Online Business and List Building – Why List Building is So Important to Your Online Business
I was having lunch with a friend of mine today and he is not in internet marketing, but was asking how he could make money selling some of his books online.
I told him that the first book he sells will not make him any money, and proceeded to explain to him why.
By the way, this principle works the same for every product online, not just books. It could be jewelry, or dog toys, or medical supplies. It doesn’t matter.
You see, it will cost you roughly the same thing to get a new customer as the product costs, in the long run. That is a basic economic principle for every well-developed market. And the internet is becoming well-developed in many of the general markets, although I believe there is still room for entry-level arbitrage in some of the niche markets. But in the long run, even the niche markets will begin to breakeven on the front end.
The real money is made on the backend, once the customer has already spent money with you.
The first customer has to be convinced to open up his/her wallet and pull out a credit card and use the one with the lowest limit just in case you are a scam. So if they lose, it isn’t such a big deal. So you might have to get 200 visitors to get one sale.
But once they buy from you, and you deliver the promised product, and you actually over deliver the promised product, it is more than they thought they were getting, and they see that you only charged them once for the product, and you did not scam them, then it is much easier to get them to buy from you again.
And the nice thing is, aside from about $20 per month for a quality autoresponder, there is no cost the second time around for them to visit your website. You might spend $50 generating enough traffic to make a $50 sale the first time they buy, but once they have bought, you might only need to spend $5 to make the next $50 sale.