What is the most important activity in your business?

Hi Felix

I would say for me it's customer acquisition and customer retention in equal measure

It's time consuming but the essence of my online business...without customers I have no business

cheers
Steve

Follow up with my prospects. I also spend a great deal of personal time mentoring and training others. By investing in the ones I train, the leverage of their efforts ultimately benefits me as well.

Content Creation and Promotion.

Since I have a ton of great product the most important thing for me is securing top notch affiliates and partners. I suppose my biggest pain point regarding that activity is the personal touch, relationship building and the time that it takes to make the good contacts. I don't dislike the process by any means...but I prefer to be taking or working on photos, graphics, art or websites.

Cheers

-don

I think the painful and most challenging thing in the internet marketing is finding the best keywords for your business, since all your marketing campaigns basically revolve around these keywords

I would say diversification. You never know where the next big client will come from or the next trouble spot will pop up. Diversifying your business will increase your opportunities and hedge against risk.

building my list bar none.

Staying focused and blocking out all the crap and shiny objects that affiliates shove in your face hourly. Not long ago, I found my online "self" and where I need to keep my focus. I unsubscribed to every list and crappy JV that I could. I only stayed on with Frank Kern because he seems to keep a few steps ahead of everybody else.

So, I think if you find your "Niche" , you need to stay focused on what you need to get done for you and block out all the distractions around you. IM is pretty simple and very much the same in all areas.

1. Find a niche where people want a particular item
2. Find an item to promote or create that item/product
3. Find the people interested in that item, offer them something for free to get them on your list.
4. Find or create product to then sell to subscribers interested in your niche.
5. Find or create more stuff to sell to those people again and again.

See,, it's all about staying focused on that system. Not really much more to it. That's the basic principle that every IM'er or online business follows.

Basically, sell people what they want to buy and stay focused on that.

Robert C.
The Warrior Syndicate
Warrior Forum Underground

Building my list! Building a bigger list! Did I mention building the list?

Creating value for my leads.

Building list, sales, looking after clients

The PR. It involves a lot of writing - which requires continually having good ideas for new content. It also involves interacting with my website members effectively. In my field - it also requires finding good gemstone and taking pics of it to share. Proof of expertise takes actual expertise in my field. It also takes knowing who from the crowd will make the best meet-up leaders, etc.

While my field is really real world intensive - the online public relations is essential. Without it you don't go far with people who are more grounded in real world than online.

list building always comes first, soon as I did this, sales exploded.

Always interact with potential customers. The task will require time. But if you want people to know that you are giving time for your business, you'll earn their trust, respect, and confidence.

I think marketing or advertising of any business is more important then any way, because advertising means we make people to know or aware of your business, so advertisement is very important for a business. You have to also generate enough leads for your business and sales is closing these leads.

What will do to attract the visitor to your site/business.
And for this every time you need to make a new strategy & implement them.

Creating LOADS of content

I'm not an online marketer but I was once a salesman. I guess customer acquisition is the most important part

Finding out what works and what doesn't and then focusing on what works

Growth

Not getting it done rapidly enough

I'll go with Steve - it's selling for me and yes I enjoy doing it even if I hit too many roadblocks at times. Its never a pain for me.

The most important activity in my business is CREATING VALUABLE CONTENT consistently.

The pain points associated with that activity is RESEARCHING KEYWORDS to target and fighting the urge to flit around from one thing to another before TAKING ACTION!

For me it is:

1. Work on yourself.
2. Have a goal in mind on how much you want to make per month.
3. Market daily whether it is pay per click or solo ads. (It does take money to make money)
4. Work with programs that pay residual and an income from other people's efforts.
5. Stay consistent.
6. The marketing techniques that are not making you money or sales, don't do them anymore.

being in the online marketing profession, I would say that content marketing is one of the most important part of business. And secondly, I would suggest the social hustles as that would fire up the business to a high level.

Connecting with my list... AKA the relationship with my list.

One of my most important business activities is spending plenty of time trying to find ways of driving product costs down. I've started importing products from China (to UK), to resell. It's extremely profitable but you can really increase your margins if you pay attention to the detail. I can spend a full two days looking into a product and it's sale-ability, tweaking my sale price by pennies to see the overall bottom line increase and looking at ways to reduce postage costs. It's important not to spend any money that you don't need to.

In terms of my web hosting company (see signature) it's about good customer service and new customer acquisition. We employ a sales and marketing outsource to deal with local business and pass us sales. A very important step is knowing your weaknesses and getting people in to strengthen where you can't.

Building and Maintaining my list.

For me, creating the perfect piece of content is vital. I spend quite a lot of time on each of my blog posts. I make sure it's well-structured and easy to read. I also add videos and photos where relevant. The posts I spend the most time on typically do much better than if I were to write a simple 300 word article.

So many great responses! Thanks. One that keeps coming up is list building. Clearly it is very important if not the most important IM activity. What are some pain points associated with that for you?

I would say getting traffic to my offer