How indeed?

How many people are sitting at home counting hits to their home based business Web site and wondering how many more hits it will take to break even?

“If I make $100 from 50 hits to my site, then I all I need is 500 hits to be making $1000 a day and that’s all I need.”

It sounds perfectly logical and there are people sitting at home making more money in one day from hits than we make in a month at our desks.

But there are tens – hundreds of thousands of people selling, for example, beaded jewelry on the Web. When I went to Google, I came up with 680,000 Web sites selling beaded jewelry. How many are making money? A friend in the Internet marketing business commented the place to be was in selling beads to beaded jewelry makers, not selling the finished product.

“I’d have trouble finding people to buy beaded jewelry,” he commented, “but I can tell you exactly where there are 680,000 potential customers to buy beads.”

Selling on the Internet, I tell my clients, is the same as selling anywhere else.

The exceptions are the same. Jennifer Lopez happens to be an ex-room mate of your sister’s cousin’s stepdaughter and she wears your beaded nose ring to the Oscars and you are now rich, fending off orders. Or you got a lucky mention in USA Today, or you got one of those lucky PR breaks that magically generate millions of hits to your site. (If I were in the Internet marketing business, I can tell you I would not be sitting waiting for a lucky break. There are too many sites, too few lucky breaks out there.)

Too many sites, too few lucky breaks.

But for everyone else, it takes money to make money. It takes advertising money to bring people into a retail store, to persuade them to call you rather than Big Price Furnace Oil, to get them to remember to go to your Web site when they get home tonight, after dinner and the kids’ baths and homework, that they will remember your URL and feel like going shopping.

Let’s be a little bit real here.

If you want to be successful at Internet marketing, I tell clients (and I am blunt about it) then take the time to become an Internet marketing expert. Learn every trick to optimize your Internet presence, scientifically purchase Internet advertising, sidebars, pop-ups, whatever, and monitor by the hour what the response is. You’ve got to become the expert Internet marketer in your category. Like Amazon. They don’t miss a chance to sell, up-sell.

Desire for a lot of hits and the expectation that you should get hits just because you have a Web site is naïve. You’ve got to do the work, buy people to come to your site. Become an expert. No whining.

Just because you have a good Web site, one that navigates easily, makes it easy to preview products and buy is no guarantee of success. That’s not enough. Not even if you have a brand name. National retailers are fighting the same battle on the Internet and they have the big bucks to do it.

Coming out in the ‘top ten’ on Google does not make you rich and you will not stay in the #1 position unless you buy your way in. Think of the Internet as a giant magazine. Full page, flashy, color advertisements on page 3 costs more than 1/16 page black and white boxes in the classified section. Want to be #1 on Google? Pay for it.

Buy your way to #1 on Google

It’s not just buying traffic and hits, either. It takes resources and technical infrastructure to keep a Web business going. It’s necessary overhead, paying for really effective Web design, paying experts to optimize your site (while thousands of others selling beaded jewelry are also paying experts to optimize their sites – you get the picture) and then along comes Beaded Jewelry International and suddenly they own the Web because they are a cartel of West Africans who spent $5 million on Google advertising and they buy 80 percent of the market….they sell 80 percent of the beaded jewelry and 80 percent of the beads to make it. You get the picture. Big Dogs get bigger.

So what should you do with that Web site? Either you play with the Big Dogs and try to out-smart their big money (unlikely) or… you get into a niche! Serve a smaller market. That’s one approach. Start local, learn the ropes, and get satisfied clientele. Where have we heard this before?

For example, create a line of jewelry for police officer’s spouses. Share some of the profits with the Police Guilds, show officers’ wives how they can sell your jewelry, and help their local police department (and raise awareness of the good works the police do). It’s a niche. It makes you suddenly different from the 680,000 basically generic Web sites with ‘beaded jewelry’.

And unless you have a cure for cancer, your market, your customers, for beaded jewelry on the Internet or furnace oil from your trucks, is not ‘everyone’. You can fight it out with 680,000 other beaded jewelry sellers on Google, or you can win a share of market in your backyard niche.

Either way, it’s going to take hard work and it’s going to cost money. There is still no short cut to ‘making a fortune’ from your Web site, or mine.

Darnn it.

(Editor’s Note: Bill Hoke is a Manette based marketing and sales consultant. He is also author of “The 90 Minute Marketing Plan” workshops. He can be reached at hoke@hokeconsutling.com.) .