Online Business Start Up Has Been Tough
I found out about the Warrior Forum from a fellow marketer in the UK just a few days ago and since checking out the threads on here couldn't believe that a lot of the answers I was searching for a few months back were almost all in one place.
I am a mechanical engineer by training but built a career in management starting back in 1986 and have since gone on to run manufacturing companies for corporations since 1995. I can't grumble that my job pays me well, but it has frustrated me for some time that I can work a typical 65 hour week, spend many days of the year travelling and away from my wonderful family and then see nothing special for my efforts.
Whilst I generate a lot of profit for my bosses, my reward is a small annual pay increase and a bonus which they make tougher and tougher each year to achieve. So I started to look for something new in 2009 whilst still working. Never once gave internet marketing a thought until a sales letter dropped through my door.
Then I had one of those light bulb moments and started to search out on the internet. I am computer literate, but until 2010 had never put a Business to Consumer sales letter together (which is so different to the B2B letters), designed a web site, used a list builder and auto responder, used PPC, used back links, written articles or e-Books. In fact most of this was alien. I spent hours and weeks looking around for that Holy Grail. You know that cost effective plug and play system that would take me from zero to £15,000 in a month.
Well, I have never found one and decided to build my online business up from scratch. I was always sceptical of paying big sums of money for a ready made system and wanted to develop my own money generating "systems" in multiple streams. It has probably taken me longer, but boy have I learnt a lot about the business in the process.
Today I have an eBay shop, 7 web sites promoting products (in my chosen niche markets) I have licenses for and most are completely re-branded, and I have written some articles and now started to publish my own "How to" e-Books. My first e-Book is on writing good sales copy. I found this by far the hardest topic to get my head around despite everyone selling all types of "sales letter generating software". Let me tell you, the best way is to learn to write your own before you can afford to have them written for you. If anyone wants to have a free copy e-Book then just send me an email and I will reply with a copy attached.
So my strategy was simple in many ways. Start with eBay as I had sold other products on there before from time to time and had a PayPal account. So this was my first task to set up a store selling a few good e-books that can help with an online business which I sold at low cost. I have always sold a hard copy or copy on CD as I prefer to give the value rather than a digital down load.
Then I set up a web hosting account and created my first 3 domains. I already had niche markets in mind so this was easy enough and had also purchased licenses for my niche market, FOREX trading. The beauty about these was that they came as ready made packages including the sales page so I could just make the small changes I needed to personalise them to my business and add in the order now buttons from PayPal. Very soon these sites were up and running. But wait how I drive traffic to the sites.
I read about PPC so started to advertise. I didn't know about SEO, or the use of little tricks in your Google add to reduce the PPC cost, or how to make use of back links, or social media or direct mail or classified ads.....I spent a small fortune on PPC without the level of sales I expected.
Then I sat down to think about the strategy. I started with classified ads to drive traffic, but this was limited as it didn't always get to the right target audience. Then I found out about renting mailing lists. I called one of what I thought was a reputable company and sent over my sales copy. They recommended 3 lists to test. I started with a small mix across three lists and then had good feedback and conversion from one in particular.
I was publishing two sets of seminar DVD's with some great footage of the world's great online marketers and ones you would all know. In fact I learnt some of the techniques from attending the seminar. I am now working my way through the list with 5,000 mailings going out each month and it is going great guns. At this moment we are conducting the fulfilment in-house (well my wife is!!), but it will get to a point soon when we outsource this work.
Then for the web site, I added a squeeze page. I also applied the techniques to Google ads to get my PPC's down to the £0.03/£0.05 level, which made a huge difference to what I was spending. Next was to increase my site traffic. I learnt for free from some good marketers and started to put articles together and to post on blogs to get the back links to my site. It was a strange feeling, and not so long ago, when my average daily visits went from 35 per day to 350 per day. In fact as I type. My site visits on August 18 2010 tipped 0ver 400 for the first time and most for free. I still can't get my head around it and I couldn't actually pinpoint exactly why, but it has to be a combination of all of the things I had been doing. So now, my Google monthly cost at about £220 and I am getting over 2000 visits per week (I can forward a hosting screen shot).
I am signing up on average 193 new subscribers a week and converting at 8%. So, now I am working hard to expand this to the other sites. So we have three income streams running so far. The e-Bay shop, the direct mail business for seminar DVD's and the FOREX websites running just online.
Oh sorry I forgot. We did start a little venture in March 2010 which is also working nicely and one my wife spends her time on. We decided to organise workshop events at some local hotels near where we live. We stumbled over a guy at a fiend’s party who has a passion for photography and runs his own small photography business. He also specializes in giving training and selling specialized hardware for like minded photographers. So a week or so after meeting him, we asked him if he would be interested in conducting a workshop for us on photography, techniques and the art of. An of course, what was in it for him was the opportunity to promote his business to the audience and to sell his training packages.
We said that we would provide the audience of between 30 and 60 people and the venue and all he had to do was to turn up on a Saturday morning and do this for 2 to 3 hours. He actually agreed. My wife and I said afterwards. What the hell do we do now!!!! So she contacted a local hotel to get some room hire estimates for 4 hours, cost of refreshments, provision of overhead projector etc. Then we had to figure out how to get people interested and how much to charge. We decided that £49.99 was a good figure but hadn't got a clue if we were too high or too low, but though we could give attendees value for money.
Then we placed a classified add in the local paper which had a circulation of 55,000 and a fly poster in a couple of local specialist clubs. We didn't want to take telephone calls so set up a web page specifically for this, so I just added a page to an existing site and directed people to this and a PayPal buy now button. Then after about 8 days we had our first booking. I can tell you now that we were twitching somewhat as running this with one person would not be too good for us! Away, we went away with the family to visit friends in Germany for a long weekend. We arrived back home on the Monday afternoon and I checked my emails. We had received a further 34 bookings for the workshop. £1749.65 sitting in that account for the cost of one classified add of £90 plus sales tax. We thought that would be it, so my wife got on with organising the details of the workshop and preparing the workshop files and the freebie we had organised. The workshop was in about 6 week’s time.
I check my emails every day and we ended up having to close this workshop down when it had hit 60 attendees so as to keep the numbers to an easy level. We decided to run the ad again a few weeks later with a list of dates the workshop would be available, using the same photographer and venue.
For the first event we cleared £1193.65 after the costs of the room hire, coffees, ad, workshop materials etc. Not bad for the first one. Since then my wife has run two of these each month and because we are better organised with the event and costs. We now clear £1292.62 at each small event.
We decided to leave August and to have the month clear as it’s a traditional holiday month, but there are 3 workshops already booked in September and October so there is a guaranteed £3877.86 per month just from this which only requires 4 hours of time on a Saturday morning from 9 till 1pm. We are now planning for other workshops with niche markets and although we didn't want to employ people, we will have an employee start on September 1st purely for organising and running these events, so that we can build the business up without it taking all of our time.
So there we have our 4 main income streams. The best part is that I am just about to quit my full time career to be a full time marketer. Scary I know as I have worked as a senior manager earning 6 figures, a bonus, company car, pension plan, medical insurance etc for the last 24 years. Remember that Queen Song. I want to break freeeeeee...........LOL. I still can't believe that I am just about to give up what I spent 24 years building..............a career............but it will be worth every second.
I am a mechanical engineer by training but built a career in management starting back in 1986 and have since gone on to run manufacturing companies for corporations since 1995. I can't grumble that my job pays me well, but it has frustrated me for some time that I can work a typical 65 hour week, spend many days of the year travelling and away from my wonderful family and then see nothing special for my efforts.
Whilst I generate a lot of profit for my bosses, my reward is a small annual pay increase and a bonus which they make tougher and tougher each year to achieve. So I started to look for something new in 2009 whilst still working. Never once gave internet marketing a thought until a sales letter dropped through my door.
Then I had one of those light bulb moments and started to search out on the internet. I am computer literate, but until 2010 had never put a Business to Consumer sales letter together (which is so different to the B2B letters), designed a web site, used a list builder and auto responder, used PPC, used back links, written articles or e-Books. In fact most of this was alien. I spent hours and weeks looking around for that Holy Grail. You know that cost effective plug and play system that would take me from zero to £15,000 in a month.
Well, I have never found one and decided to build my online business up from scratch. I was always sceptical of paying big sums of money for a ready made system and wanted to develop my own money generating "systems" in multiple streams. It has probably taken me longer, but boy have I learnt a lot about the business in the process.
Today I have an eBay shop, 7 web sites promoting products (in my chosen niche markets) I have licenses for and most are completely re-branded, and I have written some articles and now started to publish my own "How to" e-Books. My first e-Book is on writing good sales copy. I found this by far the hardest topic to get my head around despite everyone selling all types of "sales letter generating software". Let me tell you, the best way is to learn to write your own before you can afford to have them written for you. If anyone wants to have a free copy e-Book then just send me an email and I will reply with a copy attached.
So my strategy was simple in many ways. Start with eBay as I had sold other products on there before from time to time and had a PayPal account. So this was my first task to set up a store selling a few good e-books that can help with an online business which I sold at low cost. I have always sold a hard copy or copy on CD as I prefer to give the value rather than a digital down load.
Then I set up a web hosting account and created my first 3 domains. I already had niche markets in mind so this was easy enough and had also purchased licenses for my niche market, FOREX trading. The beauty about these was that they came as ready made packages including the sales page so I could just make the small changes I needed to personalise them to my business and add in the order now buttons from PayPal. Very soon these sites were up and running. But wait how I drive traffic to the sites.
I read about PPC so started to advertise. I didn't know about SEO, or the use of little tricks in your Google add to reduce the PPC cost, or how to make use of back links, or social media or direct mail or classified ads.....I spent a small fortune on PPC without the level of sales I expected.
Then I sat down to think about the strategy. I started with classified ads to drive traffic, but this was limited as it didn't always get to the right target audience. Then I found out about renting mailing lists. I called one of what I thought was a reputable company and sent over my sales copy. They recommended 3 lists to test. I started with a small mix across three lists and then had good feedback and conversion from one in particular.
I was publishing two sets of seminar DVD's with some great footage of the world's great online marketers and ones you would all know. In fact I learnt some of the techniques from attending the seminar. I am now working my way through the list with 5,000 mailings going out each month and it is going great guns. At this moment we are conducting the fulfilment in-house (well my wife is!!), but it will get to a point soon when we outsource this work.
Then for the web site, I added a squeeze page. I also applied the techniques to Google ads to get my PPC's down to the £0.03/£0.05 level, which made a huge difference to what I was spending. Next was to increase my site traffic. I learnt for free from some good marketers and started to put articles together and to post on blogs to get the back links to my site. It was a strange feeling, and not so long ago, when my average daily visits went from 35 per day to 350 per day. In fact as I type. My site visits on August 18 2010 tipped 0ver 400 for the first time and most for free. I still can't get my head around it and I couldn't actually pinpoint exactly why, but it has to be a combination of all of the things I had been doing. So now, my Google monthly cost at about £220 and I am getting over 2000 visits per week (I can forward a hosting screen shot).
I am signing up on average 193 new subscribers a week and converting at 8%. So, now I am working hard to expand this to the other sites. So we have three income streams running so far. The e-Bay shop, the direct mail business for seminar DVD's and the FOREX websites running just online.
Oh sorry I forgot. We did start a little venture in March 2010 which is also working nicely and one my wife spends her time on. We decided to organise workshop events at some local hotels near where we live. We stumbled over a guy at a fiend’s party who has a passion for photography and runs his own small photography business. He also specializes in giving training and selling specialized hardware for like minded photographers. So a week or so after meeting him, we asked him if he would be interested in conducting a workshop for us on photography, techniques and the art of. An of course, what was in it for him was the opportunity to promote his business to the audience and to sell his training packages.
We said that we would provide the audience of between 30 and 60 people and the venue and all he had to do was to turn up on a Saturday morning and do this for 2 to 3 hours. He actually agreed. My wife and I said afterwards. What the hell do we do now!!!! So she contacted a local hotel to get some room hire estimates for 4 hours, cost of refreshments, provision of overhead projector etc. Then we had to figure out how to get people interested and how much to charge. We decided that £49.99 was a good figure but hadn't got a clue if we were too high or too low, but though we could give attendees value for money.
Then we placed a classified add in the local paper which had a circulation of 55,000 and a fly poster in a couple of local specialist clubs. We didn't want to take telephone calls so set up a web page specifically for this, so I just added a page to an existing site and directed people to this and a PayPal buy now button. Then after about 8 days we had our first booking. I can tell you now that we were twitching somewhat as running this with one person would not be too good for us! Away, we went away with the family to visit friends in Germany for a long weekend. We arrived back home on the Monday afternoon and I checked my emails. We had received a further 34 bookings for the workshop. £1749.65 sitting in that account for the cost of one classified add of £90 plus sales tax. We thought that would be it, so my wife got on with organising the details of the workshop and preparing the workshop files and the freebie we had organised. The workshop was in about 6 week’s time.
I check my emails every day and we ended up having to close this workshop down when it had hit 60 attendees so as to keep the numbers to an easy level. We decided to run the ad again a few weeks later with a list of dates the workshop would be available, using the same photographer and venue.
For the first event we cleared £1193.65 after the costs of the room hire, coffees, ad, workshop materials etc. Not bad for the first one. Since then my wife has run two of these each month and because we are better organised with the event and costs. We now clear £1292.62 at each small event.
We decided to leave August and to have the month clear as it’s a traditional holiday month, but there are 3 workshops already booked in September and October so there is a guaranteed £3877.86 per month just from this which only requires 4 hours of time on a Saturday morning from 9 till 1pm. We are now planning for other workshops with niche markets and although we didn't want to employ people, we will have an employee start on September 1st purely for organising and running these events, so that we can build the business up without it taking all of our time.
So there we have our 4 main income streams. The best part is that I am just about to quit my full time career to be a full time marketer. Scary I know as I have worked as a senior manager earning 6 figures, a bonus, company car, pension plan, medical insurance etc for the last 24 years. Remember that Queen Song. I want to break freeeeeee...........LOL. I still can't believe that I am just about to give up what I spent 24 years building..............a career............but it will be worth every second.
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