If You Build It They Will Come

One of my favorite movies of all times is "Field of Dreams" with Kevin Cossner, possibly because it is about baseball and also because the cards were stacked against the chances of his dream becoming a reality but the hero succeeded in the end.

I just love the underdog stories, possibly because it parallels my own life.

And how does this reference internet marketing you may ask? So many people start out with a dream to make millions in internet marketing and thus the dream quest of how to do it. Today, there is a lot of noise in the marketplace about how to do it and yes, they all come with a price tag of buying a product, system, coaching, webinar, membership and etc.

A newbie can literally follow many paths and spend thousands of dollars before making a dollar. The end result is that some of them will throw in the towel after running up thousands of dollars on their credit card.

Sheepishly I must admit, early on I made some of these same mistakes ( as I started off with Stores Online), but I learned from them quickly. Yes, I may have entered a few market where I made very little and wasted some time and energy. Others markets were profitable. The profitable markets were discovered by doing in depth market analysis and keyword and keyword competition research. So you'll always hear me say that keyword research is the cornerstone of internet marketing. I applied what I learned and made money. Wash, rinse and repeat. Then I did it again in other markets.

You can never argue with someone else's experience or testimonial. Maybe you did not have the same experience or success story as mine. And that brings to my mind a question? Why? Why me? Why can I have success and maybe someone else with the same information fail or be less successful? What is the real difference? It could be a number of things so here are some bullet points I would like to share:

1. learning the basics
2. basic html and computer skills
3. knowing the terminology
4. levering the knowledge of other people
5. not doing everything yourself
6. mastermind with people who have already done it
7. invest in a professional looking web site
8. test elements of the website to improve conversion
9. get back links from hundreds of places
10. analyze where your traffic is coming from and how it converts
11. analyze where your competition's traffic is coming from and how it converts
12. have multiple marketing channels other that just SEO
13. test keywords with PPC and stay within your budget
14. track keywords to the shopping cart
15. get to a number one position in Google for the keywords that convert to sales
16. leverage on page linking and interior linking from testing results
17. have a schedule for checking for broken links, 404 errors and problems with your site map
18. use Google Webmaster Tools and other software to identify problems and fix them
19. make sales projections based on last year's seasonal trends and set goals to beat last year's sales
20. read and understand Google's terms of service and stay abreast of Google's change in algorithms
21. realize that with growth comes leverage and you can't do it all so invest in hiring others that have better skills than you to get the jobs done that are falling by the wayside
22. outsource link building when you can
23. connect with like minded people and meet with once or twice a month to bounce your questions and ideas off of
24. find new ways to automate or discover new processes to eliminate wasted time
25. have regular planning meeting with your team
26. survey your customers
27. if you are not moving forward, hire a internet marketing coach
27. remember it is not always what you think, but most importantly….how the customer responds

There are probably hundreds or thousands of things I could add to this list so please jump right in, seasoned veterans and let's give some good solid business advice to those entrepreneurs that are just getting started building their Field of Dreams, by adding your comments.

The statement, "If You Build It, They Will Come" is only true in the movies, not internet marketing. There is much work to do after the website is done and it is the responsibility of the business owner to get it done. I have seen a number of new people just getting started in internet marketing have the mindset that it is up to their web developer to build the site and if no one buys or they don't have traffic then they just got a bad developer. The developers job it to build it and it is the business owners responsibility to drive traffic and increase conversions and optimize it and yes, even upload products, write sales copy, product descriptions and all page content.

So I would like to close today's post by saying that I am just an average and ordinary person with an extraordinary desire to achieve my dreams and although this internet marketing journey has not been easy, I hope to share some of my experiences that will help you, the reader get from point A to point B faster.

Cheers,

Joyce Brister

P. S. There is no easy button.