Most Internet Businesses Fail Many people are in a rush to build thinking they are ready to cash in on the next gold mine. A ton of money changes hands on the Internet, yet most Internet businesses fail. Why? People think they can make something rather large that is pretty good. Logic such as “If I can make a dollar a day off each page and have 200 pages, I would not need to work.”
The low cost of content creation can lead to poor document quality. If you say one incorrect thing, you may lose the trust of a prospective customer—sometimes for life. Making information that just turns out to be clutter rarely makes for a long-term, successful website. If you don’t have passion for what you do, it is much harder to be successful in a completely open environment, especially if workers who have a lower living cost in third world countries can easily duplicate your work.
Long-Term Investment Strategy
Editor and MarketWatch correspondent Bambi Francisco asked Mike Moritz of Sequoia Capital how he chooses what companies to invest in. He replied, “It’s the idea that the founders are doing something that they think is useful for themselves, And, then, eventually perhaps, coincidentally, perhaps accidentally, they discover that the product or service that they have built because they wanted to use something like this is that of great interest to lots of other people.” If you create something you enjoy that is exceptionally useful, you stand a good chance of being successful.
Cutting Through Clutter
Numerous people have asked me to promote their ‘clutter’ sites. The correct answer has been no, no, and no. The whole reason search has become such a successful market is because it helps people cut through the clutter. Each page on a website already has billions of alternatives a click or two away. Each page is important. The most important thing to do is focus on a specific niche—something you are truly interested in.
Be Useful
Many successful websites are successful because they are syndicated. There are many ways you can work to get your site syndicated, but an often overlooked ‘trick’ is to simply be the most useful site in your niche. Amazon is successful because they built features that make it more useful than most other shopping sites. They added value to their product or service by allowing user feedback, related suggestions, used book sales, and the “so you want to” collection guides to their pages.
Own a Niche
Chartreuse explained his theory on participating in a niche market: You can’t create a site about what’s going on in the plastic industry unless you learn how they think. You gotta pick up some trade papers. Talk to some people inside. So that when you do create you will be authentic and loved. So that you get it. You can’t be ____ing pedestrian and set up a site and hope they will come. They may visit but they won’t come back. And if they don’t come back you have lost.
Be Trustworthy
Webmasters, site users, directory editors, and search engines may look for things like a privacy policy or a physical address as signs of quality. In Beyond Algorithms: A Librarian's Guide to Finding Web Sites You Can Trust, Karen G. Schneider highlighted many things she looked for in a trustworthy site, which included:
1. Availability
2. Credibility ‘
3. Authorship
4. External Links
5. Legality
Tragedy of the Commons & Being Worthy of a Subscription
The Tragedy of the Commons is a story based upon farmers sharing a plot of land, with each owning a few too many cows. As the land exceeds its usable capacity, each farmer fights back by adding a few more cows. Eventually the land is destroyed.
Nothing of value can be universally accessible and free.
Since it costs virtually nothing to create information (or have a machine generate code for you), a lot is lost on the web if we trust everything we read. As more and more information is created, more and more unoriginal information is duplicated. It gets to the point where sorting through the mess becomes more than most people desire to do. This is part of the reason why people use and trust search engines
so much. It also reinforces the value of the best channels in a marketplace. The solution to the information overload problem is to be so remarkable and interesting that you capture the attention of the audience. RSS and newsreaders (such as Bloglines, Google Reader, and FeedDemon) make it easy for people to subscribe to select news channels or websites while blocking out redundant or useless noise. If you cover a news topic that is saturated, you may want to use a news reader to help you organize your news and get the scoop on the latest news as it happens. The people who are subscribing to RSS feeds are also the most likely to be people who comment on the contents of those sites, and write other sites that can link at your site. If you can figure out a way to get those people to desire to give you their attention, you quickly and cheaply reach the most influential voices.
Controlling Costs and Leveraging
Exposure If you have a high attention portion of your site that is hard to monetize you can still leverage the value and trust associated with that section of your site without offending your regular readers. Some search algorithms heavily weigh domain related authority scores. If you find yourself in a position of great authority, but fear losing your market position by placing too many ads or too much lower quality content in your main channel, then you can create a static part of the site of lower quality that is more aggressively monetized while still keeping your high authority channel noise free. Some content management systems also allow you to change page layouts based on content age, such that you can monetize archive content more aggressively than new content.
Tagging Search Results
Both Yahoo! and Google allow users to sign into accounts and search. Searchers can also tag, or label, the results. Readers might tag my site using seo, search, or seo blog.
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