Learn from others but with your own spin

I always find that the best way to come up with ideas or improve an existing business is to learn from others but with your own spin on things. By that I mean, try to work out what works well for other sites and online business’ and try to replicate the success for your own Internet business.

Working from home means that you do not always have the luxury of a large company and its resources standing behind you. As a result, you’re more keen to get things right a lot quicker. Sure, being a small start up Internet business means you are small and nimble and can make quick changes to your business model, however  we all want to make progress and attract new customers.

I always like to have a look at the web sites owned by my competitors, not necessarily to copy them verbatim, instead to learn about their strategies. For example, how do they encourage their clients to submit their contact details? What is their search engine strategy and what keywords are they targeting.

Keywords are very important, some Internet companies spend a lot of time in this area. They work out which terms their potential customer’s are likely to use and optimise their site accordingly. You can find this out quite easily by checking out your competitors. Remember, you’re doing nothing wrong, the Internet is the greatest business democracy on the planet. If you’re missing a trick, it is a quick one to put right.

Another trick is to look at some of the larger and more well known sites. These guys employ realms of specialists and consultants and have access to the best minds and technology available. Whilst it would be churlish to suggest you try the same, there is good reason to try and understand what they are trying to do, not least because it might be something you could add to your own site.

One of the early “learns” for us was when we opened one of our first online stores. We had migrated from eBay and were growing quite nicely until we hit a wall. We knew that there was more to come, we just could not put our finger on how we were going to achieve this. By chance, we visited one of the more well known wedding sites, at the time they were heavily promoting their affiliate network, the penny dropped.

The next week we set up our own affiliate network and promoted it to our own list, we also submitted our site details to a number of the affiliate clearing houses. Very quickly, we signed up a good number of core affiliates and they started to sell our products through their links. Business doubled within six months, sure we lost a bit of margin in commissions, yet the upside was that we were doing very little to attract this important new business.

We also listened to our affiliate’s feedback, they wanted sales tools, graphics and files they could quickly upload to their own sites. This rapidly became a core part of our business, and now this is more important to us than our own site. Another lesson, never be too proud where your money comes from!