Building An Online Business For Long-Term
I’ve been buying and reading (a bit lesser than buying) books and ebook right now.
It got to me to think about the things that you can do online to make money. But something really struck me is that, is it to make money now or is to make money in the long run.
Maybe too hyped up with the power of the Internet, when it comes to the Internet, people want to make money fast. Not there’s anything wrong with that, but it takes you away from thinking long-term.
There’s nothing wrong about making money quick, making money now, as long as you also think about where it will take you in the long-run.
Normally, you are thinking …
“Hey you can make money with CB and Adwords”
“Hey, there’s a new way to make money with Adsense”
“Hey, you can sell leads instead”
“Wow, this guy is making a killing with co-registrations”
“Hey, it’s faster to just spam the internet”
“Hey, I can make money selling ebooks”
“Hey, I can get other people to write my ebook”
“Maybe I should be doing Bum Marketing”
“What you can make money with Squidoo, MySpace and YouTube?”
When you look at those thoughts again … those are today thoughts.
My friend who does “junk-sites” for Adsense recently has his web hosting account suspended. The web hosting said that he’s building “link-farms.” The sites with the web hosting contributed about $500 per month. Maybe not much … but still, it made me thinking.
I myself used to have websites ranked in the first page of Google, MSN and Yahoo that brought in thousands of visitors per day. Now, it’s no where to be found.
And doing Adwords, I’ve heard stories where you were doing so good, and then the page penalty came and the campaign is no longer profitable. What used to be a money-maker is now a money-sucker.
What ever you are doing right now, maybe it’s time for you to think about where it will take you in the long-run. Will this “fad” will still be around next year, or five years from now. Or you think that you’ll be dead then that you don’t really need to think about it?
List builders and list owners are too (sometimes) trapped in this.
Most of the times you have to think about what else you can promote. What product I can create. And this goes on month after month …
So what is the solution to this problem?
Before I tell you what I think, I want you to know that I am currently in this situation as well. So writing this is not only for you (my readers), but also as a reminder to myself. So that I will focus more on long-term business, and not to just follow the current money making fads.
Anyway … here goes …
One thing that you can do is to build good, solid, user-generated content websites. Yes, this is difficult. In another term, you need to build community. This solves the problem of relying other sources for traffic. You need to promote for initial traffic. But as the community grows, and the brand grows, people will keep coming.
Building a community or a user-generated content website, that’s a whole different strategy to talk about. But at this point, let me just put the idea out. The details, nitty-gritty on how to make work, let’s save that for another discussion.
Here’s another idea. Start a subscription-based web application. This is something like a paying MyBlogLog so you can see your blog statistics real-time. Yes, again, it’s not easy. It’s not like “generating” 1000 spam sites in a second. But maybe the ebook Getting Real from 37 Signal can help. But if you can pull this off, and create an application that really hooks people in, you secure yourself a very long online revenue.
This is not like a membership site that just have info in them. Most membership sites that I see don’t really have good content at all. And most membership sites are suffering from members dropping off everyday. If you have a good luanch, you may start-off with a good income … but sooner or later, you’ll see the money dwindle.
When I started a discussion about this with my friend, he said, “Maybe you should just stick with the evergreen business.” Evergreen business?
He explained, “web hosting, designing, copywriting, and the rest … people will always need this kind of services.” And I can’t agree more. Right now I am thinking of the Web Design Business Kit from Sitepoint.com.
So what else you can do?
Here’s one more … invest the money somewhere else. If you can make money fast, and you can make money now, then make it. Like I said, there’s nothing wrong with that. But for long-term sake don’t forget to invest it somewhere else.
You can put it in real estate, mutual funds, or even start another business. Maybe you can use it to fund your online evergreen business. Or use it to fund your community project.
Now you tell me … what else can we do?
