When I talk to people about business, most of them do not realise how difficult it is to actually build a successful company. Everyone I talk to has so many great ideas, so many solutions and a very simplified approach to making money. In particular, online business has become the new buzz topic as people read more and more news about sites that made it big quickly such as Groupon.
I’ve come to realise that there are no short-cuts. It doesn’t mean that you need to get all your ducks in order and take too much time to prepare everything perfectly, but it means that you’ve got to be ready for the long-haul and the investment of time, resource and money in order to make your idea a success.
And in terms of online sites, all people see is the website that pops up when they type in the URL. Very quickly, the conclusion reached is that it’s easy to get the site developed within a short time frame and cheaply. Then, it begins to generate income for you as you sleep and as you go to your full-time jobs. They neglect to understand the back-end system, functionality and resource that it takes to bring the site to success and, as importantly, to keep it there.
Many of the successful online sites have a team of full time workers to maintain the site and processes involved, sales personnel to sell ad space and to link up with affiliate sites, and sometimes even events people to handle road shows and publicity. At the same time, the advertising and marketing costs can be very substantial, especially if you’re looking to do extensive SEO.
The burn rate can be very extensive and there are no guarantees that your site will do well, regardless of whether it is a good idea or not. The fact that it is online means that it is easily replicable so you need to build up a loyal base of users quickly and to keep them around somehow. Networking and connections are very important especially when you’re looking to build an affiliate system of business.
You’ve always got to be prepared to face someone else out there with more capital and a better network, which can very quickly shut you out.
And if you think you’re the only one who’s come up with a certain idea…chances are that 20 others have already started working on it if it’s a good idea (of course, around 19 will completely suck at their first attempt), and it then comes down to who can build a bigger base of loyal users faster, and provide the best offerings.
So if you still want to go ahead with that brilliant online business idea, you better have the time, resources and capital to back it up if you really want to succeed.
0 comments:
Post a Comment