Starting a Successful Business

When you think about starting a successful business, all the moving pieces and parts you need to put together may seem pretty overwhelming. Plenty of folks take one look at all the steps, and then just fall into a pretty hard case of analysis paralysis.

Heads up: you don’t need to put every piece into place in order to start making money online. You can get started almost immediately by employing the “Three T’s” of a successful business:

  • Trade
  • Target
  • Traffic

Let’s take a closer look at these three components…

Trade

The first thing you need is something to trade. This is something you sell, or something you trade for email addresses to get people on your list.

Here are some off the most popular offers to trade:

  • Sell your own products. This tends to be the most profitable thing to sell, especially if you’re selling digital products such as ebooks, apps, courses, videos and similar items. You can create these products yourself, outsource the task, or even sell PLR (private label rights) products.
  • Sell your own services. Are you a whiz at something like writing, copywriting, graphic design, web development or similar? Then you might consider selling your services.
  • Promote affiliate offers. If you don’t yet have your own products or services to sell, then you can sell other people’s offers in exchange for a commission. Digital products yield much higher commissions than physical products, though certain physical products may make that up in sheer volume.
  • Do drop-shipping. Another way to sell something without making it yourself is to use a drop-shipper. You promote the product, you collect the payment, and then your drop-shipper will send the product to your customer.

Once you’ve decided what you’d like to sell, then you need to take a look at the second component…

Target in Starting a Successful Business

The key to selling a lot of products or services is to make sure:

 #1, There’s a targeted audience buying these offers. Does your audience have the money and motivation to buy your offer?

 #2, You understand as much as you can about your ideal customer – who they are, where they hang out, what solutions they’ve tried, what they want, etc.

To figure this out, you’re going to need to do a little market research so you can create a customer avatar. This includes:

  • Learning about audience demographics. These are the basics such as age, gender, marital status, education level, income, amount spent annually in the niche and so on.
  • Understanding what your audience wants. Here you look at what they’re already buying and consuming. For example, go to Amazon and search for your niche keywords, look at the bestselling products, and you’ll quickly understand what your audience wants. (Be sure to do this across various marketplaces and platforms.)
  • Getting more insight into your audience. Spend some time surveying or talking to people in your niche to get a feel for their niche challenges, what motivates them, and anything else you can dig up.

The more you know about your audience, the easier it will be for you to sell offers they really want, and give them content that really resonates with them.

Now the third component…

Traffic

At this point you have something to trade, and you know exactly what sort of person will buy your offer. Now you need to get your offer in front of this targeted audience. In other words, you need to start driving traffic to your website.

There are many ways to do this, including:

  • Paid advertising.
  • Social media marketing.
  • Email marketing.
  • Promo swaps (co-endorsements).
  • Partner traffic (joint ventures and affiliates).
  • SEO.
  • Guest blogging.

It’s beyond the scope of this overview to dive into all of these traffic methods (though you’ll find information about them elsewhere on this blog, inside my webinars, and so on). However, I do want to make two points:

  1. Start with one method. Don’t make the mistake of trying to put all these traffic methods into place at once, as you’ll spread yourself too thin and not get results with any of them. Instead, pick one method and give it your full and focused attention. Once you have one method up and running, then you can turn your attention to a second method. Keep moving forward in this manner, and soon you’ll have nice flow of traffic coming into your site.
  • Get a free Traffic Ivy account. As you start to piece together your traffic strategy, you’re going to find that a lot of it relies heavily on content marketing. You can maximize your content marketing strategy by using Traffic Ivy, which is a platform where other people can publish your content on their blogs and social media pages. Learn more at http://trafficivy.com/free/.

Now a few parting thoughts…

Conclusion

Starting and running a successful business doesn’t need to be overwhelming. Inside this article, we stripped the whole process down to three basic parts:

  • Trade, which is where you decide what to sell (your own offers, affiliate offers, drop-shipped offers).
  • Target, which is all about understanding as much as possible about your audience, including what they’re already buying in the niche.
  • Traffic, which is where you develop a traffic strategy to get your targeted audience in front of your offers.

If you haven’t already done so, I suggest you set some time aside right now to do some planning. Specifically, what will you trade? Who will you target? How will you generate traffic?

Once you’ve made a plan, then schedule time on your calendar each and every week to take the steps needed to implement your plan. A good first step is to get your free Traffic Ivy account, as the free option may not be available for too much longer.

Go get it here while you still can: http://trafficivy.com/free/