... are you sure they’re going to come?

Remember the end of Field of Dreams with all the cars lined up to come watch the baseball game. You just knew the Kinsella family would make lots of money selling lemonade and hotdogs to these folks and the farm would be saved. While most of us rooted for Ray and his crazy dream throughout the film, in real life we’d probably agree with Annie that he was going insane.

Like Ray, many entrepreneurs have great ideas and just start building them, but their friends and family don't seem to be as concerned as Annie was. Without divine intersession, how would all those people have learned about the Kinsella's field (especially in the pre-Facebook era)? Although few enterpreneurs are as blessed as Ray, they too believe wholeheartedly in their dream, have faith that “they will come,” and then go ahead and build it without a solid sales and distribution strategy in place. I’ve met with dozens dejected small business owners who have basements full of wonderful dreams that no one’s coming for. Typically these folks start off thinking:

This product is so cool everyone is just going to come to my website and buy tons of product.

The problem with this strategy is it’s really hard to get people to come to your website. You need to work you tail off to build site traffic by providing constantly updated valuable search engine friendly content (for free), running ads, social networking, generating publicity, etc. Even if you create this awesome website and do a fantastic job getting the word out, how many visitors can you actually expect per month? 1000? 2000? And how many are actually going to buy your product? One percent, two percent maybe, but not much more. So, if your product sells for $25, that would garner you about $250 to $500 in sales per month. Not going to make you rich will it? Would that even cover your expenses?

Here’s a fun exercise: figure out how many people you realistically can expect to come to your site by evaluating competitor sites. Go to www.compete.com and check out sites that are similar to yours and see how many visitors they get. So if you can generate as much traffic as your competitor, how many visitors can you convert into buyers?

Hmmm, still sure you want to rely on online sales to get your product out? Maybe you want to get it into retail channels, because …

This product is so cool that everyone is going to go to Macy’s (or Target / Starbucks, etc.) and it’ll just fly off the shelves.

...TO BE CONTINUED NEXT WEEK

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