This week, I am officially launching Hybrid Media Marketing, a new business that I am absolutely thrilled about. This business is the love of my professional life because it solves a tremendous problem that I and other internet marketers have faced for years when it comes to promoting product based businesses online.

In this post, I’ll talk about some of the strategies I used to develop businesses, using the new company to illustrate the concepts. My hope is that you will be able to take the core lessons and adapt them to your own entrepreneurial ventures.

Identifying a Problem in the Market

Anyone who sells a product or has ever tried to market a product online, knows all too well about the pain of promoting products online. Many of the SEO companies that I work with will not even take on clients that sell products because of the difficulties in promoting them:

Exposure: Even if you position yourself on page one of the search engines, potential customers must be actively searching for what you have to offer. For new products, novelty products, and non-need based products, this is a big dilemma. A first page search engine ranking does not mean your phone will ring because many of the people who would like your product aren’t searching for it.

Competition: Many people who sell products are resellers of products – meaning that there are other online companies selling those same products and winning customers becomes a matter of offering the lowest price.

Cost: Pay per click can be EXPENSIVE. One of my clients is paying $7.00 for a single click. Ouch.

It was painful to watch my wonderful clients with amazing products not making the sales they deserved because of these barriers. I went on a quest to find an affordable solution to the problem.

Entrepreneur’s lesson: If you examine your industry, you will likely find that there are problems everywhere that are waiting to be solved. If you can provide that solution, you have found a winning business model. This business is one that was born not from a question of “how can I make money,” but how can I solve this glaring problem in the website marketing industry.

If No Solution Exists, Create One

I knew that if more people could be exposed to my client’s products, they would make more sales. Sales is a numbers game and getting enough exposure is critical. The challenge was finding a way to get their products in front of people who may not have been actively searching for them.

Hybrid Media Marketing uses an already effective method of offline marketing to drive buyers online. I knew that consumer catalogs were massive sales tools for product based companies – but the problem is that my clients could not afford to put together a catalog. Designing, printing, and mailing a consumer catalog can cost upward of $50,000 which was completely out of the spending range of my small business clients.

I was not willing to give up on the idea that catalog marketing was a solution. After all, companies like Lillian Vernon and L.L. Bean built their empires with direct sales catalogs. If done correctly, direct mail catalogs work. Now the challenge to overcome was making catalog marketing affordable.

The solution I came up with was to allow small businesses to buy a page or a part of a page on a high quality catalog that would be distributed to a large audience of targeted people.

Entrepreneur’s lesson: Find creative ways to package solutions that provide more value to  more people, therefore reducing the cost per person.

I began sharing the idea with the SEOs, marketing companies, and product-based clients that I had and they loved the concept. That affirmed in my mind that this was something I needed to run with.

Entrepreneur’s lesson: Test your idea before launch to see if the idea is embraced by your target audience.

Create a Model that Allows Buyers to Get More Back Then They Put In

Because my goal was to get entrepreneurs with incredible products to generate sales, I knew that I needed to get this catalog into as many qualified buyer’s hands as possible while still keeping costs affordable.

I decided on a print run and distribution of 50,000 catalogs, giving my clients 50,000 opportunities to make a sale. At this level of exposure, a conversion rate of just 1% equates to 500 sales. For a company whose average internet sale is $50, 500 sales equates to $25,000 in profits. At a conversion rate of 2%, this equates to $50,000 in sales. Not too shabby.

At a distribution quantity of 50,000, the cost per impression is between $0.008 and $0.04 per product, depending on how many products a company chooses to place on a page. With pay per click rates between $0.50 and $7.00+, I probably could have charged more. I probably could have chosen to distribute to fewer than 50,000. But that was not the goal. The goal was to find a solution that small businesses could afford and that had the potential to result in lots of sales.

Entrepreneur’s lesson: Stay true to your goal, not money. Remain passionate about solving or meeting the needs of your target audience. Don’t cut corners when it comes to quality, instead, find a way to offset the cost.

Seek Out the Advice of Professionals Rather than Attempt to Learn Everything Yourself

I consulted with a catalog designer who gave me incredible insight about print runs, catalog size, and mailing lists that would have taken me months to learn on my own. More than likely, if I had not consulted with him, I would have based all of my numbers on a less cost effective model.

Entrepreneur’s lesson: Seek out experts in respective industries for their consultation. The knowledge you receive can easily save you more money than it would cost to hire them as a consultant. Many professionals will offer consulting at no cost if you also hire them for their professional services.

Growing the Business

You can have the greatest idea in the world, but if no one knows about it, it doesn’t matter. The challenge now that I had a good idea, was “how do I get enough people to know about it?”

Here are some challenges that all businesses face:

• A single person or company often does not have the bandwidth to reach out to enough potential clients one at a time
• People are more likely to try something if it is recommended by someone they trust.
• People are more likely to recommend something if there is some benefit in it for them.

Because of these key points, I knew I needed a network of people who already had clients experiencing this problem to recommend the solution. When setting pricing, I built in enough to provide referrers with a generous referral fee that will create passive income for them.

I am a big believer in passive income and one of my lifetime goals is to help others create passive income. I could have made the referral fee less, but I really do love rewarding people well when they send business my way.

A marketer or a web designer who recommends this solution to just 10 of their clients can generate as much as $10,000 per year in passive income. If you are an SEO, marketing company, or web designer with clients that need this type of exposure, contact me to talk about the partner program.

Entrepreneur’s lesson: Be kind to those that send business your way. When more people have a vested interest in your success, the more successful you will become.

Joining me on this venture is Tara Geissinger. Tara has 10+ years experience in Ad Agencies both in PR and advertising, working with client budgets in excess of $5M, writing marketing plans, event planning, press releases and general client service.

Tara is also a mother of 4 year old triplets. Readers of this blog are probably aware that I am a big believer in empowering home-based entrepreneurs – particularly parents that choose to venture into business for themselves in order to be more available to their children.

In the past, I’ve taken the solo approach with my businesses. This time I knew that I wanted to bring other talented people in who were just as passionate about the idea as I was.

Neither of us is working for a paycheck right now. We are working for a dream that we both believe which is empowering small business owners to make it big. In return, I hope to provide her with a generous income for doing what she loves to do while being able to devote time to her family.

Entrepreneur’s lesson: Build a team of talented, passionate people. If you don’t have the funds to pay people out of pocket during start up time, be willing to compensate for it later with a greater stake in the success of the company. Again, when more people have a vested interest in your success, the more successful you will become.

Topics: Business Development, Business Opportunities | 20 Comments »