Financing an Online Business
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I joined SBI on 12 April (yep, last month). It was fortuitous timing. I've been developing my website, V______.com for a year or two. Small traffic. No financing. I could see something amazing was possible; I just didn't know quite how to go about it. I spent many, many hours building the previous sites. The only problem was, it took me so long to get the design/hosting/links/etc.etc. done, that by the time I got to writing content, it was always... 'too tired! I'll do it tomorrow'. I could never decide on a site design, either. Then last month I discovered SBI. I was quite overwhelmed by all the marketing hype on the sales pages, but after sleeping on it, realized that there was real logic there; it wasn't the GRQ ["Grow Rich Quick"] -speak I was used to. So I bought SBI. Never mind the software, the e-books were so exciting that I couldn't sleep for three days, the TAO & the Action guide, in particular. And all the others. This, I realized, the missing piece of the jigsaw that I had so laboriously been putting together for the last 18+ months. I've been at it steadily ever since, a bit per day. Making a little bit of Adsense revenue already, but now the focus is on CONTENT, CONTENT, CONTENT. The visitors are beginning to come. How do I know? I choose one random low-demand keyword ('r_________', a piece of music featured on the site), and immediately it ranks in the top 10 on google. People are typing that phrase in and finding my site already. So imagine what happens when the site has a bigger reputation, and hundreds of similar featured keywords! It's going to be amazing. OK, so my old domain is sending the SEs to the site and it's ranking quickly and I'm fairly experienced at computers, which might be why within a month, all my pages were being listed on msn, google and jeeves. But that's NOT the point... now I realize that everything's organic online too. It's just like musical (or indeed any other) performance: - you do a ridiculous amount of pre-preparation, get the technical framework in place, then just forget it all and enter 'the zone' - ride out the delivery of the experience/performance/content/information by giving 100% focus and concentration, but staying relaxed and letting your subconscious/imagination do the hard work. (OK, and some typing is necessary too) So things are looking good... ...Except I had a BIG problem. No capital. I'm not just doing the SBI website on it's own here - I'm trying to work it in with a live music band and an international community of listeners, for which I need to market to concert promoters over here (UK), and eventually further afield. But who on earth wants 'just another chamber ensemble'? Classical music is competitive enough as it is! To succeed here, I'm going to need to find an EDGE. So back in March (pre my SBI purchase) when I heard that the Royal Academy of Music and D_______ Bank were offering a development prize of personal mentoring + seed money, I went for it... with trepidation (there are some tough competitors here, believe me). I did the tortoise on a business plan (though I didn't realize it at the time), and I described my website idea (my 'edge' in my niche) quite fully, but based only on the knowledge I had of total-DIY-self-hosted-website whatnot. I got several people to read the plan through for me, rewrote it more times than you would believe, and sent it off. By the end it was quite good, and it got me shortlisted. The problem was I then had to give a presentation. The panel? 2 tough city guys from D_________ Bank. Me? Music student. Never given a presentation in my life. Never used powerpoint, maybe never will. So I made a nice structured talk, and printed out the main points on paper; gave it to them. I did the basics: intro, who I was, what the principles of the project were. But after that was done, I didn't really have much I wanted to say, other than what was already in the plan, about boring specifics e.g. marketing and personell and finance and blah blah blah (come on, I'm a musician!) So I just opened up my laptop on my new SBI site, and said 'have a play with this'. I explained that it looked pretty much like any website, and I'd only had it up for 3 weeks, and it hadn't yet been styled with nice graphics, extra features, etc. etc.. 'But', I explained, 'it is functional'. Why?... Well, you can probably guess what happened next. As they were playing with the site, I started telling them about C>T>P>M. I told them how the site draws people in, how people become attracted by the personal voice and the content (OK, OK, the site's still very unfinished, but it's well on the way!). I realized that I was sitting there, watching these two guys from one of the top London banks browsing on the internet, whilst simultaneously explaining their behaviour to them, and telling them why they had just reacted in the way they had, and how my business would be benefitting from them without them even realizing it. There was a magical moment when I sensed the metaphorical lightbulbs go on over both their heads... Ker-Ching! AND... I went one further and pointed out how such online techniques can be used offline too. Underpromise, OVERdeliver. As you've probably guessed, I 'closed the deal'. Don't let up. Do the hard work, but don't forget to keep with the big vision. I'll see you at the other end PS to Ken Evoy [the Founder/President/Head Coach of SBI]: :) Postscript by Webmaster: We tried these very techniques in California and discovered that financing an online business wasn't nearly as difficult as we had imagined!
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Jasmine
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