As any avid poker player knows, 2-7 is considered to be the worst starting hand in Texas Hold ’Em. The reasons are simple: these two cards have the worst odds of improving and therefore, any other player at the table is virtually guaranteed to have a better hand. Said another way, these are the two lowest cards you can have that can’t make a straight (there’s four cards between 2 and 7) and even if they are suited, they make for a very low flush. Heck, even if you manage to scramble up a pair from either of them, it’s going to be a pitiful pair.
The bottom line? There’s a high risk that you’re going to lose money by playing 2-7. That being said, it is possible to win with 2-7. But to do so, you must first play it, and that’s really the point of today’s blog post.
If you study the stories of some of the world’s most celebrated entrepreneurs, you’ll find that risk — and luck — are a big part of their early entrepreneurial days. John Paul Jones Dejoria, cofounder of John Paul Mitchell Systems and a reported billionaire and homeless person at various stages of his illustrious life (I wrote about him back on the 25th of January), has said that he, ”…should have gone bankrupt 50 times” in the early days of his career.
Doba’s own Jeremy Hanks (our co-founder and president) has discussed his luck as an entrepreneur on his personal blog, JeremyHanks.com. And Kemmons Wilson, the founder of Holiday Inn, was fond of saying, “Success requires half luck and half brains.”
In 2007, a change occurred in the demographics of those who use the World Wide Web. While, for the most part, this change occurred with little fanfare, dedicated Internet marketers definitely took note. So what was this grand event?
Queue drum roll…
Female Web users began to outnumber their male counterparts. Okay, I know what you’re thinking, “Wow, that’s it? Pretty anti-climactic if you ask me!”
And you’re right; it is downright anti-climactic, especially if your target market is cats, dogs, or fish. For the rest of us – those of us who target human beings — this is a pretty big deal. For years Internet marketers had assumed the number of men surfing the Web would be greater than the number of women doing the same. Well, that assumption apparently started out in peril, and now it is dead. Clearly, the time for ignoring the fairer sex is over. Now, it’s time to figure out what women want.
So what do women want? Well, no one really knows for sure (okay, just kidding); but seriously, take look at these statistics and see if anything listed speaks to you and your business model:
According to the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project, 78% of all women (versus 71% of all men) used the Internet within the last year to buy a product online, such as books, music, toys or clothing.
In the latest study available, 47% of female Web users (versus 53% of men) visited video sites (such as YouTube) versus 27% the prior year. They also visited more often, more than twice as often as men. Continue reading »
I used to work for one of the nation’s leading online advertising agencies. When I first started working there, the company was just another among a slew of startups who were far from being considered a leader. We had the opportunity to change that when a very well known and large Web-based company came calling. We’ll just call them “The Really Big Company.”
Our executive team scheduled a meeting of all managers to let us know that we would be presenting an overview of our services to The Really Big Company, which included how each of our departments fit into the big picture. Keep in mind that we were one of many ad agencies this company was considering partnering with. Our executive team wanted us on our absolute best behavior and stressed that we needed to only expose our “best side” to The Really Big Company.
I’d like to say things went smoothly, but there was one incident that has gained some level of infamy among those that were there to experience it. Continue reading »
Ask anyone who owns a Web-based business if they’re at all concerned about their search engine ranking, and you’re likely to receive a resounding “Yes!” Ask a firm that claims to specialize in search engine optimization (SEO) if they can improve your search engine rank, and you’ll likely receive a similarly resounding “Yes!”
Sadly, many people working in the get-rich-quick world of SEO are only in it for themselves, use antiquated methods, or truly believe optimizing websites is as easy as spelling ESPN. In the following video, I show you — the online drop-ship retailer — how to develop a website that is properly optimized for search engine rank.
Questions, comments, horror stories, keen insights or observations? Leave yours via the Comment link below!
Pretty glaring title today, don’t you think? And yes, I already know what some of you are thinking, “But Stuart, if I can’t compete against other retailers on the Web, than why even bother?”
That’s a legitimate question. After all, if you could capture just 1% of Amazon.com’s market, you’d be sitting pretty. Here, take a look at Amazon’s most recent quarterly income statement (taken from Yahoo! Finance):
Over a period of one year, you can see that 1% would come out to about $24.5 million in sales. Well, I hate to break it to you, but you’re not going to get 1% of Amazon’s market. While you can eventually do 1% of their business, you’re just not going to get it by stealing their customers. Continue reading »
For anyone keeping score, my November 18, 2009, blog post titled Drop Shipping For Dummies has attracted more than 200 comments, one of which recently caught my attention. From Derick Sweet:
I have recently started with Doba on a trial basis; I have not decided yet to stick with it long term. Is it normal to not sell items at the beginning of using the service? I’m not too far into it but I’m trying to change up some of my strategies while at the same time learn how everything works and how to get my items to actually sell and at least compensate for my loss in fees. Perhaps it will improve once my eBay rating increases? That, I think, is what is crippling me, because I started a new eBay account and it placed me at 0 rating. Maybe the book [sic: Drop Shipping For Dummies] will help.
I’m guessing a lot of Doba members have asked themselves the same question, so here’s what I think: It’s not abnormal to have difficulty selling online when first starting out.Continue reading »
I already know that this post is going to touch off a pretty sensitive nerve with a lot of people. Nobody wants to hear it, and the natural reaction is to become defensive, but it must be said. And more than that, you — the new online retailer — must hear it, especially if you need to be successful.
Like many of you, I myself am an entrepreneur. I started my first Internet business in 1998 shortly after dropping out of college. The last 11 years or so have made up the bulk of my schooling as I’ve had various, albeit temporary, successes littered with many notable failures.
Over the last decade, I’ve learned two things about running an online business:
If you watch eBay auctions with any regularity, you may have noticed that some sellers manage to receive more bids and sell items for a higher price than you or others who sell an identical item. More often than not, a high number of bids has more to do with the way the item is presented, as well as the way the seller presents him or herself, than anything else.
Successful sellers and online retailers who use auction sites like eBay understand that to attract a high number of bids, they sometimes have to tap into their buyers’ emotions. There are a dozen or so really strong emotional triggers that online marketers utilize to influence a shoppers decision-making process. One of these — and this is the point of today’s post — is the belief that there is a bargain to be had.
According to a recent article in The Wall Street Journal, online sales increased 5 percent for the 2009 holiday season, which online research firm comScore attributed to a continued increase in the number of people shopping online. Online sales from the beginning of November through Christmas Eve were reported be $27 billion, which was up by 3.5 percent over 2008’s holiday figures.
With so many people shopping online — and not just during the holidays — you, the entrepreneurial online retailer, have to present online shoppers with a compelling reason to buy from your store as opposed to Amazon or some other independent online retailer’s shop. Why should I buy from you is a common question shoppers have about your online store, and if you’re not able to address that issue within the first minute of someone’s visit to your store, chances are you’ll lose the sale. Continue reading »
From the beginning of time (well, the beginning of the World Wide Web anyway), content has been declared king by search marketers everywhere.
In the beginning of the “Content is King” movement, content development was rather crude. Throw in lots of keywords — whether related to your site or not — make sure you repeat every possible keyword more than everybody else, and you got ranking in the search engines.
For those that remember the dark days of search, you’ll remember that adult sites excelled at this. Search for any popular term, whether it be “cool music,” “pet adoptions,” or “shoes that make me jump higher and run faster than the other guys on my basketball team,” and about half of the top 10 results always came from nefarious sites.
Good content becomes king
Fortunately, search engines have improved since those days, but more than just the search engines changed. Continue reading »
