The Ultimate Secret To Success With An Online Business

I believe that without understanding the very core of what makes a business successful, only small levels of success are possible. And that without knowing the “ultimate secret to success” with any business, online or off, most people with great ideas and a lot of passion about serving their market are tragically blocked from seeing the success they could if they only knew the secret.

So what is the ultimate secret to success with your business?

Here’s what it’s not:

• SEO
• Link Building
• Social Marketing
• Great Content
• A Lot of Traffic
• …or even making decent sales.

You’d think, and most people do, that at least having a lot of traffic or making decent sales was a sure sign of success.  Most people are lucky to get that far.  You might even be thinking to yourself right now that that sounds just perfect for your business.  Traffic and sales.  What more could you ask for?

When I interviewed Jeff Paul not too long ago, he brought up the ultimate secret to success as he and I see it.  It is all of the above, but with a wrapper made up of the principal you’d do well never to forget.

Just like learning how a magic trick is done, you run the risk of blowing off this secret and not taking a moment to understand it deeply.  When people watch Penn and Teller show how a long-standing illusion is actually done, you have mixed feelings of “aha” followed quickly by disappointment.

At the same time, you feel excitement to see how something you could never figure out is done, and a feeling of loss because the “magic” had forever left the illusion for you.  You could never be tricked again with such an illusion.  All that’s left to do is seek out more illusions for your entertainment which you cannot figure out, and now, probably don’t want to for fear of killing the magic.

That’s entertainment.

This is business.

And your are the “magician” who MUST know the tricks inside and out in order to make a living.

So I have to kill the magic for you in order to give you the ability to succeed with your business.

The simple truth about the secret to all business success is this:

You absolutely must find out what your market desperately wants and give it to them.

Now stop! This is a crucial moment.  You can blow this off as something you’ve heard before and not look deeply into what it means to your business and what you offer your market right now.  Or you can take a moment to think about what you are selling, whether it is content to drive traffic to generate advertising dollars, or selling products and/or services to your market.  (Your own or as an affiliate.)

If you take this seriously and analyze what you are doing now against the secret behind all massive successes in business, you could find you are nailing it (but you’d probably not be reading this post if you were already nailing it). Or you could find that you are pushing products, services, or content to people who are only mildly interested.

A business cannot thrive with a “mildly interested” customer base.

It doesn’t matter if you have the best rankings, the highest traffic in the market, the most links, or that you make moderately good sales.  You won’t know true success with your business without wrapping everything you do in a shroud that is the ultimate secret to success.

Examples of Filling a Desperately Desired Need

One of the things I noticed when living in New Mexico and traveling through the Reservations (known for being some of the poorest places in the United States) was the number of late model $30,000 trucks sitting in front of shacks.

I always wondered to myself “How in the world could someone this poor afford such a vehicle?”  The first part of the answer is that “poor” is a relative term.  The second part is that people will do everything humanly possible to acquire things they desperately desire.

When I came out with The Authority Black Book, the market desperately wanted to know everything they could learn about social marketing. People grabbed up the ebook faster than any other freebie I had released to date which resulted in a list we have made close to $2 million in sales of our own products and affiliate products and services.

When Brad Callen came out with Keyword Elite, the market desperately wanted a better keyword research tool and bought it up like mad, making it the #1 seller on Clickbank in its category for a long time.

When John Reese came out with Traffic Secrets, or Frank Kern came out with Mass Control, people responded at levels previously unheard of simply because those guys produced things that people in their market desperately wanted.  And their customers used any means necessary to acquire their products even if Suze Orman would have told them they couldn’t really afford them.

When You “Get” the Secret, Your Business Changes

When you put the secret to work for your business it can mean the difference between average success and monstrous success.  In fact, the limits to your success are practically vaporized when you apply the secret.

Tactics don’t matter as much when you give a market access to what it desperately wants.  It’s not a matter of mastering blogging or SEO. It’s not even a matter of knowing all that much in the way of product creation and marketing tactics in the beginning.  Without applying the ultimate secret, none of the tactics we all seek out on a daily basis matter more than first deciding on what to put out there.

An example I always use when it comes to someone succeeding wildly without knowing much about the tactics of marketing online is Dooce.com.  Heather Armstrong could fill a large encyclopedia with the things she doesn’t know about online marketing, branding, SEO, link building and the rest.  Yet she bypassed all that learning and became one of the most successful and widely-read bloggers on the web by providing something that people in her market desperately want:  her brand of irreverent, outspoken, funny, edgy blogging.

People found her through the buzz generated by her initial followers.  She’s only high in the engines now because of her site’s popularity which came before.  The people in her market were seeking her brand of content so desperately, she couldn’t even hide from them if she wanted to.  Something great and desperately desired has a way of becoming popular despite any mistakes you could make in your marketing.

Knowing the secret and applying it to your business makes it possible for you to skip a lot of techy training on the tactics and head right to the end game.

The YouTube founders started a little, simple site for friends and family to share video.  They didn’t spend years learning SEO.  They put the service out there and accidentally realized very quickly the whole web desperately wanted to use their site.  They completely skipped over the learning curve of tactics and strategies for online marketing and selling and went straight to the end game, being bought out by Google and becoming massively rich in the process.

The ultimate secret happens by accident too.  But the principle behind it in either case is the same.

So what would be more important to focus on?

My advice is to always be on the lookout for what your market is not getting but that they desperately want.  Every hour of every day should include some thought and research into what your competitors and peers are seeing success with and finding out what’s likely to come next in your market as the “next big thing.”

You shouldn’t throw out all that you have learned or are currently learning about tactics. But hedge your bets and include in your daily routine some kind of research to make sure you are keenly aware of your market’s interests and desires at any given moment.  Sparks of inspiration and genius will fly much more often, and your business will do much better much faster, if you are constantly striving to give the people what they want really badly.

Not kind of badly.

Not mildy interested.

You have to strive to give your market something it cannot resist because of price or any other factor.  They must have what you offer.  And you have to offer something they’ll do practically anything to afford and acquire, whether it is knowledge, software, mentoring, or any number of products and services imaginable.

With the social web and increasingly real-time research tools like Search.Twitter.com and Google Blog Search, it’s never been easier to instantly plug into the pulse of your market and squeeze out ideas on a regular basis.

Tagged as: secret to success, succeeding online, success secrets, ultimate secret to success