There are three absolutely critical aspects to building a business online. Fail in any one of these categories and nothing else matters, you’re dead in the water. All three of them are equally important. You can’t focus primarily on one and hope the other two take care of themselves. And they won’t work independently of each other. All three aspects have to be addressed in order to be successful at building a business online.

3 Keys To Building A Business Online

These three areas are foundational pieces for your business. There are many sub pieces that can also have a significant impact on your success, but these three need to be fixed before any real focus is shifted to other areas. The three keys are:

1. Traffic generation. This one isn’t rocket science. It’s a pretty common message on the internet that driving traffic to your website is important. And there’s no shortage of “experts” out there that’ll tell they hold the “super secret ninja kung fu tricks” to generate massive traffic to your website. You have to be careful here, though, because some of the “experts” use less than ethical means of traffic generation. Your unique selling proposition comes into play here. If you’ve picked your USP right, that will help to generate traffic for you. There are several ways to generate traffic, but we’ll talk about that another time.
2. Lead capture. When traffic comes to your website, it’s imperative that you capture a percentage of that traffic and turn it into leads. This is known by another name: list building. If you’re not building a list, you’re not building up any trust and it becomes awful hard to sell anything.
3. Lead conversion. This area isn’t discussed quite as often as traffic generation, which I think is because it’s a more difficult area to teach and therefore people tend to shy away from it. But, it’s every bit as important as traffic generation. You have to be able to convert your traffic into leads and leads into sales in order to get paid. If you can’t do that then you’re wasting the traffic and leads you’ve generated and you’re not going to make any money. Copywriting is a critical piece to your effectiveness in lead conversion. This is where your sales funnel comes into play.

These three pieces make up the trinity of your business. Each piece works in harmony with the other two, and together they create the formula for creating an income online.

Lead conversion is where I’ve fallen short in my own business. I’ve developed decent, although not overwhelming, traffic. I have my lead capture pieces in place, and I’ve converted some of that traffic into leads. But, I haven’t been able to convert anywhere near enough of that traffic into leads, and I haven’t been able to convert any of those leads into sales. As I’ve mentioned in other posts, my big weakness here has been my copywriting skills. Up to this point I simply haven’t done an adequate job of persuading people to take the next step. Luckily for me, copywriting is a skill like any other that can be learned.

The Fundamentals Of Building A Business Online Haven’t Changed

I realize this information probably doesn’t come across as earth-shattering, but in reality these fundamentals of marketing haven’t changed in decades. The strategies used to accomplish these fundamentals have changed drastically as technology has changed, but the fundamentals themselves haven’t changed one bit. And without these fundamentals in place, it doesn’t matter about your strategies or how good they are.

When it comes to building a business online, you need to be competent with these three fundamentals in order to be successful. Master them and you’ll hold the keys to the vault that you can open whenever you desire more money. But, miss the boat in any one of them and you’ll be in a virtual desert without a dime to be found.

Take a minute and leave a comment below. What kind of success have you had with these three aspects of your business? Did you find any of them to be significantly easier or harder to learn than the others? Was there any one specifically that caused you a significant amount of frustration? What did you do to overcome it? I look forward to hearing from you.

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