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Thread: Planning your online business Stage 3

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    Platinum Member Chatmaster's Avatar
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    Planning your online business Stage 3



    Stage 3

    First of all. If you think you can skip this vital step, you are sadly mistaken, do not skip it or else you will fail!

    The planning of your online business will dictate every single step that you will take throughout your entire project. It is the most crucial step you will ever take in starting your own online business.

    The following steps are vital:

    Before planning your business you need to understand yourself. At the moment there is a clear indication that the strongest seller on the Internet is to show people how to make money online, do not let this change you from who you truly are. Some of my biggest sellers online has been, Ducks, Airguns and Juicers.

    I want to expand on this topic as people are often guided by other so called “experts” to sell their products and become rich. The Internet has such a large population that it is hard to find something that doesn’t have interests online.

    According to Internet World Stats the world’s total population stands at 6,7 Billion people and 1,6 Billion of those are active online. That is huge! What are the chances that you will find at least a hundred people that will be interested to buy your product for a $100? Compare that to any other land based industry and you suddenly realize that it is a mere shadow of the Internet.

    But lets get back to planning your online business.

    Write down your interests and specialities on a piece of paper at least 5 but try to write down several more. Do not be in a hurry. This stage is meant to take the most time to do. After writing them all down you will be ready for the next step.

    Finding your niche

    Use Excel for this...

    Create and account with SEOBOOK Copy and paste your list one by one into the keyword suggestion tool. Export the lists to CSV and save it into a folder that you will call keyword research.

    After doing this for all your keywords, copy all the data into a single Excel sheet and then simply arrange your results according to the Google daily estimate.

    Create a new Excel sheet with the following columns.

    Keyword, Google estimate, Google results, Google Score, Rating and choice.
    Now copy and paste the top 10 keywords and Google daily estimates into your newly created sheet under the appropriate table.

    NOTE: Always treat the data from Google, Yahoo and Bling (MSN) separately.

    There is definitely a difference between the type of people using different search engines but never just disregard other search engines because they are smaller. You will understand better later in this series.

    As I said, the columns are Keyword, Google estimate, Google results, Google Score, Rating and choice.

    By now you have entered the Keyword and Estimate. The next step will take a bit more time to do. You can do this for a minimum of 20 keywords, but I normally do it for as many as possible.

    Do a search on Google for each of the keywords in your new excel sheet. Enter the total number of results found by Google into the Google results table. In other words this will give you an idea of how many pages on the Internet is competing for SEO on this specific topic. The idea is to determine how much competition there is fighting for this keyword.

    Now add the following formula to the rating column.

    Rating column = Results divided by Estimate =SUM(C1/B1)

    The lower the score in the rating column the better the keyword. Rearange the sheet to order the keywords according to rating from low to high. Add a filter to the Estimate table to only list values higher than 100 (this is your choice and depends on the amount of results you get) and in the Choice table add the numbers 1 – 10 to indicate the best keywords. Do not delete the rest, you will use them for SEO purposes later.

    Now do exactly the same for Yahoo and Bling.

    This entire process will take you about 30-40 hours to do after which you should sit with a list of prime keywords for Google, Yahoo and Bling.

    At this stage you should have an idea of which market segment you will target for your 1st online business. I need to add that my personal keyword research methods are much more advanced but the above method should work for a newbie. There are even super affiliates still using this very old method successfully.

    At this stage you are only interested in the top 10 keywords in the choice table of each of the search engines.

    The next step will be to determine your budget. NOTE: Throughout my articles I will assume that you have Unlimited Internet and a computer.
    Last edited by Chatmaster; 22-Feb-10 at 08:03 PM.
    Roelof Vermeulen (Entrepreneurship in large organizations)
    Roelof Vermeulen| Rock flaps south africa

  2. Thank given for this post:

    Dave A (10-Nov-09), Faan (10-Nov-09), wynn (10-Nov-09)

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    For the first time I get to understand a bit how this works. You must be lucky if you do not use this kind of approach and make mega bucks within 24 hours after deciding to design a site and go live.

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    Site Caretaker Dave A's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Chatmaster View Post
    Write down your interests and specialities on a piece of paper at least 5 but try to write down several more. Do not be in a hurry. This stage is meant to take the most time to do. After writing them all down you will be ready for the next step.
    Roelof, would this include interests where you don't necessarily know how to monetize them online?

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    Platinum Member Chatmaster's Avatar
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    Yes, Dave. As a first business try to stick to that which you know and understand else you will have a problem finding the sales pitch. We will find products later.
    Roelof Vermeulen (Entrepreneurship in large organizations)
    Roelof Vermeulen| Rock flaps south africa

  6. Thanks given for this post:

    Dave A (10-Nov-09)

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    Platinum Member Chatmaster's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Faan View Post
    For the first time I get to understand a bit how this works. You must be lucky if you do not use this kind of approach and make mega bucks within 24 hours after deciding to design a site and go live.
    Faan you are soooo right. There is not a single, and I mean a single person that has EVER made serious money in 24 hours. They always seem to leave out the months of planning and preparation it took. They also seem to forget that they had an existing customer base or websites.

    If you start from scratch you have to understand that the planning phase is the most important phase of all. You will see this even more clearly when we start with the next phase of Compiling a marketing plan. But we have about 2 or 3 steps before we get there.
    Roelof Vermeulen (Entrepreneurship in large organizations)
    Roelof Vermeulen| Rock flaps south africa

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