But the whole purpose of putting up a website is to promote my business, no? Well, yes; but that is not the point. Advertising costs a pretty penny. Did you spend a lot of money putting up your website? Of course not, no. And that is one reason why the Internet by itself is not a form of advertising.
The Internet is something that you do along with your advertising. This is why so many business startups fail. They think that their website is their advertising effort when it is not. Your website could be your sales channel. It could be your electronic business card, and it could be your ambassador to the world, but what it never will be is your marketing department. Far too many people decide or or are sold on the idea that all they have to do is build a website and the traffic will come. All that traffic in their minds will of course translate to many sales and their business booms. Unfortunately, it does not work that way. If if did, we all would be online gazillionaires. It is simply not that easy, but ask yourself this: Should it be? After all, if you want to build a real-life brick-and-mortar business in the real world, does it not take a considerable investment? Does it not take a lot of time and hard work? Is it not true that most of these real world businesses simply fail after a certain period of time? Do they not continue to fail regardless of how much time, money, and hard work are brought to bear on the matter? Indeed they do. About 85% do within the first 5 years, so says the Small Business Administration.
The Low Cost Of Failure On The World-Wide-Web
The real secret value of the Internet is the small cost of failure. It is not inconceivable that you can build a business online for no money at all. This means that given enough time, you can start up an infinite number of small businesses. Every one of these small operations can fail and all you would have lost is your time. Think about it. Does that give you some kind of advantage over your real world counterparts? Yes, indeed it does. You can startup, fail, and learn from your mistakes. A lot of people out there in the real world only get one shot at getting it right. After you have mortgaged your home and/or borrowed all the money you can from your family and friends, the learning experience that you gain may do you no good at all if you are unable to raise the money to start all over again.
Then you fail online you don't take a lot of investors with you. You startup, make your mistakes, flame out quickly and then you are out of business. But not for long, because within a few hours of going down, you can get right back out there and be swinging at the fences once again. The Internet is all about giving you unlimited second chances to get it right. You learn the hard way, the easy, way, this way, and that way, but you do learn, and sooner or later it starts to sink in. What works, and what doesn't. You build up your skill and savvy through trial and error. Isn't that what life is really all about anyway?
So, now you know, the Internet is not an advertisement. Nobody is going to go to your brand new website until YOU find a way to get them to go there. There are as many different ways of doing this as there are opinions on what is, and what is not a good TV show. New methods are being developed all the time. You might invent some of your own if you put your mind to it. So get to it. Do the opposite of what everybody else does. Think of your traffic building strategy BEFORE you settle on your business idea or build out yoru website. You will be mighty glad you thought of this.
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