Fly on the E-Commerce Cyberwall

Internet Marketing in the 2010s -- Creating Your Own Community
What does it take to succeed in business online? A lot of people start their own business because they don't want to have some boss making their decisions for them. They don't want to deal with irritating co-workers. They want to be left alone.

If you went into business online because you hoped it would insulate you from people, you've probably already reached that fork in the road where you needed to make a decision. You had to decide either to continue your isolation and fail in your business, or open up to others in order to succeed.

Even if you run a sole proprietorship, business is never a solitary task. You have to interact with people. You need to learn what your potential customers really want, what needs they have, what buttons lead them to buy.

You have to work with others to get your business moving forward. Looking back on my career both in Fortune 100 and in self-employment, I can't see a single major step in my career that didn't involve help from someone else.

Working with others is an integral part even of a one-person business. I almost closed my business three years ago when I grew too frustrated with being totally isolated. It wasn't until I started partnering with other business owners and bouncing ideas back and forth between us that I had the social engagement I needed to be able to work alone.

The beauty of this is that this need to connect can benefit your business. People want connections, especially as life in general gets more disconnected. You can capitalize on that need by finding ways to build your target customers into a community.

You can find ways to help people through a membership site. Build a community around your area of expertise. They will get the connection they need. And you will get recurring, monthly income instead of one-time sales.

Not sure how to start a membership site? Become part of Jim Edwards' "The Net Reporter" training site and you'll find both community for you and a wealth of training in his Vault on how to set up a profitable membership site.

Or check out Jim Cockrum's "My Silent Team" training site. It has great training on a lot of different marketing strategies and is a great community of marketers in which to kick around ideas and get lots of new ones.

Look for ways to build community into your business. It will benefit both your customers and you.

And make sure you get your needs for community filled. It will make you a happier, healthier, and more successful business owner.
Jeff

Labels: Jim Cockrum, Jim Edwards, marketing, membership sites, My Silent Team, predictions, The Net Reporter

Internet Marketing in the 2010s -- Make a Living Consulting for Small Businesses
Remember the OLD way to job security? It went something like this: get a job with some big corporation, work your way up the corporate ladder, and never have to worry about looking for a job ever again.

Didn't quite work out that way, did it?

This career model used to leave you set for life. That's not the case anymore.

If you still hope that career model will reappear anytime soon, I have bad news for you: things won't go back to the way they were.

The big companies find they must get leaner and more nimble in the face of the 21st century's volatile economy. And what created it? That's right. It's the ability of smaller, more nimble competitors to take a bite out of them.

More and more people will dabble in starting their own businesses. More and more small brick-and-mortar businesses will try to get up to speed with the rapidly-changing online world.

This is good news for anyone who has a basic knowledge of Internet marketing. New business owners will need help getting started. Established small brick-and-mortar business owners will need knowledgeable consultants to whom they can outsource their online marketing.

What does that mean? The marketing knowledge you've already gained in your own business puts you in demand. It gives you job security even if you don't have anything remotely like the kind of big-company job that used to bring it.

How can you benefit from this trend? You can feel out the local businesses in your community to assess their online marketing needs. Talk casually with the owners of businesses where you do business personally.

Chances are you'll find several who could use a hand. Chances are you'll be surprised to see how much they're ready to pay for your help.

What if you feel uneasy talking consulting with local business owners? Check out Jim Cockrum's OfflineBiz training site for those who are getting started at doing exactly that. Jim has the tools and strategies to get you ready to set up a profitable consultancy.

He shows how to approach small business owners, how to set your rates, even how to handle requests in areas of marketing that you don't feel comfortable handling yourself.

Whether you take Jim's training or jump right in on your own, though, don't overlook this profitable trend. It's your job security for the new economy.
Jeff

Labels: consulting, Jim Cockrum, marketing, predictions

The Good Guys of Internet Marketing -- Jim Cockrum
For the last marketer I feature on this year's list of "The Good Guys of Internet Marketing," I'll feature Jim Cockrum.

Jim started with a simple little ebook "The Silent Sales Machine Hiding on eBay," which detailed the strategies he had used to build a HIGHLY profitable business through eBay. Note, I said "through eBay," not "on eBay."

Jim's ingenious methods made it possible for him and his readers to build relationships with and make sales to people who hadn't even bid on any of his eBay listings. That book has become one of the biggest selling ebooks in history.

Jim followed up with a couple of other very successful books as well: "Turn Auction Traffic into Cash" and "A Part-Time Plan for Massive Success Using eBay and the Internet." Both of them offer the same unique blending of eBay strategies and website strategies to leverage both eBay's huge traffic stream and a website's freedom from the restrictions that eBay places on sales done on their site.

With all the attention his methods have received, he could easily have raised his prices to five or even ten times what he started out charging. But he has held his prices down to their original level that he sold them at five years ago.

In addition, he has developed two training sites that offer some of the best value for the cost around. Jim's My Silent Team site offers dozens of successful marketers as experts sharing their expertise in various areas every day in site forums.

It features a HUGE library of free training materials. Each of the books that you are free to download from the site generally are books that the experts who share them there sell for more than the monthly membership cost of My Silent Team. So you get tremendous value there.

He also has a second membership site, Offline Biz.com. Offline Biz helps marketers who have developed marketing knowledge from working on their own sites to learn how to start profitable consulting businesses for small local businesses in their area.

Both sites are among the most economical training sites I've ever seen. Yet they offer value that outshines many training sites that are far more expensive.

Perhaps that's why Jim has consistently been rated as the most trusted Internet marketing teacher online. Personally, I think you can't go wrong learning from any of the marketers I've featured in this past week.

I urge you to check them out, as well as their free content and their paid products. You will always get far more than you pay for anything that they offer.
Jeff

Labels: Good guys of Internet marketing, Jim Cockrum, My Silent Team

Two New Reviews on the Site
I just posted two new reviews on some pretty comprehensive Internet marketing resources on my site. They are:

• Jim Edwards' "The Net Reporter" Internet marketing strategies site
• Jim Cockrum's "My Silent Team" strategies site for both eBay and website selling

Have a great Memorial Day weekend!
Jeff

Labels: internet marketing tools, Jim Cockrum, Jim Edwards, marketing, My Silent Team, online business, reviews, successful business, The Net Reporter