To answer these questions I always ask a few of my own. The first thing you have to get into your head is that you will never be able to be the next Amazon or the next Walmart online. Those are battles you do not want to be involved with. Instead there are plenty of other opportunities that you can explore that are not as competitive.
When starting a new business I try to find an area that first interests me. The reason is because I want to make sure that I am passionate about growing it. If I am interested in it, it will hold my interest. If I have no interest, doing the work that it requires to dominate will seem overwhelming and become a burden.
Now the next one is even more important than the first. I have to make sure that I do some homework on the niche or products carried to see who is dominating the market. A few quick keywords into Google will show you who ranks for those particular products. I then take a separate sheet of paper and write down each site and start to evaluate these sites. If they are poorly constructed and weakly marketed then I can get excited. This has to be in addition to my interest factor. I will not start a site that I am very interested in but the competition is way to tough and wisely optimized. Its is an exercise in futility. Both factors have to be there or its on to the next topic. Taking your time here is where the details get exposed.
I once decided to market a friend’s site for him. His site was so poorly optimized that he could only go up. It was the typical story, someone sold him a beautiful website that was almost non functional according to the search engines. It did not even have title tags. As I dug a little deeper I realized that even though the site was 4 years old, it badly needed almost everything in regards to optimization. He only relied on Pay Per Click advertising so his organic results were non existent.
The real excitement began when I looked at his competitors. I stood in awe as I discovered that not one of his competitors sites were done well. No title tags, no meta tags, no keywords, no plan and no direction. How could this be? These are big companies making very big money but without any direction in their online presence. I realized very fast that this was going to be so dramatic that the fun would be in watching his site rise to the top of the rankings. Destroying the competition was going to be like shooting fish in a barrel, and it was.
Now, does this happen all the time? Not really, but there are plenty of hidden gems out there that are just dying to be discovered. When you put the interest factor and combine it with the competitor factor you will eventually find a winner.
The best place is to start on paper. Use the internet for ideas. I love to use Ebay for product ideas since Ebay tells you what products are the hot products for that month. That’s right, they take a lot of the work out of the process for you by telling you what products are great sellers and which ones are not. I then take those products and look for regular websites selling them and go from there. Strategy is much more fun when you have a plan.
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