So we’ve covered the What and the Why of an Online Presence. Be sure to go back and read them if you missed them.
So then, HOW will an online presence benefit your business? The short answer is that an online presence will help you reach customers and prospects that may have otherwise been slipping through holes in your sales funnel.
It doesn’t matter what type of business you have (and yes being an author is a type of business too), there is always a sales cycle and a sales funnel. Every potential customer for your product or service (again, yes a book is a product) fits in somewhere on the sales cycle and sales funnel. Now explaining and teaching sales cycles and sales funnels is beyond the scope of our focus, but if you need some help to understand that terminology please leave a comment, we’re more than happy to pull together extra materials for our readers.
We point out authors and books, because most other industries and niches do see themselves as a business, including artists producing visual arts or performing arts – but authors so very often don’t. So the key point to remember is that if you have ANYTHING that you would like other people to BUY then you have a business.
So being that every business and customer is part of a sales cycle and funnel, you can be guaranteed that there are holes and that you’re missing out on potential customers because of it.
An Online Presence Benefit to your business is that it can help to fill holes in your sales funnel.
One of those holes is when you have prospects who LOVE the Internet and live by it, but they can’t find you online. And guaranteed that you do have prospects who fall into this category. There isn’t a single demographic in existence that doesn’t have at least a segment who gravitate to the Internet. So if you don’t have an online presence, then you’re never going to reach those prospects.
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Another possibility are visitors not from the area. You may not be a tourism relevant business per se, but if there’s a chance that my aunt from England could have a need or desire for your service or product when she’s visiting your town in Canada for a month, wouldn’t it be nice if she knew about you?
Is it financially viable to run ads in local newspapers around the world on the off chance that you might connect with a person who will be visiting your town at some point in their life? Obviously the answer is no.
But if you could get in front of that person at no extra cost to you, might it be nice to earn their dollars during their visit?
We can’t think of a single valid reason why a business would want to leave that money on the table and ignore it, when clearly an online presence benefit exists.
Look at it this way, how much is one new customer worth to your business? For arguments sake, let’s say their lifetime worth to you is $100 (super conservative).
Now let’s say your hourly rate is $100 (that’ll be high for some and low for others).
[two_third_first]Next, let’s estimate 4 hours of your time to setup a basic website (that’s being generous you can do it in less time). Nothing fancy and it doesn’t cost you anything but your time. That means that the total investment of that website is $400.
You would only need to have that website help to convert (or close) 4 new customers to break even. Make it 5 and your website just gave you an ROI on your 4 hours of time.
Think about what happens when the lifetime value of one customer is $1,000 or $10,000 and your hourly rate is $50. Plus, this is based on the “value” of your time, it’s not specifically an out of pocket business expense. Yes it’s still important to take into consideration, but it won’t affect your cash flow.
These are some things that could create an online presence benefit for your business. Ultimately the point is to reach more people. But these examples illustrate some prospects that you may not have even considered before. So not only can you reach and connect with more of the same target audience, you can also more easily tap into new targets that may have otherwise been unreachable without an online presence.
When there is a smart, effective, and viable way to make this happen, why wouldn’t you want to?
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Up next in Fundamentals:
What are the components of an online presence?
Gain even more with our Facebook Group
To offer the most possible benefit to you on this journey, we’ve also setup a closed Facebook Group that we invite you to join, where you’ll be in a safe and friendly environment, surrounded by supportive people just like you. So go ahead and join our Facebook Group with the link below:
Getting Going Online Facebook Group
Get started with right tools!
Every Online Presence needs to have eye-catching images and graphics. But not everyone is a photographer or a graphic designer. Fortunately, we have a solution and the awesome part is that it’s FREE. We’ve put together a free course that will teach you right from step 1 how to use a web-based application called Canva, which is a free tool. This course will make sure that you’re setup for success right from the start and we include some valuable resources on where to get images, completely for free, to get you started without delay.
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