Overview Of Web Commerce: Colt--customers, Offers, List, Traffic

Question: I want create online streams of income selling information products, and I have studied many techniques, but I'm getting lost in the details. I need an overview of e-commerce that can help me fit all these parts together. Is there one?

Answer: I find myself using the acronym COLT to remind myself of the elements I have to provide. The letters stand for Customers, Offers, List, and Traffic. Not only do they give you an overview of Web commerce, they also give the order in which you can set up the parts of your income stream.

To open a restaurant, it is said, the one thing you most need is a hungry crowd with money to spend. "Customers" refers to finding that hungry crowd. You need to find some group of people who need something and are willing to spend money to get it. You can hunt for groups of people by looking for their forums, blogs, and groups. You can check keywords typed into search engines and see if a lot of people are searching for certain things. You can check to see whether there are magazines and books directed at certain interests. You can check the electronic products on sale at ClickBank directed at certain needs and see how well they are selling.

"Offers" refers to what you are offering to these customers. If you have found the customers and found what problems they have, you can find products or services that will solve these problems, or you can create your own products or services that will. If you're thinking of offering information products, you can check at Amazon and ClickBank and see if there any gaps that you could fill with your own product. Or at ClickBank, you can look for products to sell as an affiliate. (Amazon offers a tiny commission compared to most products at ClickBank.)

"List" refers to the e-mail list that you need to build of people who are interested in your offers. You'll typically need half a dozen to a dozen contacts with potential customers before they buy the first time. Moreover, now that you know what they want, you'll naturally want to try to sell them other related products as well. For all of this you need to have the name and e-mail address of each of them. You need an auto responder to gather and use these names and e-mail addresses.

"Traffic" refers to bringing potential customers to your website. The game of traffic is essentially the game of links -- getting links to your website spread around the web. There are many techniques, some free and some that you pay for, some that work quickly and some that grow over time, some that produce a brief surge in traffic and some that build sustained traffic.

When you launch a new product you should have prepared all those four elements: Customers, Offers, List, and Traffic.