Online Business: critical success factors [Part 2]

Where to publish them? The standard advice is for you to have a website of your own. This means designing one or picking one of the many overly available free templates online and having a hosting company hosting it for a fee or using the free hosting services with all that goes with it like your name being a sub domain to the name of the hosting organisation and ending up with a difficult to remember name or having adverts splashed all over the pages. However, you can join one of the many free article publishing sites for free. The only thing you lose is the revenues from adsense or better still open a blog account just the same way you open an email account.

Some online experts will tell you that the kind of name you use online affects your success. To me, that is nonsense, and an absolute one at that. Does Amazon or eBay represent market names for used items or books? No. What is of utmost importance is reputation and credibility.

What is the proof that Okey Ndibe of Sun newspaper is a good, better and best columnist in Nigeria? His well researched and meaningful articles with Sun newspapers and not his, name. Wouldn’t you hire him if he is available and you can afford his fee to write an article including sales copy for you if you were looking for somebody to do that for you? Of course, you would.

Let me expend some space on “traffic drives” to your sites which some persons organises seminars on. The truth is, there is really no hard and fast rule about prompting on-liners into visiting you site. That is if you have one. Whatever works for you is the best strategy. However, one sure way of doing it is by joining as many free articles sites—again! Start submitting content driven articles that leaves you readers wanting to visit your personal site for other works of yours. Be sure to avoid phrases such as set up is a breeze and hold you by the hand and all that online cliché made popular by mostly Americans, all of which goes to portray you as a copy cat and one with a herd mentality. Be formal. Be informative. Be entertaining. Be original. Be unique.

To get many on-liners to visit your site frequently, you need to have and make your site more helpful to them. This you do buy having as many free helpful links as you can grab and then doing exactly what I have done—publicizing it. For instance, I have made my blog a one stop centre for job seekers in Nigeria and beyond. If you are looking for job right now, you don’t need to memorialize any job site url. Just visit and click on any of the many job links available and pronto! You are there. It is also useful for those wanting inspirational quotes to motivate them. There are three to four different slides of quotes from personalities like Einstein, Abraham Lincoln and the rest.

A return to the matter of your software is most desirable now. You must discover your software if you want to make headway. And the faster you do that and start making as many mistake as you possibly can, the better for your talent. For instance, my software is thinking of writing an eBook on security; then another on persons of a particular age bracket. Research is currently on, on both. What is however not resolved, is how much to stamped on them. This leads to what is called pricing decision. Certain factors go into fixing a price for eBooks. You have to know them and not unthinkingly fix prices and end up not selling a copy. If you are interested in this info, you have to pay. I am not persuading you to buy anything—that is for another day— but informing you about issues you need to understand properly.

I go to seminars and see deprived fellows being hoodwinked by equally deprived brothers in the name of teaching strategies on how to do one thing or the other and the attendees still not making any meaning of their lives, online simply because their fundamentals are weak and nobody is telling them this or how to grow them but pushing products that they don’t need, their way.
Come to think of it. How many of the resources persons selling “how to” on forex and brandishing millions as their incomes from online business are actually practicing forex. And if they are, what percentage of their income comes from such practice and what percent comes from resourcing in different seminars and selling eBooks’ sometimes copied free online?

Those who organises seminars on how to be an author without touching a pen, ask them, how many such books have they written and how many have they sold?
Will yourself to commercialize your software but more importantly, will yourself to read and study materials related to your software. And if you are wondering how to determine what to prepare from your software, then follow this guide:
Anticipatory: you prepare what comes to mind and then, advertise it existence.
Just in time: you get idea about what to prepare from, may be, discussion board of social network sites. This requires more money since you would have to stay longer online to determine the “hot cakes” and then consulting for clients. That is, proving yourself as knowledgeable in a particular field and waiting for request to start coming your way.

Online Business: critical success factors [Part 1]

The global decline in productivity (GDP) which resulted in an economic crisis of immense proportion did render certain investment options unattractive, particularly, for the short and medium terms.

Stock, being the most life infused investment vehicle ever—yes! It is actually blessed or rather, cursed with all the characteristics or some or better still, most of the characteristics of living things like hearing, growing, reaction to what it hears, and even dying due to the same hearing—did react to the information of the crisis more radically. It was the rapid southward movement of its prices with it catholic reach that actually told the story of the crisis more vividly.
And the consequences of this were many folds, both vertically and horizontally for peoples and nations. For sure, it did stunted the growth of the then booming ancillary businesses that were anchored to it like writing, publishing—online and offline— and even cloning and microwaving of existing test by “”experts” including clergies; and the most lucrative then, organisation of seminars by over night gurus from, before then, fields as diverse as even medicine. Note this and you had better know it also that, one has not attempted to use a blanket cover for all the resource persons nor organisers of seminars during those period of boom as some actually, even though from unrelated disciplines, did carry out enough research to justify the attachment of the titles to their names.
It was not all stocks and shares. No. some of the resources persons of that era, to be fair, did actually made attempt to diverse their focus and earning sources by introducing more business and investment opportunities like forex, online betting, web design, pyramidic schemes, pay per click, adsense, sales copy writing and many more. But all these proved not to be any where nears as lucrative as was the stock business. So, a return to stocks picking “how to” became inevitable. However, the sudden bust in the stock market saw a forced return to these “neglected sectors” for everyone—teachers and students.
Arguably, some, if not most, of the persons now online to either sell or buy, edit and resell such acquired information have not really taken out time to understand the fundamentals of the business of online “businessing”.
That people are making money, lots of it, online is not debateable. However, what is is some of the stories of how I use 200 naira to make millions in two weeks, which are nothing but, false truths meant to, in most cases, get you to part with your money! How? Wouldn’t you be interested in buying a lab guide of how to convert 200 naira into 2 million naira? Did I hear you shout, wonder banks!
The truth is, there are critical success factors, that is, determinant of success, for online businesses just as there are, for offline. And you ignore these factors to your own peril. And these factors, inexhaustible as they are, are not in the custody of any one “expert” as they change or subject to modification according to customers changing taste and your region or country of your primary target. For instance, I don’t believe as a Nigerian that a sales copy that tells says that there are limited copies of a material can inspire any kind of urgency in me to buy, Whatever happened to the originally source and even the sent items folder in your email account!

The success drivers can be divided classified into two:
the hard wares
your soft wares
The hard wares: you need a computer of your own and then, a flash drive of say, 256MBor less. The Pentium of the computer is of no consequence. Provided, you can do your typing and add excel document when the need arises, then it is adequate. The reasons for this:
It saves you money that would go into typing your informational all the time with typist. This allows you absolute control over the finally look of your document besides, typing directly into the computer allows you to edit as many times as you can. Personally,
You are sure that you are the only owner of the material as yet. not when you are trying to sell your” exclusive” somebody is somewhere coping for almost nothing to customers and friends and friends of friends.
It also reduces the cost of doing business since you will always need to go online to do something like research then, rather than sit there and burn your airtime trying to hurry over a material to get the real information embedded and then, pay for printing. You simply click on file bottom at the top of the displayed page or window and select the “save as” menu and then select your flash drive and save the entire page to it. It opens as if you are still online when you open it in your system back home. To free your drive for more of such job, you should endeavour to move the copied material to your computer. This way, you can be sure that a 200 naira worth of time would take you some where before it runs out besides, there is nothing comparable to peace of mind.
Other gains of having yours would be apparent in the course of the reading this piece.


Your soft ware: note that one did not simply state, software but your software. Therefore, one s not referring to anything of those Microsoft and all its competition produced aids that make the computer actually worth having like MS word, Quick book. No. here reference is actually being made about what makes you worth having—your thinking faculty! it is far more important than any hard wares and software you would acquire in the course of trying to establish yourself online.
It is when your brain is fully engaged in the business that you can determinedly refuse to jump into the bandwagons of one of the many template driven businesses like “ how to drive traffic” “how to build list” and other similar stuffs but rather, find a niche for thyself based on your software—your hobby and interest. This is the surest way of being amongst those to be celebrated than conformity. Thinking out side the box

For instance, there is nothing that says you cannot market formulas for winning elections particularly, in Nigeria, online as a consultant. Or be an image maker to politicians. The more dirty the image the more your fee. Remember, the number of clients you need to break even here is just one. Now, how many do you imagine you need in all other businesses to break through? Hundreds! Thousands! Meanwhile, they all require similar, note that I did not state, “the same” but similar strategy.
Yes! One might take a little longer but all the same, it is better for you to find your own ark and wait there for the flood which is bound to rise some day for your sailing to commence than hoop from one solar energy seminar to forex, computer, betting, and the rest. You become a regular face at such meets and on first name relationship with all the resources and experts and still not their equals. Again, this is not an attempt at condemning seminars. One personally attends even till date just that one picks and choose. Just pointing out that whilst they may be good, they might equally be the wrong business field for your software.
The best person for you to be is yourself. You should love what you do in order to motivate yourself the more to do it even with a seemingly unacceptable level of failure or rather, set backs and discouragement from non patronage. Remember this: effort, they say, only fully releases it rewards after a person refuses to quit!
Never think of quitting! You gain by staying. The further you dig into the net because of this business or that business the more you become an expert at something. That is knowledge; a priceless software.

Remove the need for early arrival, that is, success on the business from your thought. It is one of the discouraging factors in the business—wanting to make it in two weeks. Discover what you can do and start doing it small. Build a profile first. This you do by writing—not about yourself but about your areas of interest. For instance, if you are good at research and writing, then rather than how to repair a lap top or forex, you should be a freelance writer with any of the many freelancing sites making money simply by helping others put their thought down in a readable and understandable form. The best way to advertise yourself here is to have as many articles as possible that your intending employer can easily have recourse to in accessing your capability.

Austin is a Business graduate with Accountancy as his core from the University of Nigeria. He is however, rainbow-like and chameleonic in his choice of research interest with focus mainly on Politics, Computer Engineering; self motivation and casually, sports. Very expressive and therefore, writes a lot of free-pay articles.
He is available @ www.nigeriavillagesquare.com, www.facebook.com www.twitter.com and www.vibratingaustin.blogspot.com