I am absolutely astounded at the difference between the really good online marketers and the not so good ones. What I’m astounded at is that the difference is not as obvious as you may expect. You’d think some have flashy videos, great graphics and unique designs but it just doesn’t work like that.

I’ve been checking out some of the best online marketers and trying to figure out what makes them so successful. I have even gone to the extent of screen capturing their sales pages to try and understand what it is. It’s hard to compare my own because I become subjective so I feel it’s best to use others and take a completely objective point of view. The truth is in the detail and the delivery. It’s not much really and can range from a better fonts, bolder boarders, use of keywords and their uncanny ability to make you like them. This is probably one of the biggest marketing factors that most people are yet to fully understand and that is that the real good internet marketers are hard to hate although you think you should.  What do you think about the Virgin brand? I don’t know too many people that hate it because the brand is just so likable.. now what makes the Internet Marketing industry any different?

Then on the other end of the scale you’ve got the guys who have scam written all over them and the sad thing is, these are probably legitimate online marketers. However because they used a few over-zealous words, a dodgy squeeze page and maybe a few too many bells and whistles they are dismissed and placed in the Internet Marketers dregs pile. Think of any telco and compared it to Vodafone. They might both offer great product but for me personally, I struggle to hate Vodafone because of how to hold and promote their brand.

It’s sad really, a few choice words and a different colour can be the difference between being successful in this industry and being an ‘also tried’. My advice, and I can’t believe I’m saying this… find the good guys, observe, analyse and implement for a solid foundation. Only then may people tolerate your re-invention of the wheel and if not, you’ve still got a fat pocket to survive off until your next charge but remember wash up before you go out again.

In this post entrepreneur Boyan S. Benev from Crimson Kaie examines the topic of business ventures and the relationship between planning, passion and success. You can also check out Boyan’s personal Blog where you can find information about his upcoming books and a bit more of a bio of this great young entrepreneur.

Many budding entrepreneurs struggle to start for a simple lack of inspiration. A great deal of time is spent mulling over ideas, discussing sectors and making models. This has been an issue for me in the past – I would fret over a concept for a long time before taking the plunge.

One free day I decided to look back and see which ideas, out of the many attempted, have been successful. It didn’t take very long to reach two conclusions: 1, there was a very clear, and seemingly inexplicable, relationship between planning and success & 2, the successful enterprises were all niches/markets/products which I personally enjoyed.

Now, the relationship between planning and success was inexplicable because it was inverse: from diamond brokerage to art dealing, the successful projects were ones which I dove into with very little planning.

At this point I would imagine other business writers to frown deeply but I did manage to justify this quite quickly.

I don’t know about those reading this but when an idea comes for a business it is seldom in an industry which I am intricately familiar with at the outset. I may have only scant knowledge of a business sector but still believe that the idea is a solid one with good potential. The courses of action from this point are to either do meticulous research on the sector and come up with ‘solid’ plans or to simply jump in at the deep end and learn along the way.

The reason why I believe the latter approach is over-whelming successful for me over the former is because the real world is not the most black and white of places. Written material, strategies, reviews etc. present a simplified version of the world covering only those concepts essential to the topic being presented. It is important this is done because otherwise every article in a magazine or newspaper would be the size of an encyclopaedia BUT it is not a true reflection on the real world.

An idea can sound great on paper but have very limited application in real life. I’m sure we all know the cliché about ‘the school of life’ but I find is so true for business. We are bound to make mistakes and stumble along the way but the sooner we expose ourselves to that risk of failure, the sooner we start learning and bettering our ideas.

This isn’t a suggestion to skip all the ground work but, from personal experience, I have found that when this is kept to a minimum the exercise is far more dynamic and self-correcting.

The caveat I would put here is that all projects I have attempted have been carefully budgeted so I a total loss of the resources allocated to them wouldn’t hurt. Many people go into business risking a great deal: money they cannot really afford to risk in this way. In such cases research is important to assure the individual they have considered as many factors as possible.

I think my point does largely stand for to those looking at internet business opportunities, often these start from an idea to generate a small side income which can then grow. In these cases I really believe practise makes perfect. There are so many nuances with e-business that it is almost impossible to get a feel for it unless you give it a try. The most important thing is to know from the outset how much you are prepared to invest.. or lose, in the venture.

The second point comes out of the above. The most successful ideas I have realised have been ones which I was passionate about. To give an example; I’m a big art fan. I love art in all of its forms and wouldn’t restrict my interest to one particular style. Whenever I have the opportunity I seek out and buy paintings, largely by emerging artists.

At the same time I meet many people in the daily course of my work. Through initially casual conversations I discovered that people took a great interest to the works I had and were eager to occasionally buy them from me. As I realised there was an opportunity here, I started to collect more pieces with the idea of selling them. Now I represent a few emerging artists from around the world and regularly manage to secure commissions for their work. This ‘enterprise’ grew out of something very pleasurable which has never felt like work.

To compliment it I established Crimson Kaie (www.crimsonkaie.com) as showcase to let the world know about talented artists in all sorts of media and styles. The site has taken off fantastically and it has been such a pleasure to run. As a result I know many of the featured artists have had increased interest in their work and more traffic to their sites.

Again, this project has been a pure pleasure to establish and manage. It came out of a hobby and so has not felt like work even though I have put a good deal of effort and energy into it. Now I see the potential to expand the concept further and if the interest continues to hold I have a couple of ideas up my sleeve for its development.

Everything started spontaneously with no preplanning and little knowledge of the industry. The growth was natural and guided by my interest in the subject rather than financial goals. There has been some financial benefit but it has come by the way – a bonus, in a way.

I’ve always believed that entrepreneurship should be fun – the individual should enjoy what they do. Otherwise they might as well stick with the security of a traditional job.

I now apply these two approaches: skeletal planning and the ‘fun’ factor in every new venture I consider because I have seen, first hand, the benefits of this approach.

There seems to be a definite pattern with people who want to get into an online business of some sort in that they start with the same questions: where do I start and what should I sell? Well I think these two questions actually fall under the one action, because before you do anything, you should probably decide on what niche you wish to get into. So I’m going to outline a few points that will nail the initial questions so you can get started on the meaty stuff.

Before you do anything, think of a field that you know a lot about or think of yourself as an expert in. Try to find something you are really passionate about as this helps, but it not necessarily an essential. Now once who have a few ideas, put them to the following tests:

1. Is there competition?

People often associate an industry that has plenty of competition as being an industry you should stay away from. I think that’s quite a silly approach because why else would there be plenty of competition other than the fact that it’s a profitable market? If there are plenty of people advertising to this market then that’s a good sign. If the market wasn’t profitable then why would people keep advertising? Use you competitors as your market research.

How do you do this? Let’s use “weight loss” as an example. The first step is to do a Google search for, you guessed it, weight loss! Now once you do a search have a look at the right hand side of the page at the sponsored listings. Its full. Check out the more sponsored links tab the the bottom. 54 pages of weight loss ads! 54 pages! I feel sorry for the guys on like page 32.. Who’s ever visiting these guys? Now go back to the original search and visit the top sites in the organic search. Do they contain a lot of advertising? Banners? Adsense? You get the picture.

2. Clickbank it – Is it popular lately?

No not Google it. Clickbank it. Clickbank is the largest affiliate network for digital products online. I’ll go into a little more detail of Clickbank later in this report but for now quickly visit Clickbank (www.clickbank.com), go to their marketplace (small link top-right of screen) and do a search for your niche to see what comes up.
Now you need to take note of how many products are for available for promotion and the more the better. Its for the same reason we did the Google search earlier. More advertisers = more people buying.
But most importantly you need to have a look at the “gravity” of the product. You can find this under the product description in a faded grey text with other info such as $/sale, %/sale and so on.
I’m not going to explain gravity because that would take me forever and I’ll end up getting confusing myself. Just take my word for it. You want a higher gravity. The higher the gravity the more that item has been promoted and sold recently. Gravity places emphasis on recent interest and sales of that product but in short, the higher the better.

3. Google Keyword Tool

This is different to simply doing a search in Google. Google’s Keyword Tool (do a search for Google Keyword Tool) allows you to see the volume of searches for particular keywords. So back to the weight loss example, the search term “weight loss” has a global search volume of 5 million searches. To put that into perspective “learning guitar” is at about 350,000 searches and “cheap flights” is almost 24 million.

4. Ebay Pulse

A great final test especially relevant for physical products is using Ebay Pulse. Visit pulse.ebay.com. Ebay pulse tells you what’s hot on Ebay right now, a great indicator of what is selling well on the internet. Great to use especially if you want to sell physical products.
The conclusions? You want to sell something that is high in demand, being sold recently and is a proven profitable market. If your product gets a tick for all these tests then your product is sellable and most likely profitable. Don’t be afraid of big markets just because there is plenty of competition. Where there is plenty of competition there is even a bigger market and getting a small piece of the cake is much easier than trying to take the whole thing!

(This is straight out of my ebook, Bootstrapedia. If you want to get a copy, first grab your version of Think and Grow Rich and I’ll also send you my book!)

Ok I understand my little rant about Twitter in the previous post however just after I wrote the post a few interesting things happened. I decided to question everyone on my Twitter account like this:

What I didn’t expect was the amount of people to actually call me up on it! So maybe people are actually listening? Maybe its just that you really need to put the time in to nourish your Twitter community just like you nourish your blog community. I’m interested in trying to put an effort in so I have decided that I will put in 10 quality Twitter posts everyday for the next 30 days. Then I’ll re-evaluate the effect it has on both traffic to this blog as well as the level of interaction from other followers.

Just on that, John Chow has relaunched his Twitter Follower system, TwitterFollower.com. I strongly recommend you join this if you want to increase your Twitter followers. The great thing is that the system is absolutely FREE and all you need to do if register. Great work John!

I have written a few post about the micro-blogging, social networking monster on this blog and I have been relatively frank. But this post is probably a bit more candid than the rest of them because I’m pretty frustrated with the platform to say the least.

To give you a background, I’m a relatively recent blogger, with this blog only starting in late Feb 09 (from memory). So its safe to say that I am a relative unknown compared to some of the super bloggers and IM superstars such as Jeremy Shoemaker, Darren Rowse, John Chow and the rest. I’m not going to try and tell you I’m a superstar because I know I’m not, I’m new in the online world and I know where I stand and don’t really have a problem with it.

An example would be John Chow writing a great article about Blog Marketing vs Email Marketing vs Twitter Marketing. John was able to get several sales out of Twitter promoting a product (a $27 footer ad which I’m suddenly interested in at the moment!) but I have a feeling that if someone not in John’s league did the same thing, the results would be completely different. John has a brand and has effectively and intelligently been able to leverage off his brand to make Twitter work with him.

The guys I mentioned earlier have all lauded Twitter and the utility is has provided them. This is fine and dandy but they have a name and an online presence which not all of us have. By the way, I’m a big fan of the above mentioned bloggers… so by no means am I discrediting what they have to say. But what is it like for those who are not virtual brands like these guys? If they were to state: New blog post “http://ww….” then yeh, a flood of people go rushing to their blog interested in the next post and that’s very understandable as I do it myself. For example if Coca Cola brings out a new drink and a Coke rep tells you that they are bringing out a new drink then immediately, you want to know more, right? However if Florentine says they are coming out with a new flavored milk what would you say? Exactly what I would say; who the hell is Florentine? Or more appropriately, flip the page, change the channel or check the other Twitter updates.

There is a vicious cycle developing here which I believe has lead to the overwhelmingly skewed favoritism of the network. This is when people go out and read reviews of the site, chances are these reviews are conducted by the very people who already have an online presence, ie the top 20% of bloggers, IMers or webmasters. Well is a proven fact (I have proved it) that the top 20 sites in the world receive roughly 80% of the traffic therefore 80% of the audience are fed with ideas that all is good in the Twitterverse. The other 80% of blogs (the majority) make up the measly 20% of the audience. These lesser read blogs are those that will probably have alternate opinions, the opinion of the majority but because they only receive 20% of the audience, not that many are listening. Here lies a problem where the ideas and opinions are bias towards the top bloggers, IMers and webmasters… who own 80% of the audience.. Vicious circle.

So what if your Florentine? (by the way I have completely made that name up, but lets use it as an example). What is Twitter like for all the other Florentines? Well, it’s a pretty lonely place to be honest. The truth is, apart from friends and family, not many people actually care what you have to say but at the same time they want you to care about what they have to say. You feel like a 8 yr old, you can speak, people can hear you but not many people are that interested in listening. You yell, wave, RT, @, RTT and still silence. No love. Just another 40 Tweets with affiliate hoplinks in them. Well maybe it’s just another step, you need to wait until your a little ‘order’ and maybe people will start listening.

In conclusion, “what are you doing?”. Apart from the select few, does anyone really care?

Microsoft launched their attack on Google with their own search engine, Bing. It’s meant to change the way we think about search engines, or something like that. So I decided to search: “what is bing” using, none other than, the Bing search engine. Interestingly, this new generation search engine was unable find me the answer of what it actually is! I got results for an electrical shop (BingLee), BING the rigid polyurethane insulation industry in Europe and a bit of information about Bing Crosby. Naturally I head to Google and good old faithful tells me straight away.

Obviously I don’t have the greatest first impressions but I’m an open minded type of guy, I won’t judge right now.. I think time shall take care of that.

Anyone actually used it and found anything interesting or out of the ordinary compared to other search engines? I would be interested if you’d share a few things we could have a look at that exploits its potential.