September 2010

A complimentary publication of
Top-Web-Entrepreneurs-Plan-It.Com

Entrepreneur
On Near Zero Budget

My first advice to those who want to start a business - any business - is to start by acquiring and retaining a faithful audience.

That invariably prompts two questions.

Why?

Because you must ensure that there is a real demand for what you have to offer. And what you have to offer must be unique ... as unique as you are an individual with a unique set of knowledge, know-how and life experiences.

You can channel that existing real demand for your offer by first making a name for yourself as a generous and helpful source of decision making information.

You make your uniqueness obvious and well known first. In doing so, you make it easier for people to more readily recognize the uniqueness of your product and/or services.

Your potential customers will have to decide at some point whether to buy your offer or someone else's.

Give them the pros and cons, from the generic to the specific. Help them decide, for their benefit. They'll reward you with their trust.

People buy more readily from someone they trust than from anyone else.

In other words, you must ensure that your target audience is pre-sold ... before you try to sell them anything.

How?

How do you get the vital recognition and trust you need from your visitors to turn them into paying customers?

Certainly not with advertising! The ROI of advertising - any form of it - is horrendously prohibitive. Worse, it is cold and impersonal.

Advertising makes people more or less vaguely aware of the existence of a product or a service. It reveals nothing about who is behind the product or service.

When you make it easy for people to get to know you, both as a human being and as an entrepreneur and responsible business person ... you never have to resort to advertising. People come to you naturally ... if you make it easy for them to find you, that is!

Before you can become an entrepreneur with a reasonable expectation of success, you must become a person worth knowing, worth trusting.

Most people turn to social media and/or blogs to make themselves known.

You should know that any of those solutions let you create a buzz. But to make it a sustainable, even growing buzz ... one must invest a sustained, if not growing amount of energy and time.

Social media (Facebook, Twitter, etc) and personal blogs require a prohibitive amount of time and involvement.

The information you put on your blog is immediately perishable. It is pushed down the stack by your blog visitors' contributions. You must constantly come back and post fresh info to keep up your audience's interest ... much like you would have to hit a gong at regular intervals to have it emit a sustained level of sound.

Social media is what I consider to be a "fickle" and somewhat superficial environment. You should not try to build a reputation and a business on such fragile foundations.

Social media can play a role in giving your pre-existing "fan club" a means to interact with you. But, first, you must acquire that fan club and, secondly, you must be prepared to devote a lot of time "entertaining".

Can you afford the time that social media demands?

My Recommendation

There is a much more productive way of investing your time as aspiring entrepreneur and future business owner.

I have devoted an entire Web site to cast a revealing light on the many aspects that have to be taken into consideration.

The first order of business is to acquire a faithful and growing audience. You must earn it's trust by giving it what it is looking for. Answers. Decision-making information.

Then, and only then, can you safely start doing business, in an efficient and effective manner.

Pre-sell successfully and you will sell successfully!

But, to achieve that, you must have a reliable and proven marketing plan.

I can vouch for the effectiveness of the SBI 2.0 Business Marketing Process ... because it is behind my success as an entrepreneur. Without it I would never have made it this far. Period.

On Just Under One Dollar A Day
As Near A Zero Budget As You Will Ever Get!
While Maximizing Your Chances Of Success

As editor and webmaster I publish this newsletter monthly to help promote entrepreneurship on the web.

I sincerely hope that you have found this e-zine informative.

Best regards,

Claude Jollet  B.Sc.A.
Applied Knowledge Entrepreneur
Top-Web-Entrepreneurs-Plan-It.Com
"From the idea to the bottom line. My business is in the black by design!"