Best keeping secret about online business is that it is waste of time and money.
by Dr. Leonid Sakharov
Entrepreneurship online is a waste of time and money.
You are searching web to find out possibilities to make some
extra money. Most likely bet that one time you will open the
page with claim that the secret how to do decent money can be
revealed to you for quite moderate price like 10 or 50 backs.
Being very frustrated with previous experience you could buy
the e-book or real book or membership or something else to do
at last right move. What this secret information most possible
will be about? That you can sell the secret how to make money
on Internet too. And as soon you yourself bought such product
it means that there is no fraud. Every small fishes online are
selling such kind of information each other. Almost nothing else.
And this almost is so small that we can put it aside for these remarks.
What could be successful Internet business? You already know
all of them. Successful specific online businesses are intermediates
between sellers and buyers. Between job seekers and employers,
individual antique sellers and collectors, software sellers and
buyers, travel planners and hotels, stock and currency sellers.
Necessary condition is large number of participants - hundreds
of thousands. Internet is mostly chaotic market place but not
an avenue of stores. A human nature is responsible for this situation
- peoples tend to do impulsive purchases in real stores because
of falling in love from first sign with some nice gadget. Online
the magic of touching and trying is not presented. The same as
there is an absence of a pleasure of chatting with nice store girls.
What you can sell on Internet as an ordinary or even extraordinary
person? Something else that you cannot to put out of your front
door but that has a value? Even more difficult question? What
you can produce periodically so unique helpful that in necessitate
to sell this product all around of globe? Something that you
neighbors already bought from you and you are sure that everybody
else will buy it as soon as will see. Do you have this it? If
the answer is yes - go to Internet and you will be billionaire
very soon. If not forget about residual income from online business.
I will explain catches of most popular but illusive plans.
Affiliate partnerships. Idea is quite reasonable. You have a
traffic on you website and placing the advertisement for others
business products on it. You visitors could want to go to check
products and if they will buy them you will have part of price.
Absolute honest and legitimate scheme. Every information services
are selling advertisement place or time. The weak link here is
traffic. Let's estimate what is the average number of hits for
one page. Note that numbers here are fluid. So. Google is indexing
8 billion pages, all population on the globe is about the same.
Active Internet users about 5% of all. So if we will say that
per one potential Internet customer there are twenty pages the
mistake are not too great. It means that if every computer user
will randomly look at 20 pages every day the every existing page
will has one hit per day. Only one. To my experience it sounds about right.
So everything about online business focuses on traffic. Traffic.
Traffic. Traffic. How to get big fat healthy traffic. No way.
You have to present valuable, unique and often requested information
to be popular. What it could be? News, search service, reference.
Nothing of above is can be developed by one person or even by
small team. You have nothing to offer to crowd. Accept it.
Traffic generators. There is very funny activity online. Desperately
entrepreneurs who out of hope for naturally driven customers
gathering under one roof to stroke each other backs. The idea
is to exchange visits. Technically there are different solutions
but all of them are about it. I will see your page - you will
come to mine. To my estimation there are about 25 thousands of
such traffic hungry businesses and they migrate from one place
that offer such service to another. Visits from the same poor
things obviously will not significantly increase sales. Nothing
more then fooling yourself. You need only customers who are looking
for your products not one is in need to sell something to you.
E-mail campaign. Not too much nice to say at all. In most cases
it's the best way to create enemies and looking for trouble.
I have about 200 bulk emails every day. Probably open one or
two per week. And take into account that I am very curious person.
Million e-mails probably bring you 100 visitors who will find
you site with search engines anyway.
Entrepreneurship online is a waste of time and money.
Originally submitted at Feb. Nov 15, 2004; 14:02
Unfortunately after many years I can only confirm the conclusion.
One way or another small player will be marginalized and pushed
out of money stream. Maybe there are few exceptions but in general
even talented programmer with unique product will be ignored
until sell himself to industry level organization. Too high money
barrier to enter market with broad advertisement campaign to be noticed.
And in addition to previous troubles now the is lots road blocks
tolls like certifications of different sorts. At first they create
backdoors to their software then they are fighting them by blocking
all third party software been treated equally. It is long story
deserved separate article.
Nov. 16, 2017; 18:49 EST