I want to start a local business (Sydney) that is web based - Can it work?

I know of people who appear to be doing well delivering physical goods into the local Aussie market, using for instance Ebay Aust.

But as the internet has no borders, it's much easier to deal with the larger, global market place. Australia has a population of 21 million compared to more than 300 million in North America. 80% of my website traffic come from the USA.

It's possible to have physical goods delivered over the internet into the US by using Amazon, who stock just about everything and pay commissions for the customers we send them.

Even easier is to sell downloadable products which are deliverable just about anywhere in the world and collect payment through third parties like Paypal or Clickbank.

Running an internet marketing business from most parts of Australia is no hindrance at all as long as you operate in an area that has broadband. The technology is in place.

The real challenge is in learning a business model that works. With tutoring this can still take a few months to learn the procedures and set up a few websites.

Once you have proven that your marketing strategy works and has been proven with websites you've installed, it's just a matter of repeating the model in new marketing niches.

As an example, if one website reliably produces $300 per month, build ten more to expand your income, and continue to build with your proven model.

I especially recommend a business model that places emphasis on building an email mailing list as part of the strategy.

Ivan

I'd test the idea first using other people's products to make sure that the model works for a similar product before spending a lot of money.

With sales as the end goal, follow-up is important, so build a page for a giveaway product - eg, "Features You Should Look For In Quality Shoes" - that would be of interest to targeted prospects and get them onto your mailing list. Then you can send them a series of carefully crafted emails designed to pre-sell the product and then direct them to a catalog or sales page that closes the sale. To begin with, "sell" the freebie, not the end product.

Most buyers take up to seven visits to your site before they buy.

Sales pages typically convert 2-3% of visitors. However, you can double or triple that by getting them onto an email list first and following up.

A good optin page will get more than 20% of visitors joining your list to get the freebie.

You can speed up the process by using Google Adwords to send traffic and select the region (eg Australia) to accept traffic from.

Once you have them on your list you would need to have a sales system in place to convert the sale and a distribution system in place to make the delivery. SmartDD is a good program that can assist with this. It's effective and not expensive.

As you can see, the overall marketing strategy needs to be looked at but once you have a good idea of the basic model, set up a simpler version to test it.

Here's a free 16 min video that describes this process in more detail (not an affilite link):

http://www.nicheprofitclassroom.com/...blueprint.html

Ivan