I remember back in the late nineties during the dot com boom. A friend of mine was in the website design and website hosting business (and still is for that matter). He constantly had people coming to him with ideas for websites. The common thread was that he would do all the work building and hosting the site and the other party would supply the idea. They would be 50/50 partners. What a fantastic deal!
Creative Commons License photo credit: HVX Silverstar

Unfortunately, these ideas suffered from the Field of Dreams’ “Build it and they will come” mentality. 10 years ago, there may have been some truth behind that mentality. As far as today goes – FOGET ABOUTIT! It’s more like – build it, market the hell out of it while building it, continue marketing the hell out of your site afterwards, researching new ways to market your site, and – oh yeah – part of your marketing plan needs to include spending real money to get your site going (I wonder has anyone used the term “internetworking” for marketing web based businesses?).

With the success of sites like Facebook, Youtube, and more, many people are still coming up with great ideas for internet businesses. And god bless ‘em. And those people still come to people like me and my friend (who have some html knowledge) with great ideas for web-based businesses; however, with web-based businesses beginning to resemble brick and mortar businesses more and more (especially in terms of initial capitalization), I have to ask the idea-men and women, “Are you willing to back that idea with a few grand or more in cold hard cash?” If not, then “are you willing to wait 5-10 years while you constantly promote the site through free methods of internetworking to get the site off the ground?”

My advice is – instead of constantly pumping out new sites, why not focus on those websites that have already taken off the ground? I’m guilty of the insatiable urge to develop a website every time I come up with a new idea as well. I keep coming back to the idea that if I just converted another 0.5 – 1.0% of the visitors that come to my best site, I could make another grand a month. Perhaps I should be focusing on my cash cow and trying to milk that a little bit more?

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