My Own Case Study – Small Business Flexibility

Cindy King — Sun, 07 Sep 2008 23:00:12 +0000

As a very small business owner, I do have more flexibility in certain business strategies than many bigger businesses.

Content Creates An Online Communication Base

It has now been 7 months since I started my business directory.

Writing and publishing an article each work day for 6 months
Creating a business system
Recently color-coding on the website to make this system obvious to the readers

Of course, with over 200 articles there is now an obvious editorial direction for the website.

But I have always wanted an online communication base for my own business. Sure, I spent some time looking into the great Internet Marketing “Get Rich Quick” processes out there. It is a good way to pick up a lot of knowledge on web marketing practices.

This is what lead me into copywriting 3 years ago. But I chose to study copywriting because I already had good sales skills, and sales writing skills. Of course, you need good copywriting to make money on the web, whether you are in a typical get rich quick internet business or a brick and mortar business using the web as a tool. But recognizing good copywriting is already more than half the work done.

My situation was a little different. I already have valuable skills. I knew I wanted to use the internet primarily as a communication base for my own business services. My websites are there to communicate my international business development system.

All well and good. But how do you go about communicating your business system online to reach the right people, and to bring in the right clients?

Structure For Your Business

I found I needed matter to work with. Content. Lots of content. This took me 6 months of writing one article a day.

As a small business owner I had the flexibility to jump in and develop the structure on an on-going basis.

My primary focus was to write on and around my main business subject area. My articles are not primarily determined by niche keywords and research. Of course I tried to use appropriate keywords, and ran keyword searches from time to time. These searches often proved to me that I knew my subject matter well. My main focus was writing on my own clearly defined subject.

On a side note, my experience has shown this content strategy to give fantastic SEO results. I have come up on the first page of many different search results from month 3 onwards. Businesses from all over the world find me.

People pay money for SEO? Why don’t they sharpen their business perspective and knuckle down to work on exploiting what is basically a communication platform?

Now that the content structure is there, the content is extremely easy to create. This business directory has become very easy for me to feed.

Using the flexibility I had in the beginning probably gave me a better structure 6 months later than if I had planned everything offline first.

So, I now have time for the next business phase and it is now in progress. This is the phase which links my business directory to my business.

What does that mean?

A Real Specific Business Offer And Not The Get Rich Quick Web Marketing

First of all I have a several new URL’s, or domain names, for very specific landing pages. Now these landing pages are not the get rich quick type. These are simply landing pages targeting each of the specific products and services I offer.

These products and services form a lead generation strategy. This means:

There are some landing pages for free products, some for paid products and services.
There are also some landing pages for the same product, but written for different audiences.

This leads to a fair number of new websites, even if they are mainly mini-websites.

Ready Fire Aim

My immediate task is to set up 20 odd landing pages. This takes time. I am doing just about everything single handed:

Lead generation strategy
Web marketing strategy
Copywriting
International SEO

Yes, it is a fair task, even just for mini-sites.

But as a small business owner I do have some flexibility. Also as a small business owner I value batch processing.

So one of the first things I have done is to put all of the URL’s live. I simply put all of the websites up with an article or two from my main business directory.

As a small business owner, I feel I can do this.

It is essentially a Ready Fire Aim approach.

Having all of the websites up early, means that Mr. Google will find them soon. I will appreciate this when I actually get the website ready and want to promote it. Tomorrow I start writing a new landing page website one after the other.

Online Flexibility Brings Success

One of the basics of international web marketing is testing and adjusting your communication. Your communication needs to be live before you get any real market feedback.

Market feedback often shows you how to improve your message. The better your online communication is, the more sales you can expect.

Market feedback will also show you where your business potential lies.

So there will be lots of adjustments to the landing pages. That is my second business phase.