Networking is one of the most important functions that any business owner can engage in. I used to work in the field of banking and while I did, I was fortunate enough to make some interesting observations. For example, at quite a few banks the “branch manager” will have the job description of being in charge of “business development”.

At first I thought that these “business development” types where hired based on their ability to sell. Over time I began to realize that their jobs were not just based on cold calling but also, to a large degree, on networking.

Then one day it hit me, some of these managers were hired not just because they had demonstrated an ability to sell, or because they had shown networking ability in the past, they were hired for the size and quality of their current network! Though of in these terms their employer was not just paying them for their skill but also renting the value or “equity” of their network.

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A few weeks ago I stopped into a Subway sandwich shop for lunch. When I sat down to eat I noticed the game piece for their current Scrabble based promotion. One game piece was attached to my soda cup and the other one was attached to the deli paper was used to wrap my sandwich.

The game pieces offered two possible ways to win. The first was a chance at an instant win and the second half of the game piece could be used in the “collect-to-win” portion of the promotion.

That day one of my two game pieces was an instant winner for a free 6” sandwich. After a relatively short period, it might have been within a week, I stopped into another Subway location to eat. Once again two game pieces were sitting before me, and once again one of them was an instant winner, this time for a free cookie!

I have to tell you; at that point I was feeling pretty good about eating at Subway. First of all I am a fan of their “five dollar foot-long” promotion, but adding two back-to-back instant wins on top of that made me feel like I couldn’t loose at Subway.

After my two initial experiences with the Subway Scrabble promotion, I would hazard to guess that the frequency of my visits to Subway locations has increased. I say this since I can recall eating at their restaurants several times in the last few weeks. However since my initial two instant wins, none of my subsequent game pieces for this promotion have been instant winners.

So here is my question, what if Subway engineered the promotion so that towards the beginning of the promotion, the frequency of game pieces which would result in an instant win was higher then during later stages of the promotion?

I am not saying that this is actually the case, or that the game is “rigged” in any way-shape-or- form. Keep in mind that I am basing my observations on an extremely small statistical sample since I am only considering my own experiences over that last few weeks.

However if the contest was engineered in stages, with earlier stages having a higher statistical chance of producing instant winners then later stages, then this would represent a very interesting strategy.

Customers who were instant winners in the early rounds might be more inclined to visit Subway again in the near future. This increase in traffic just might have the effect of boosting sales, and this boost might more than offset the food cost associated with giving away “free food”, especially if the frequency of instant winners was declining as foot traffic was increasing.

At Feedback Secrets we like to discuss interesting and novel strategies for doing business. It is our belief that studying such strategies can help you to develop innovative strategies for your own online business.

Aside from some pure e-commerce sites, most online businesses owners are actively monetizing their own credibility. This is true whether you promote your own products or you engage in affiliate marketing.

Let’s say you market affiliate products via either an email list or a blog. Every time you make a recommendation you are risking your reputation to some degree.

The degree of risk involved depends on several factors. For instance, one factor is the quality of the product that you are promoting. A list of loyal readers that is bombarded with several bad recommendations in a row may soon begin to question their loyalties. Another factor to consider is the frequency with which recommendations are made.

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If you take a quick look at Mr. Furey’s website you will see that on his site, he sells multiple information products, as well as promoting his business coaching services and seminars. I would describe Mr. Furey’s main niche as fitness products marketed to those interested in combat sports.

By most accounts, MattFurey.com is an enormously successful online business. According to direct marketing guru Dan Kennedy, in his book No B.S. Wealth Attraction for Entrepreneurs, Matt Furey’s online businesses generate “millions of dollars a year”.

I would argue that the success of the website MattFurey.com has been largely based on a single product, and that product would be Mr. Furey’s book, Combat Conditioning. For years Matt Furey has run full page ads in the back of magazines related to his niche, to promote this particular book.

Many of these full page sales letters would offer prospects the opportunity to purchase Combat Conditioning directly or to visit one of Mr. Furey’s websites. In the same book on wealth attraction, mentioned above, author Dan Kennedy explains that Combat Conditioning “has sold hundreds of thousands of copies”.

We have all herd of “gateway drugs”, where use of drugs such as marijuana are considered to increase the chances that person will move on to using other, less main stream substances. Well it seems that in Mr. Furey’s business model, Combat Conditioning has been a gateway product.

By that I mean that some of Mr. Furey’s first time customers came to know of him and his line of products through a magazine ad for Combat Conditioning and then based on the strength of that one product, a percentage of those customers became “converts” to the Furey’s line of products.

Having a successful line of information products definitely helps to promote a seminar business, and a seminar business is a great platform from which to promote your information products. And of course success in online business and seminars provide excellent credentials for promoting your business coaching services.

Often when I talk to people about their online businesses, I get asked questions about various tactics that people are thinking of using to make money online. Some people ask if they should sell on Craigslist or eBay. Others considering the benefits of placing AdSense ads on their site’s vs. ads from ValueClick.

All of these are questions about online business tactics. While asking such questions can be helpful, I think there are some more important questions that should be asked.

Tactics are individual actions or decisions designed to produce a specific reaction. Strategies on the other hand are plans for stringing together a series of tactics, in a specific order, depending on various conditions.

The problem with tactics is that no matter which one you pick, your competitors can follow you by using the exact same tactic. If your business is all tactics and no strategy then you will be engaged in perfect competition with those using the same tactics. The problem with perfect competition, as we have described in The eBay Myth, is that “…with identical products and perfect competition, profits tend towards zero.”

The only way to avoid perfect competition is by building barriers to entry into your business strategy. A barrier to entry is any feature built into your business that makes it difficult for people to compete with you directly.

Examples of barriers to entry in an online business might include a sizable email list, tons of SEO traffic coming to your site month after month, a large number of social-networking contacts, a reputation as an expert in a particular niche, or even a system for producing article marketing articles, faster then your competitors.

What other barriers to entry can you think of, we would love to hear from you in the form of comment to this post.

The price that you pick for your site’s offerings will be intimately tied to your sites conversion rate. If the price you pick is too high, then even with excellent presentation, your conversion rate will begin to drop. On the other hand, if you price your offering too low people will assume your product is not of much value, and your conversion rate will also suffer.

The exception to the two guidelines mentioned above is websites that run as discount operations. These kinds of sites can be successful, however this is very difficult model for those just starting their first business. One reason for this is because these kinds of sites usually require the business owner to maintain his own inventory.

If you are drop shipping, and acting as a middle man, then chances are that it will be just about impossible for you to undercut your competitors and still make a profit. The problem with keeping an inventory when starting out is that it requires storage space, and that it comes with the risk of taking a loss if you are not able to move your inventory.

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So as we touched on in our last post, all things that relate to monetization in the online business world start with Traffic. It is the river flowing towards your online business. Feel free to let me know if I am getting too metaphysical sounding.

Anywho, once we have this traffic flowing towards us, it is our job to funnel it through some sort of conversion piece. The purpose of this conversion piece is to catch a certain percentage of the traffic flowing towards us and to convert them into some actionable event, such as a sale.

If you are sending traffic from an email list to a specific landing page on one of your e-commerce sites that sells a single product, or a single product with multiple variations, then in theory your conversion rate could get as high as 5%

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Well do you? If so we want to know! Here at Feedback Secrets we are gearing up for a new series on the subject of e-commerce sites. To kick off this series, we are asking you to share a link to your e-commerce site.

All you need to do is email us at feedbacksecrets@gmail.com with your site’s name, URL, and up to seven words describing the nature of your business.

We’ll post your link and site description in this post and we will continue to update this list throughout the week. BTW, no sites of an “adult nature” please. Thanks for your participation.

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So earlier today I was eating at a local location of a restaurant chain that has become a recent lunch time favorite of mine. The chain is a small but up and coming organization, I think at the moment they only have four locations.

I don’t know how long the company has been in business. I first heard about the place about a month ago, and since then every day I walk past it during lunch, the place is packed. The food is really good and the price is not totally unreasonable. In their menu, they have managed to come up with a new twist on an old theme.

So here is what happened… I was stuffing my face, enjoying a break from work when I happened to look towards the restaurant’s front door. At that moment a cute little girl, who to me looked to be about seven years of age, walked in with a high power Minolta digital camera complete with a giant manual focus lens attached to the front.

What happened next was even more bizarre. This little girl systematically walked up to just about every menu hanging on the wall, focused her camera and then snapped a picture. After she was done with the menus, she repeated the process with the marketing posters on the wall. I don’t know if she got a shot of every single marketing piece they had, but she came close.

I noticed at least one other person in the restaurant who had noticed the strange behavior of this adorable little girl. He had a look of utter confusion on his face that seemed to say “what in the world is going on”? Most of the other patrons seemed not to notice this tiny photography enthusiast.

So what in the world does this have to do with online business? Well the business world, in all its forms, can be highly competitive. This level of competition drives people to do all sorts of things in an attempt to gain an edge. I am not suggesting that you engage in any business activities which make you feel uncomfortable.

What I am advising is for you to be aware of some of the techniques that others may use in attempt to gain information on you or your business. There will be some information that will be almost impossible to protect, like a menu on a wall. There will be other details that you will want to protect to the best of your abilities.

In our last post on Batch Processing we wrote about the incredible value that can comes from knowing the “priority stack” for your business and making sure that those weekly business functions that you deem as most important, are completed without fail, every week.

So what is the other secret to batch processing? As we mentioned in our last post in this series, hopefully one day your business will grow to the point where you have to hire people to work in order to farm out some of your business’ functions. Until you reach that point you will have to decide which functions you will take on, and which you will leave alone until you can retain some help.

Once again there should be two lists. A first list of those functions that you must complete each week without fail, and a second list of all the tasks you hope to hammer out in an ideal week. The second secret ingredient in batch processing is to make sure to leave some business function off of both of these lists.

Each of us is different, and some entrepreneurs seem to be “superhuman” in there ability to accomplish an unnatural number of tasks each and every week. The point is that you know your own optimal stress load. To little stress and human beings tend to get lax, on the other hand, if you stack too much responsibility on yourself you may feel swamped if you are unable to complete your tasks.

Several weeks in a row of feeling swamped can have an extremely discouraging effect on a small business owner. This is why we recommend a small list, faithfully completed every week. Too much of load and you run the risk of either stressing yourself to the max or of spreading yourself so thin that you cannot maintain the standards of quality that you have set for your organization. As Henry David Thoreau wrote in Walden, “a man is rich in proportion to the number of things he can afford to leave alone.”