Know-How Exchange : E-Marketing

Dear Terry,

How do you grow (build) your site?

Meet people's needs and exceed their expectations. This means giving them top class content they can put to use now, not next week, and not based on some pie in the sky BS.

Do you "Africanise" your site?

No. On the Internet, you can be anyone anywhere. As long as you know what you're talking about and as long as you offer value, content, and great benefits, who you are, where you are, and what you look like are non issues.

How do you commercialize your site?

Monthly subscriptions (paid content); Adsense; affiliate links to products your users might find useful or helpful; joint ventures;
your own range of information products (physical or downloadable).

But every time your finance director asks "Where's the money"?, your answer needs to be: before sales come in, value has got to go out.

This means an initial investment and up front loss leaders. Which also means you getting your act together to first prepare your back end sales. The money is on your list, and in repeat sales.

But in order to secure those repeat sales, you've got to offer astonishing value month after month. In short, you've got to blow people's socks off.

If you can pull this off, you'll do just fine.

I hope this helps.

Gary Bloomer
Wilmington, DE, USA

Hi Terry,

For a reference, please check out

https://www.masterseek.com/Default.aspx

These guys already put US$ 200 Million into this project.

Then of course there is 'www.linkedin.com' probably the leader in business Networking.

Growing in stature in Europe is 'www.viadeo.com'

It is definitely a tough and competitive market in the networking space but there is always room for a new player if they can differentiate their service.

For once, I disagree a little with Gary. (sorry Gary).

Considering that you are coming late to market, you may be better to focus on a specialised service just for the African market and African business persons around the world and those wanting to do business in Africa.

Become the expert in Africa and focus your business just there and you will have a chance to survive and flourish. If you try to go global right away, then it will be tough to meet all the different needs of different businesses.

As an example, I can site our own business.

We specialise in Weight loss online programmes.

The competition in the English language markets is huge so we don't try to compete. We are the number 1 player in the French market and we specialise there. I won't mention how much revenue we are generating monthly but I can tell you that I am shooting 20M emails per month in my marketing campaigns (you do the math).

I would be very interested to hear more about your plans and maybe offer some ideas on the marketing. Please feel free to get in touch (details on my profile here).

Good luck,

Matthew

Dear Terry and Matthew,

Matthew, you disagree with me? Splendid!

As crazy as this sounds, I WANT people to disagree with me.
It shows I'm wrong. And by being wrong, or at the least, by being different, it shows one ways to learn through being wrong.

So everybody benefits.

And you know what? Having read your response to Terry, I tend to agree with you. Becoming the expert in Africa makes perfect sense, ... if that's your (Terry's) preferred market.

By focusing on Africa, you'll have less competition, by getting there first, you can say "We were first", which offers you opportunities to make HUGE progress.

I still think it makes not one whit of difference where one's located, geographically, but by making the most of one's position in the world (London, Cape Town, Paris, Hong Kong, Tokyo) one's stature as the"go to" source can become immense.

I hope this helps.

Gary Bloomer
Wilmington, DE, USA

A British and Irish citizen living just outside Philadelphia, USA.