7 Keys To A Virtual Business

The highest ROI activities in business are creating new products, new marketing, and new distribution channels - everything else is just playing business

Eben emphasizes that activities like making phone calls, working on business cards, or perfecting website colors are not actual business - the money-making activities are product creation, marketing, and distribution

Your biggest opportunities for online products, distribution, and marketing have yet to be created and discovered in the virtual business world

Eben explains that the internet has created a Cambrian explosion of new business models, comparing it to how manufacturing changed entire countries like America and Japan, and how big box stores like Home Depot, Walmart, and Costco revolutionized distribution

The first commandment of business success is know thy customer as well as thyself - you must understand their problems, fantasies, fears, and nightmares

Eben states he can determine within a couple of minutes if someone understands their customers by asking about customer problems, secret fantasies, fears, nightmares, stories they tell themselves, and what they worry about at night

Use all online tools available to get to know customers one-to-one, then create a customer avatar with all the commonalities of your ideal customer

Eben recommends combining traditional phone and in-person conversations with online tools to keep your finger on customer pulse, then creating an image in your mind of an ideal customer that represents typical buyer characteristics

Niches are needs - your niche isn't the group of people you'd like to sell to, but the specific need that group has

Eben created Wake Up Productive, a 13-week time management course promising to double productivity in 90 days, which sold over a million dollars by targeting the specific need for time management rather than general business education

Virtual business models allow you to narrow your niche dramatically, making it far more powerful than traditional businesses

Eben's Wake Up Productive course generated over a million dollars by focusing solely on time management and productivity doubling, demonstrating how narrow specialization in virtual businesses can be highly profitable

Validate customers, products, and business models before spending big money on production, marketing, and distribution

Eben references Stephen Blank's customer validation methodology from Silicon Valley, emphasizing testing before major investments in production, marketing, and team building

Use free and low-cost online tools to research, survey, and test your market assumptions before major investment

Eben describes using social networking groups, forums, blogs, free PDF downloads, webinars, and opt-in pages to test market interest, where 1% opt-in rate indicates low interest while 50% opt-in rate shows strong market validation

Opt-in rates reveal market interest: 1% indicates low interest, 10% is better proof of concept, 50% shows you're on the right track

Eben provides specific benchmarks for measuring market validation through opt-in page performance, using simple pages with headlines, videos, pictures of free offerings, and single call-to-action to test genuine interest levels

Make products and conversion work on an individual customer level, then scale it up - don't automate what you haven't tested first

Eben warns against the biggest mistake of building products, marketing, and getting everything ready before testing, only to find no customers show up to buy after investing lots of time, effort, energy, and money

Use live phone and video conferencing to create conversion presentations that work, then automate them with technology

Eben advocates using the flexibility of virtual business to jump on phone and video calls with prospective customers throughout the day, asking questions, having conferences, and figuring out what works one-to-one before automation

Don't be tempted by flashy automation software and tools until you have a proven process that works manually

Eben warns against the temptation of cool survey tools, autoresponder systems, or software that promises to do all the work with just a few clicks, emphasizing the need to do it yourself first, then automate

Run everything in your business like a business - think critically, track, measure, and report everything, especially people and management processes

Eben defines running like a business as taking it seriously, thinking critically, tracking, measuring, and reporting all aspects, particularly emphasizing people and management processes

Just because you're working from home doesn't mean you can skip hiring stars and running your business professionally

Eben warns that the virtual environment can create a casual mindset that causes people to not take their business seriously and hire other casual people, when it's even more important to hire stars and manage professionally to build a stable business with diverse products, marketing, and distribution