This is not to say that bricks-and-mortar businesses don't work anymore.
The reason why I'm saying this is because unless you are already seasoned business man or business woman, or you have deep pockets that you are willing to risk it all, you should not start a traditional bricks-and-mortar business.
These are the risks that you have to bear when starting a traditional bricks-and-mortar business:
1. You have to bear a HIGH FIXED RENTAL EXPENSE, even if your revenue for a particular month drops.
With increasing rental cost year after year, your financial risk increases proportionally as well. Moreover, the rental expense wastes a lot of your revenue which can be put to much better use. Many businesses, including the established ones, have been driven out of markets just because the rental costs have become too unaffordable for them.
2. You have workers whose salaries you have to pay first BEFORE you pay yourself.
Worker's salaries are another fixed monthly expense you have to deal with when you have a traditional bricks-and-mortar business.
3. You have to STORE and MANAGE INVENTORY.
First, you have to hire people or use your own time to manage those physical goods. So, money is wasted on paying salaries. Even if you are using your time, you are wasting money too because time is money. When you waste your time on low value work, you waste your money as well. Next, you have to waste valuable rental space to store those goods. Third, you need to spend money to buy an inventory system to manage the stock level and automatically order for re-stork if the inventory runs low.
4. You have to SPEND MONEY IN THE LOOK AND FEEL of your physical store.
This isn't just a one-time expense. It's a RECURRING EXPENSE because you have to keep renewing your image to keep up with the trends
As you can see, there are lots of expenses to take care BEFORE you are even sure you can make a high profit from the goods you are selling.
Now let's look at the advantages of building a digital business that is focused on selling INFORMATION PRODUCTS.
1. NO HIGH RENTAL TO PAY
As there is no need to display and store your physical products in a store, there is no fixed rental expense to pay for. At most, you only need to invest in a domain name (which you need to renew every year) which only cost about $10 per year and a web hosting service to store all the files in your website (this may only cost you $120 to $150 per month). Many web hosting services offer discounts on a regular basis when you first sign up. You may even spend less than $100 per year for hosting your website. If you buy a longer-term plan such as a 3-year hosting plan, your discount will even be deeper. Compare to thousands of dollars of rental costs, which one will post must lesser risk for you?
2. NO SALARY TO PAY
There are experts selling information products that earn them 6- or 7-figure revenue per year all by themselves. You can have a highly profitable business without the headache of paying salaries to any workers and managing them.
3. NO INVENTORY TO MANAGE!
Information products refer to eBooks, MP3 audio files, video recordings, teleseminars, webinars, and eCourse. These can be easily in your computer's disk space, on an external portable hard disk, or on a cloud storage such as Google Drive, Dropbox, Evernote and Amazon.
4. NO NEED TO SPEND MONEY ON STORE DECORATIONS!
You only need to invest some money (this could be as little as a few hundreds only) to build up an effective website, a few effective sale pages with good copywriting
5. NO NEED TO MANAGE PHYSICAL PAYMENT
All payments can be done online with secured fast payment transaction services provided by trusted online payment provider such as Paypal. All your transaction records will be stored, so you can easily keep track of how your business is moving. No need to manage physical receipts.
Don't LISTEN TO WHAT I SAY! DO YOUR OWN THINKING AND DECIDE WHAT IT IS BEST FOR YOU!
My Suggestion to you...
If you already in an industry which is information-rich, such as in training, education, cooking, arts and crafts, health and nutrition, design, or gardening, turn that into a set of products and use FREE internet resources such as blogs, Facebook Pages, Google+ Pages, Twitter, Instagram, and paid marketing resources such as Google Adwords, Facebook Ads and Email Autoresponder such as GetResponse.
Click Here To Set Up Your GetReponse Account Easily!
If you are not in such an information-rich industry and still want to open a physical store, try to think of ways to convert some parts of your operation into information marketing segment and exploit that to draw more people into your store!
GOOD LUCK TO YOU!
No comments:
Post a Comment