in first place. So good hunting.
Written by Chris Barling, CEO of ecommerce and EPOS supplier, Actinic. Originally published on The Start Up Donut.