Image Source: The Day of the Triffids Courtesy of aussiegall
After wrestling with the marketing companies, I have decided to go with low cost or zero cost DIY Internet marketing strategies on my own. Regardless what you are doing on your sites, you need to have marketing strategies. I will be recording everything I have learned on my entrepreneur journey diary. I am hoping to help other entrepreneurs learning what I have learned and to avoid making the same mistakes that I have made.
Again, I am not marketing expert. I would love to get real suggestions from real marketing experts. Let me start from scratch and find the brutal facts.
What is my goal as an Internet Entrepreneur?
My goals are to become top online retailer world wide. That is my big picture. It’s a doable goal with very high bar.
What is my business plan?
- Stabilize the first few online stores and make static profit.
- Finalize my business module and differentiate from other competitors.
- Build good relationship with suppliers
- Operating my own warehouse for better fulfillment.
What do I have so far?
- Just pass the first anniversary and survive. The first year sales was over my expectation. It was actually profitable.
- Few online stores with zero or very minimum inventory cost. The business is solely relying on suppliers and drop shipping.
- Getting more and more organic traffic each day. My keywords strategies seem to be working, but need to improve.
- Very low cost to run multiple online stores.
- Good relationship with suppliers.
What difficulties do I have?
- Low conversion rate. My highest conversion rate was 3% in the first year. It drops blow 1% due to few major facts.
a. More competitions in the crowded niche.
b. More traffic which lower the conversion rate.
c. Poor marketing strategies.
d. Poor store front design. - Difficult to track inventory. In many cases, the orders have to be canceled due to out of stock. This is the biggest issues with drop shipping.
- Difficult to lower shipping cost with multiple suppliers.
- Not enough bandwidth to do everything.
- Minimum budget to spend on marketing.
- Finding good suppliers that don’t suck.
What has to be done to improve my business?
- Increase Search Engine (organic) Traffic.
- Decrease bounce rate.
- Increase returned visit rate.
- Increase conversion rate.
- Increase online and offline exposure.
- Improve online store shopping experience.
- Find more good suppliers.
- Invest money on killer selling points.
Those are the facts that I am facing so far on my journey. It does not sound very bad at all. I am not a speed writer. I have spent 2 hours put together all this facts, but I am glad that I get this done. I have to put these facts down, so I can clearly see where my problems are. Now I have identified the problems. I just need to get start and work on solving those issues.
Do you have any suggestions? What are the facts about your online business?
Terence, you have just proved something that I have always maintained. There are no marketing experts. They become experts by doing exactly what you have done. You can now say why you succeeded and why you did not succeed by hindsight. That is exactly what all experts do. Not one of them can ever predict with 100% guarantee that he can come out with a plan to succeed. They are all wiser by hindsight. You are on the right track, and you will hit the jack pot sooner than later. You have my absolute guarantee on that based on your own confessions.
@Dining Tables:
I believe that too. It may sounds difficult to do marketing, but it actually don’t seem that difficult at all.