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Some Thoughts on Internet Business Opportunities
By Karen | March 19, 2008
We are blessed to live in the age of the Internet. Information is literally at our fingertips, never before in history have we been able access so much of life so easily. We have the resources to learn and grow and become more than we ever dreamed in the past.
And never before have we had the opportunities to create businesses that can help so many people so easily.
But has it become so easy that we are caught in an illusion? Do we tend to forget the basics? Think that the basics of good business no longer apply?
If the dotcom craze and subsequent bubble taught us anything it should be that you can’t get something from nothing, not even on the Internet.
Do you remember the IPO offerings of years back, when an essentially unknown company with no track record and no proven way to really make money went for completely unreasonable amounts? A now essentially “defunct” company had it’s stock rise over 250% on the day of it’s IPO, that same company was later purchased by another larger company, (for another completely unreasonable amount!) only to become split into separate services. Much of the original is now gone, obsolete, defunct. The second company could have accomplished the same end with the same services for substantially (substantially!) less money had they thought it through.
Another recent example that seemed to make no sense from a purely business standpoint, (as in spending money to actually make money–whew, what a concept! Is that the plan? To make money?) would be the acquisition of Youtube by Google. Youtube had never made any money whatsoever and it was very unclear how money would be made in the future. Yet Google paid an exorbitant amount to acquire Youtube. Now I don’t even pretend to know the logistics of this transaction. But I do know that a business that pays out large sums of money for something that has no foreseen way of making a profit or at least breaking even does not meet the standards we learned about in our college “Basics of Economics 101” classes.
And that is the point.
A business is a business. Even on the Internet, a business is a business.
A business needs a plan. A business needs a product or service. And most important of all a business needs a steady stream of people who are interested in the products or service enough to give up their money.
If you have a brick and mortar store on the very best and busiest corner in your town but no one ever steps foot into the store, the business will fail. Same with your online business. If you have the most beautiful website on the web, with the absolute coolest name, and the very finest products, or the most thought-provoking blog, or the greatest website template ever known to man but no one ever visits, your business will fail. If you are trying to make money from your website from advertising but no one ever sees your ads, it won’t matter where you put the ad on the site, on top, in the middle, on the side, cover the whole page, it doesn’t matter. It’s irrelevant.
Because what is relevant is how many people do you have coming to your store, which in the case of the Internet, your website.
And how many of those people are interested in what you offer? How many people are willing to actually spend their money? (In the case of Youtube, the traffic is there, but are the people actually willing to part with their money? no evidence of that so far!)
Marketing is marketing and a business is a business, even on the Internet.
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