Staying in for the long haul
Tuesday, January 15th, 2008When you start an online store, sales will start out slower than you could imagine.
If you’re off to a slow start in your e-commerce venture, rest assured that it took Amazon 7 years to report a profitable quarter.
Who else had to hang in there? An archived Google Answers topic shows that these companies had to have their share of patience.
- Star and New York Post’s owner, Rupert Murdoch (10 years)
- ESPN (~6 years)
- Sports Illustrated (11 years)
- Turner Broadcasting System (12 years)
- Unimation (19 years)
- Airbus (20 years)
- World Trade Center (20 years)
- OfficeMax (6 years)
- Ask (7 years)
- Greenfield Online (10 years)
I’m not wishing a 20 year slump on you, but I’m hoping that you’ll find some encouragement in it!
January 27th, 2008 at 3:42 pm
Ugh…I don’t have 20 years! We’re working our plan right now on what we should be selling on our web site and how to make it so people want to buy it. We’re a career coaching business and know it should be in the form of mp3 files and booklets….
Any ideas from you or your readers would be awesome!
January 28th, 2008 at 2:31 pm
Of course I’m not wishing 20 years of delayed success on you.
You’ll want to sell products on your site because you can control your profit margin and such, but I think that you’ll also need to look at different distribution options as well.
Captive audiences I’ve heard of are iTunes, Amazon MP3, and Audible. Audiobooks are kind of cool because your content goes directly onto people’s iPods!
From what I understand, it may be tough to get into iTunes without some sort of agent or major company backing you, but maybe you can find some information about that that I was unable to find myself.
You’re going to hate to hear me say that you may want to consider producing a free podcast as well. Maybe 15-20 minutes weekly or biweekly? Especially if you’re pushing to sell content on your own site, you’ll need something freely available where you can gently direct listeners to your own website for extra sales.
Places to put “free samples” of your written content (besides your blog) are scribd and SlideShare. I especially mention those places because they let bloggers embed the content on their own blogs, much like how YouTube lets you embed their videos into other sites. I recommend posting info there and branding the hell out of it, so that there’s no mistake of which website to go to for more info!