After two weeks of surveying my visitors, I am finally making an attempt to draw some conclusions. Reading my visitors replies to the survey questions, I sense one common concern in one way or another: lack of money and lack of profits. One person even said, “help me make money first then i’ll send you a payment”.
Another theme dominating in people’s replies is the confusion about too many details involved in starting a web business. If you already have a web site, you know what this means. Just step aside for a second and take a look at your business from a newbie’s prospective.
You had to design a web site, put it online, figure out a way of accepting online payments, find out where and how to advertise, how to capture your visitors’ e-mail address and how to contact them later to remind about your products. The list can go on and on, and if you are not web savvy, you might find yourself scratching behind your ear not knowing where to start.
Here are some of the common concerns my visitors had:
– How to reach target audience (creating a flow of target traffic)
– How to focus their online efforts better (web business management)
– How to make their web site to sell on the first visit (direct marketing)
– Lack of time and how to overcome it (efficient use of time spent online)
– Not enough customers (finding and selling to a target customer)
– Lack of money to start a business and advertise it
– Fear of technology (general Internet knowledge)
– How to automate some time-consuming tasks
– Making a web site look more professional
Most of the people who filled out the survey are either stay-at-home moms or people with full-time jobs who desperately want to make enough money with their business to quit their jobs. Nothing new there, all right. The words “fast” and “easy” were mentioned in the replies quite frequently which tells me that most people who are starting an online business still don’t have a realistic idea of how much time and energy is involved in making it a success.
They say, the first million is the hardest. So, please, do me a favor: the next time you see a “make money while you sleep” ad, pass it by.
Milana Nastetskaya is a full time web developer and the author of the “65 Instant Web Design Answers”. http://www.instantwebanswers.com