Just as many starts, starting online is easy. Yet, growing your budding business into the thriving enterprise you dream of, or publishing your books - which often goes hand in hand - can be quite overwhelming. Why? Because there are

• many potential ways to success;
• many moving parts;
• many webinars, trainings, downloads, and other products competing for your attention.

Some of these products are essential, others are helpful, but most of them are merely shiny objects that pollute your online journey and seduce you to taking draining detours.

In other words, it’s easy to miss the forest for the trees. To beat the overwhelm and stay on track, we have to get down to the basics, and stick to what counts when in doubt which path to follow. Ready? Here is what it’s all about:

1. Marketing = Matchmaking

Our task as marketers is to match our customers' dreams and desires with the products we are offering.

Or, the other way around, the allure of our products has to trigger dreams and desires.

Put less romantically, we are matching customers’ problems with desirable solutions. It’s as simple as that.

Which implies that you must know your customers inside out. Demographics, psychographics, buying behavior… The more the better.

2. Break even as soon as possible

As simple as this sounds, it’s not an easy feat. Please note that I am not talking about making profits (yet). If you want to win in the Olympics, you have to qualify first. So don't get distracted by potential massive profits and focus on breaking even.

It’s one of the key milestones for any entrepreneur. And perhaps the most difficult one, because getting the ball rolling can feel like Catch 22: you need money to send traffic to your offers, but you must sell these offers to earn the money to buy the traffic… Need I say more?

There is a way out of this predicament: combining lead generation with offering a low-threshold product (for instance a very affordable guide or a collection of tips).

Once you've mastered this and broke even, you are home free: everything else you sell to your leads is profit.

3. Measure, measure, measure

I can’t say this enough. Data, not diamonds, are your best friends in this business. Data will lead you to the diamonds, if that’s what you are after ;-).

Anyhow, I’ve seen many clients shifting in their seat uncomfortably when the talk turns to numbers. Math does that to people 😟. You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to understand the typical marketing math, but if you don’t feel comfortable with testing and data analysis, subcontract it (here is how).

Some online stories would make us believe that success depends on selecting the right tools and tricks. But marketing isn’t a lottery. Although lottery and marketing do have a thing or two in common: the gold rush, the exciting chance to win big, and NUMBERS.

The key to success is in understanding your numbers.

For instance, let’s say your product sells for $100. Thus if you want to make $5000.00 in sales per month, you have to sell 50 products each month.

Now, let’s say 20% of the people who click on your ad buy your product. It means that 250 people have to click per month, because 20% of 250 gives you the 50 buyers you need to make the $5000.00 in sales. Easy, no?

From here we can go on to how many people will have to see your ad per month (based on your click through rates), how much it will cost you, and what you can do to improve these numbers… Again, understanding your data is the key!!!

In a nutshell:

Build & understand your platform, brake even as fast as you can, scale-up using data-driven strategies.

These are the basics - the WHAT. The HOW is of course a much longer story ;-), which this site is part of.

Enjoy!