Online Business: critical success factors [Part 2]

Where to publish them? The standard advice is for you to have a website of your own. This means designing one or picking one of the many overly available free templates online and having a hosting company hosting it for a fee or using the free hosting services with all that goes with it like your name being a sub domain to the name of the hosting organisation and ending up with a difficult to remember name or having adverts splashed all over the pages. However, you can join one of the many free article publishing sites for free. The only thing you lose is the revenues from adsense or better still open a blog account just the same way you open an email account.

Some online experts will tell you that the kind of name you use online affects your success. To me, that is nonsense, and an absolute one at that. Does Amazon or eBay represent market names for used items or books? No. What is of utmost importance is reputation and credibility.

What is the proof that Okey Ndibe of Sun newspaper is a good, better and best columnist in Nigeria? His well researched and meaningful articles with Sun newspapers and not his, name. Wouldn’t you hire him if he is available and you can afford his fee to write an article including sales copy for you if you were looking for somebody to do that for you? Of course, you would.

Let me expend some space on “traffic drives” to your sites which some persons organises seminars on. The truth is, there is really no hard and fast rule about prompting on-liners into visiting you site. That is if you have one. Whatever works for you is the best strategy. However, one sure way of doing it is by joining as many free articles sites—again! Start submitting content driven articles that leaves you readers wanting to visit your personal site for other works of yours. Be sure to avoid phrases such as set up is a breeze and hold you by the hand and all that online cliché made popular by mostly Americans, all of which goes to portray you as a copy cat and one with a herd mentality. Be formal. Be informative. Be entertaining. Be original. Be unique.

To get many on-liners to visit your site frequently, you need to have and make your site more helpful to them. This you do buy having as many free helpful links as you can grab and then doing exactly what I have done—publicizing it. For instance, I have made my blog a one stop centre for job seekers in Nigeria and beyond. If you are looking for job right now, you don’t need to memorialize any job site url. Just visit and click on any of the many job links available and pronto! You are there. It is also useful for those wanting inspirational quotes to motivate them. There are three to four different slides of quotes from personalities like Einstein, Abraham Lincoln and the rest.

A return to the matter of your software is most desirable now. You must discover your software if you want to make headway. And the faster you do that and start making as many mistake as you possibly can, the better for your talent. For instance, my software is thinking of writing an eBook on security; then another on persons of a particular age bracket. Research is currently on, on both. What is however not resolved, is how much to stamped on them. This leads to what is called pricing decision. Certain factors go into fixing a price for eBooks. You have to know them and not unthinkingly fix prices and end up not selling a copy. If you are interested in this info, you have to pay. I am not persuading you to buy anything—that is for another day— but informing you about issues you need to understand properly.

I go to seminars and see deprived fellows being hoodwinked by equally deprived brothers in the name of teaching strategies on how to do one thing or the other and the attendees still not making any meaning of their lives, online simply because their fundamentals are weak and nobody is telling them this or how to grow them but pushing products that they don’t need, their way.
Come to think of it. How many of the resources persons selling “how to” on forex and brandishing millions as their incomes from online business are actually practicing forex. And if they are, what percentage of their income comes from such practice and what percent comes from resourcing in different seminars and selling eBooks’ sometimes copied free online?

Those who organises seminars on how to be an author without touching a pen, ask them, how many such books have they written and how many have they sold?
Will yourself to commercialize your software but more importantly, will yourself to read and study materials related to your software. And if you are wondering how to determine what to prepare from your software, then follow this guide:
Anticipatory: you prepare what comes to mind and then, advertise it existence.
Just in time: you get idea about what to prepare from, may be, discussion board of social network sites. This requires more money since you would have to stay longer online to determine the “hot cakes” and then consulting for clients. That is, proving yourself as knowledgeable in a particular field and waiting for request to start coming your way.