Your Online Business Sucks!

You know what, people come up to me telling their online business ideas. They want to know what I think. With the first sentence of their idea, I know that it can’t do well.

OK, I am not trying to shoot people down … if you really think that you can do it, then ignore my ‘wisdom’ and go ahead with your idea.

Before I tell you about what’s wrong with most ideas I hear these days, let me tell you my approach to starting your own online business. And let’s make it even more interesting.

Let’s take away Adwords, Overture, Digg, Technorati, MySpace, eBay, Tag & Ping, Blog & Ping … and anything else that you can use to drive traffic to your site in the ‘modern’ Internet.

Let’s just say that you are down to websites, forums and emails.

People always tell you to take a look at the ‘keyword demand’. Well, I am not going to go there. For me, the numbers in keyword tools are just guideline. When you think about your business idea, just open your eyes and look around. If you see there are demand, then there probably is.

And then, take a look at competition. Are there competitions around? Taking a look at competitions does not mean that your looking for ‘deal breaker.’ But rather you are trying to find out what people have been doing. Here are a few things that you need to ask yourself when looking at competitions:

• Are they doing well?
• If they are doing well, how can you compete with them? How will yours be different?
• If they aren’t doing well, why? What makes you think that you can do any better? Maybe your chosen market is a dried well?

So what’s wrong with most business ideas I hear lately?

Let me give you an example …

“I have these PLR ebooks and I want to find JV partners.”

Why would people want to JV with you when you only have PLR products? If you approached me, I would rather get the PLR myself and sell them direct to my list. This way I would earn 100% of the cut.

The way I look at it, when you want to start your own online business, you have to do something special, something people would like to share around, spread the words for you.

It can be something new. If it’s not something new, something different. If it’s not different, something that comes with extra stuffs. If there’s no extras, maybe delivered in a different way.

When there’s nothing special about your site, guess what? Nobody’s coming … or at least, nobody stays. And sooner or later, your business will die.

Do you know what people call this? It’s USP … unique selling proposition. I don’t want to start off with that cliche. So that is why I start off like I did here.

When their business is not doing well, and they ask me that question again, “I have these PLR ebooks but I can’t find JV partners …”

Guess what? The problem is not with the JV partners that you are approaching. It’s not with the quality of the PLRs. Maybe it’s the whole business idea itself!

Sometimes people are just too caught up with the trend that they ignore the whole business strategy. PLR, membership sites, Joomla, Adwords, Wordpress … do you know that all of those are just tools.

Put all that away and start thinking about how you can grow your business. Rather than cracking your head whether to use WordPress or TypePad, maybe you should be thinking a lot more on what people want to read, the writing style you want to use, how to get more people to your blog and other more critical issues.

If you think you can start a membership site by just stuffing PLR products in there, that is also available else where, then think again. Or maybe you are cracking you head whether to use Script A or Script B. What you really should be thinking is about the content that you can deliver in your site, what kind of value can you give, what would make them stay a lot longer.

Maybe you should go back and take a look at competitions. Learn from them, adapt to your own business model, squeeze those creative juice out of your head.

Since you are here, at the end of this article, here’s an assignment, take a look at your business again and do a little assessment.