Steve Mills - Life, the Universe and the Digital World

Online Business is more than just blogs

Just a quick post today to make sure that everyone knows that I am still around and kicking. I have had a busy last month, consolidating a couple of exciting new opportunities that have presented themselves, and getting my teeth into some challenging new internet marketing campaigns.

I just wanted to put the idea out there today to all of the bloggers out there that are wondering how to make money online with their blogs. The short answer is that you have a very small chance of making a decent income with just your blog alone. A blog that just has posts, a few adsense ads and some affiliate programs (like this one is at the moment) may turn some dollars, but not enough to get the bank manager excited every time you walk in.

You should not be considering yourself just a blogger, but taking the next step, treating this area seriously and start thinking about starting an online BUSINESS. Sure, a blog may be an integral part to it, but at the end of the day you need to know how to attract peoples attention and move some kind of product. The internet is full of bad information about “How To Make Money Online”, in fact there seems to be more of this around today then ever before. But in-between all of this there are some sound strategies of people that have gone before and made Sustainable Online Enterprises.

Like the byline of this site says, I am all about helping people become Sustainable Personal (as in personally branded) Online Connected Entrepreneurs. Its a simple phrase, a small acronym that can be easily remembered and applied to everything you do online. It is a system that outlines how to gain traffic, and then monetize that traffic so that your audience becomes your customers, and yes, even your fans in the year to come.

By utilizing the wide variety of ways to promote your business, develop content and target customers the SPOKE system deals with social media, google adwords, SEO strategy, blog optimization, marketing and advertising theory, personal branding and sound business knowledge to provide a comprehensive system to at the very least give a good online business idea a head start.

Tags: advertising, blog, Business, marketing, media, money, social networking, strategy

Sustainable Personal Online Connected Entrepreneur

So Steve you may be thinking, what is this Spoke system you keep talking about here? SPOKE is a system that I have been developing over the last two years to give people a systematic approach to becoming an online entrepreneur. It takes the best of social media theory, internet marketing secrets and online business strategy and combines them into a mindset that can guide you towards success online.

SPOKE is an acronym with two meanings. The letters stand for Sustainable Personal Online Connected Entrepreneur.

Sustainable

Everyone wants an internet business with longevity, one that will continue to pay off long after the initial hours of developing and setting up an online marketing system. I personally can not see the point of setting up a business that will be obsolete or struggling to find customers In three months time. Online businesspeople that follow the SPOKE system will be building long term digital assets, businesses online that will continue to provide revenue for years to come. This is not just about landing pages and Adsense, SPOKE shows you how to productise your knowledge, keep customers coming back and retain customers for longer by developing a sales funnel.

Personal

In this modern world, the main thing that separates you from the next business person online is YOU, your unique personality. SPOKE is all about you building your personal brand, and allowing your unique voice to shine through and be the thing that keeps people coming back to your online assets. It is about finding an online business model that allows all of your personality to express itself, and there is a definite emphasis on having fun. By building a personal brand, you make it easier for customers to find you as you begin to roll out your Internet Marketing Empire, and also raising your profile greatly increases your chances of connecting with other SPOKES of already successful online businesspeople.

Online

SPOKE recognises the immense advantages in becoming an online entrepreneur rather then setting up a traditional “bricks and mortar” style business. With low overheads, very small barriers to entry and new tools and software being released every day, there really has been no better time to start an internet business.  The SPOKE system shows you how use these online tools to their maximum efficiency to save hours each day, market your products more effectively and gather intelligence on the competition quickly and easily.

Connected

The SPOKE system recognises the power of social media to drive targeted traffic to your online business. It is my aim with this blog and the associated tools and books that you will get to understand and develop a social media marketing strategy that is easy to set up, but most importantly easy to maintain.
SPOKE is also about connecting to other entrepreneurs and offering products and services that combine your skills, knowledge and customer base to the mutual benefit of both partiers. SPOKE is also about connecting with outsourced providers so that you a free to grow your business and plan for its future expansion.

Entrepreneur

The aim of SPOKE is the development of  an Entrepreneurial business for yourself, one that has an end goal of removing you from the day to day running of the business, and allows you to choose the hours and place where you work. By developing an entrepreneur’s mindset you will learn to see opportunities as they arise and continue on your path to online business success.

The second meaning of the SPOKE acronym is that it refers to the Spokes of a wheel.
Each business can be thought of as a HUB, and it can be connected to other SPOKE business by coming to an arrangement to provide products and services to each other.

Your SPOKE business might be to develop website templates, and you might develop a relationship with another SPOKE business that sells website hosting packages. By complimenting each others services in a mutually beneficial arrangement you automatically increase your base of potential customers and sales.

So That is SPOKE in a very broad stokes and abstract nutshell. If you are interested in more information please subscribe via RSS, or sign up for my email newsletter to get hot tasty tips served straight to your inbox.

Tags: Add new tag, business model, business strategy, businesses online, digital assets, Entrepreneur, internet business, marketing system, money, spoke system

SPOKE - A New Model For Online Business

Been a bit quiet on here of late, but I assure you it is not without good reason.

I have been working on a new model of business, one that I am sure you can benefit from. It is a model that some people have been following with great success for decades, but is only coming into mainstream view now as everyone becomes super connected, has instant access to unimaginable resources of knowledge and skill for creating websites and knowledge products online become easier to learn and more widespread.

Hey, and it even has an acronym. SPOKE

The SPOKE system is going to present people with a way of developing sustainable online businesses, that provide long
lasting income (some of it passive) and creating meaningful work. It is about utilizing the skills that you currently have to start to
break the cycle of trading dollars for hours, and which skills that you should be developing to be successful in an ever changing world.
It is about  making the most of this connected, fast paced world that we live in, and using it  to support rather then overwhelm you.

A NEW VIEWPOINT

Over the last few years I have studied and worked closely with many bloggers, entrepreneurs, business managers and internet marketers. I have also lately been doing a lot of work with social media marketing and consulting, as well as studying a lot of material about social networks, the future of the internet and business, entrepreneurship and work.

While doing a review of my business plan last month a number of these pieces started to click together, and a picture began to form out of the confusing puzzle that we call our modern working life. I saw how it was possible to have meaningful work, escape the 9-5 office based - always the same drudgery and also make a decent living. It is like freelancing, contracting or even “making money online” but more then that. I will develop and share the SPOKE system with you over the next few months

REDESIGN TIME

Also I think I need to modernise this blog (once again) and develop it into a world class resource of information. Design for this site is a continual process with me, but inspiration has come in short bursts. While design isn’t everything, it is important that you quickly convey what the site is about and your level of professionalism as soon as people hit the page.

Tags: Business, Connection, Entrepreneur, marketing, online, SPOKE

Lifetime Customer Value Explained

One of the key concepts to learn if you want to successfully run a sustainable online business is the idea of lifetime customer value. I define LCV as how much the customer is worth over the lifetime of your relationship with your business.

HUNTERS & FARMERS

Some businesses can be seen as hunters, and some as farmers. The hunters are focused on a single sale, and will do everything the can to get a customer perform one specific action, buy their product. Once purchased, they don’t perform any specific actions to get that customer to purchase from them again. They are not interested in having to provide long term value or in retaining the customer.

Farmers however understand the importance of building long term relationships with clients. They want to nurture and grow relationships with their customers so that they can continue to provide more products and services with ever increasing value to them. The cost of retaining your existing customers if often far less then the cost of acquiring new “cold” ones via advertising and other marketing methods.

LCV is all about keeping customers as YOUR customers, stopping them being tempted to look at competing products, and when they do look elsewhere they retain a loyalty to your brand that makes them come back, based on the relationship that you have developed with them.

Real farmer businesses realise the LCV as so important that they will give their first sale away almost for free in order to get that customer into their sales funnel. I will leave the concept of sales funnels to another time, but in short a sales funnel is a range of different products that you can provide a customer after the initial purchase. In general, these products are a) more expensive and b) more closely tailored to the qualified customers needs. So by giving away the first sale profits to those that promote their business (affiliates, retailers) the very top of the sales funnel acquires a lot of customers that you can then promote other products too.

A REAL WORLD EXAMPLE

A real world example to consider would be the sale of inkjet printers. You can go and buy one from your local office supply mega warehouse for $100, which at the time seems to be a bargain. You use the printer for a few months, printing off photos, documents and CD labels, and all of this goes well until one day a flashing icon tells you that the ink has run out.
It is only when you go back to the store and look at the price of the ink cartridges that you realise that it is going to cost you $120 to refill the ink for your $100 printer.
The printer company now has extended your LCV with them by giving away the printers for near cost price, and now make all of their costs back on the ink.

While this example does not really do the sales funnel model justice (it only has one tier to the funnel, which is buy more ink), it does show you how lucrative it can be to develop a business model with LCV as a key factor.
WHY IT IS IMPORTANT

When you understand lifetime customer value the importance of mailing lists, social networking and making sure that everything you produce has real value to it becomes apparent.

This is why membership sites, online courses and mentoring are such great opportunities online. You are constantly in front of the customer, providing real value and a service which they would rather get from you then anyone else.

There are lot of terms and specific theory around Lifetime Customer Value such as churn rate, retention rate, retention cost, discount rate and a lot more which I will cover in some detail over the coming weeks.

The Vital Spark For Your Online Projects

There are no shortage of programs, courses and books out there showing you how to make your business work online. You will read one and it will tell you to go through steps A…Z and at the end you should be making X amount of dollars per month.

It looks simple, and if you followed their step by step approach you too should see similar results (if they are being truthful, please do a bit of checking out any incredible or unbelievable “too good to be true” statements at least a little bit sceptically before jumping in headlong).

For most internet marketers, blog owners and other online business people the road to profits starts to look a bit harder as soon as the information has been digested. Because now, when it becomes time to put the theory in to action you hit the first road bump. You need a market to apply this fantastic information to, and idea to base the system on, a topic to write your fantastic new ebook about.

There is plenty of information out there about using Google tools to find a niche, and this is a very good method of finding what people are searching for, and what they are finding as a result of those searches. If you can offer something that is significantly better then what is currently being offered in that niche (or can market / convert the traffic better) then give it a go.

Also, be creative around your research into niches. As the online marketplace has matured, new niches (ones that are profitable) have become as rare as hens teeth. But they are still out there, and new ones are created every day. Just keep your eyes and ears open, look at innovative ways of using the technology. For instance there are a few books starting to appear about using twitter as a marketing tool. Keep your finger on the pulse, be an early adopter of the next big web thing and then inform all of those that jump on the bandwagon later on.

The idea around your internet business and the niche that you target with your material is one of the fundamental keystones to your online efforts. If it is a good niche it could be plugged into any model. Ebook sales, membership site, adsense, affiliate sales.

Tags: Add new tag, business work, google tools, internet marketers, keystones, marketing tool, niche, true statements, twitter