Eric Edelstein

A friend who lives overseas, (lets call him W), got into a discussion with me on skype the other day. He’s been in IT for a number of years, and has considerable experience in fixing networks, and managing vast amounts of computers. But does he have business experience, a track record, his own financing etc. Unfortunately not.

So W has been wanting to break away from the RAT RACE for years now. A few months ago when I was overseas, I outlined a number of steps that W should do to start generating a small second income using the Internet. I showed him a simple model - one detailed by Brett Tabke from Webmasterworld - that would allow anyone to have a small successful Internet business in a year.

Basically, write a few new pages of fresh high quality content every week on a subject you were passionate about, and spend a year finding high quality sites in your niche to link to you. In a year, you should have traffic from the search engines, traffic from the sites linking to you, and with the site being monetized by sponsors, cpm advertisers, affiliate programs, or the highly relied upon adsense (or more recent YPN - yahoo’s answer to adsense) you’d have a second income, which with time, should allow you to be able to quit the job and live a life on your terms.

Of course, there are many pitfalls in the model, with the biggest one being if you fall out of the search engines for a number of reasons. Nevertheless, the most important part of the excercise in my mind, is that you acquire the skills necessary to launch bigger and better Internet models. This model allows you to spend a year understanding how to set up a domain, your website, how to write content, how to get links, how the Search Engines work, how to monetize the traffic etc. It gets you a basic understanding of the Internet.

Obviously it’s hard work writing fresh content all the time, learning all the skills (how to set up a domain, how to set up a site (no matter how bad the design), understanding the advertising side, and so most people, even if you give them the blueprint, will have quit the project long before the first year ends.

W has set up a site, and although he’s not writing fresh content or linking nearly as much as he should be, his mind is now thinking of new Internet ideas.

So this week, he had an idea for a 2.0 site - a simple idea which sounded good, and with a small amount of work could be a nice business which could be run while he was lying in his deck chair in the caribbean.

But he hadn’t researched. When I asked him who else was playing in the space, and who his competitors were, his answer was “a few years back, when he had looked for similar sites, nothing was really out there.”

Sure W - the Internet is evolving faster than the speed of light.

When you come up with an idea, there’s no use thinking what used to be - you need to see what’s available NOW, and even try find out what’s happening in the future (although I totally understand that if you’re not in this space that’s next to impossible).

However, as a start, go to google, and spend a few hours searching:
1. for sites in your industry
2. for sites in other industry’s that do exactly what you want your site to do

For one thing, you’ll find out who your current competitors are, but just as important you’ll find features and ideas for your site that you hadn’t thought of yet.

Don’t rely on google or the other search engines as your only avenue for research. Many new players with large budgets, aren’t in the engines yet - look for them advertising in traditional media - that’s right - Not on the Internet, but offline - posters, TV, radio, magazines.

Speak to people in the industry you are intending to go into and find out everything you can.

Research is essential…

it doesn’t only allow you find your competitors, but gives you a huge advantage in the next step…THE PLAN