Many businesses spend a lot of time and effort building a website and then leave it at that, but at the end of the day you don’t need a website, you need more sales.

Once you have your website you’ll often discover that no-one finds it unless you tell them the website address, and so you don’t get the phone calls and sales leads that you were hoping for.

You realise that you can’t compete if you can’t be found, so you then try and get your website visible and optimise it for a search phrase such as “kildare electrician shower installation” only to find that no-one ever uses that search phrase.

Profit by Giving People What They Want

You should do things the other way round.  You should find out what people are looking for first, and then build a website to give it to them.

You should build “online sales funnels” to divert people who are searching online for your products and services to a website that leads them to fulfilling your goal.

Your strategy should allow you to have an online presence as quickly and cheaply as possible, and allow you start getting traffic immediately.  At the same time you should be regularly analysing your website usage and search trends so that you can tailor your offering to where the most demand is.

It’s all about boxing clever.  Don’t spend all your time and energy building out website pages for things no-one is looking for… concentrate on the low hanging fruit, get profitable, then start working your way through the rest of the market until you’re the dominant business.

If you’re getting all the online traffic then you just have to work out how to make money out of it.

If your business idea is going to fail because of lack of demand then you want to FAIL FAST and move on quickly. Spending longer than you need to on an idea that isn’t going to work is a huge waste of your time, energy, money, self confidence, and potential.

Be Found By The People Looking For You

You can put people into different categories:

1. People who need your products/services, but don’t know it.
2. People who know they need your products/services, but still don’t want them.
3. People who want your products/service, but aren’t actively looking for them at this moment in time.
4. People who are actively looking for your products/services, right now!

By far the easiest people to sell to are the ones who are actively looking for your products or services. If you can pick this low hanging fruit and get profitable from this category then you can look at selling to the other categories later on.

It would be criminal to start a costly exercise to educate those people who need your products/services but don’t know about them, when there could be a lot of people actually searching for you that no-one else is serving!

Your Plan In A Nutshell

1. Find out what people are looking for.
2. Find out how to give it to them.
3. Find out if you can make a profit doing it.
4. Create and implement a plan to act upon this knowledge.

Getting Started On The Right Foot

1. Got to https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

2. Make sure the region is set to Ireland if you’re target market is Ireland.

3. Enter a phrase that someone might use to find your services/products (“dog grooming” for the case of someone thinking of setting up a dog grooming business).

4. Google will tell you how many searches there were in Ireland that had the words in that phrase on the line, and for similar phrases.

I’ve just done it and the results for Sep-09 are:

dog grooming 9900
grooming dog 9900
dog groomers 1000
dog grooming courses 1000
dog groomer 720
dog grooming ireland 590
dogs grooming 590
mobile dog grooming 480
dog grooming equipment 260
dog grooming course 210
dog grooming supplies 210
dog grooming in ireland 140
a dog grooming 110
dog grooming jobs 110
grooming a dog 110
dog grooming clippers 91
dog grooming services 91
mobile dog groomers 91
professional dog grooming 91
dog grooming business 73
dog grooming parlour 73
dog grooming salon 73
dog grooming table 73
etc

5. Determine which are the best phrases to indicate people are actually looking for you, and have a reasonable volume of searches (don’t get too excited about volumes… remember it’s for the whole of Ireland).

6. Put those search phrases into Google yourself and see what pops up. Are there lots of Sponsored Links (on the right hand side)? If there are then people are probably making money from those Ads. If there isn’t but there is a high search volume then maybe it’s ripe for you to go in there and be the first to have Ads up.

7. Check out your main competition (the ones with Ads in the top positions over a few weeks). Reverse engineer their sales funnels for free by pretending you’re a shopper and visit their website and see how they lead you into becoming a customer.

8. If you think there is enough traffic out there and you can compete with (or better) the competition create a simple 4-5 page website such as [YourCounty]DogGrooming.com.

The 4-5 pages would be:
Home | Products/Services | Testimonials (optional) | About Us | Contact Us

A simple one I’ve done for a client is www.dublin-electrical.com
Nothing fancy, but it works.

9. Create a Google Adwords campaign to run only for people who type in the search phrases you identified within the geographic region you cover (with Google Adwords you could set it to being your county or within, say, 75km of your location). Don’t forget that people travel to work during the day and could be searching during their lunch break, so factor that into the geography you want your Ads to be displayed in.

10. Analyse the traffic stats over a month and see how many times your Ads are triggered. Hopefully you’ll also be getting a few sales leads too.

11. After a month use this info to help decide whether you have a viable business idea.  If there is a lot of demand on Google then maybe there’s something in it, if there isn’t then maybe there is still something in it, but you’re going to have to work harder to get those sales.

I’ve been doing quite a lot of sales pitches recently, and there are always some clients who think that you cost too much or that they would rather do it themselves, especially once you show them technically how to do things.

As my business coach Blaise Brosnan says, knowing “what to do” is far more important than knowing “how to do things”.

Be Seen To Add Value Not Costs

I’ve been struggling with how to deal with these types of clients as I thought it was a problem with the way I was pitching, but Blaise summed it up for us a few weeks ago: “find clients who put a value on what you do, rather than see you as a cost”

Blaise also advised us to think about whether a client is likely to become one of the 20% that will account for 80% of our revenue, or one of the 80% that will account for 20% of your revenue.

Are there some potential clients who show early on that they will be the horse that you can lead to water but won’t drink? Will you be spending more time on them that could be better spent with a client who is a pleasure to deal with?

The 80/20 rule works the other way too. 20% of your clients will take up 80% of your time, and it’s up to us to make sure that it’s the same 20% that is giving us 80% of the revenue.

The 50/5 Rule

Something extraordinary about the 80/20 rule is that if you applied it again then about 5% of your clients will account for about 50% of your revenue.

Here’s the logic:

• If a company has an income of 100k from 100 clients, then their top 20 clients likely accounts for 80k of that income.
• Applying 80/20 again would imply that the top 20% of those top 20 clients will account for 80% of that 80k turnover.
• i.e. their top 4 clients accounts for 64k of their turnover.
• Round that down a bit and we could say that the top 5% of their clients likely accounts for 50% of their revenue… and we end up with the “50/5 rule”.

I’ve seen this hold true for a number of clients of my own. A few years ago a franchise in the U.S. sent me 5 years of their sales transactions for their 70 franchisees stores. I worked out that the top 4% of their clients accounted for 41% of their sales.

So our fictional company with 100 clients could try and increase their income by 100% by finding another 100 clients. Alternatively they could identify the common characteristics of the clients that make up their “50/5″ segment and find 10 more of those clients.  This will increase their income by 100% as well, but they”ve now got 110 clients to manage and not 200, and they only had to get 10 new clients and not 100.

Your own top 5% of customers could be called your “hyper-responsive” customers. Once they find you they buy everything off your shelf. The reason they are hyper-responsive is that they know the market the best, and realise when they find you that you’re exactly what they need. You have all the necessary market entry points, but you have the special points of difference that they have been searching for for ages, and have now found.

Sometimes Its Good To Say No

So don’t feel guilty about saying no and pushing back. Sometimes a client will just drain you of your time, energy, and motivation and you’d be better off ditching them and spending more time on your top 5% of clients.

Warren Buffet is reputed to have said that his company never takes over a company where he personally doesn’t get on with the everyone on the board. He’s going to have to spend a good portion of his life with them, so he might as well make it something he enjoys.