Are You The Owner of Your Business or An Employee In Your Business

By Terry Dean

I will never forget the day that a direct marketing millionaire told me, "Concept is more important than ad copy."

You need to know at the beginning of this course that the concepts you come up with for your site are more important than the actual ad copy or having all of your advertising ducks in a row.

Most Internet marketing courses only deal with the actual tactics you can use to make money from your Internet business. They teach how to design web sites, how to rank high on search engines, how to post to newsgroups, or how to use banner advertisements.

It will almost be like beating your head against a brick wall if you don't learn how to develop the right concept and strategy for your business right along with using the right marketing tactics.

To put it simply, tactics are your day to day actions in building your web site. A strategy is your overall plan and goal for exactly what you would like to have your web site and business accomplish for your customers.

The Random House College Dictionary defines strategy and tactics this way: "In military usage, a distinction is made between STRATEGY AND TACTICS. STRATEGY is the utilization of all of a nation's forces, through large-scale, long-range planning and development, to ensure security or victory. TACTICS deals with the use and deployment of troops in combat."

So, developing an Internet strategy involves long-range planning and development to ensure your web site's victory...which to us means that it is profitable.

The tactics are our day-to-day actions that we take to generate traffic or run the business.

A major question that every Internet marketer needs to ask himself is, "Am I working on my business or am I working in my business?"

If you are just working in your business, that means it owns you. If you stop working, your income stops just like at your job. If you are working on your business, that means you have become the decision maker and you are leveraging your time and money for your business to produce and work for you.

Are you the owner of your business or are you just an employee?

Your responsibility as an Internet entrepreneur is to put your computer to work for you. It is your employee and it should be assigned to do the daily tasks such as generating traffic, making sales, and sometimes even delivering the products.

If you are trying to use the old methods of posting to free-for-all links pages and free classified ads to generate traffic and sales, you are definitely working in your business. You have created another job for yourself, and once you quit your income will stop also. You will never have room to expand your business because you will always be limited to a 24 hour day just like everyone else.

If you install (or hire someone else to do it for you) a CGI program on your site which automatically generates traffic, then your computer is working in your business generating you an constant income stream. You would then be working on your business and would have free time to create another income stream if you like from that same site or from another site.

Note: Thousands of low cost or even free CGI programs which can automate much of your Internet marketing work can be found at http://www.cgi-resources.com

It all boils down to your strategy. For me, a key point in any Internet strategy I create is that it has to run at least 95% automated...and it has to have an automated constant stream of traffic.

This isn't all there is to it for me, but it is the start. If I can't find a way to do both...automate the business and create a constant stream of targeted prospects, then I am not even interested in the business idea.

As a matter of fact, the first thing I do when developing a strategy for any business is to find out if there is a way to target a large group of Internet prospects quickly and easily.

If you can't name off to me in less than a paragraph how you can target your customers quickly and easily, then you have a faulty strategy. Over 95% of businesses approach marketing from the wrong direction. They find a product and then start looking for prospects.

You will find that the upcoming Internet millionaires are finding the prospects and building a community first. Then, they are delivering the products and services those people want and need.

If you focus on the product first, you are headed for failure.

If you focus on the prospect first, you are headed for success.