An Internet Business is not for most people, is it for you?

Now I'm not trying to shower you with pessimism or discourage you from trying to build a business online, but I want to give you some insider knowledge coming from someone who's been here for four years (a century in web years :)).

Most internet businesses are marketing opportunities that fall into the network marketing category. These opportunities are grown by leaders who network business builders together who in turn recruit distributors. The leaders -who make up less than 3% of the downline on average- travel around continuously seeking to convert disgruntled career people and small business owners into networkers.

The lure is financial freedom and a carefree lifestyle. A very attractive prospect to a typical 9-5 guy or gal.

The prospective networker is brought in with nominal startup costs and promised they will too succeed as long as they "stay the course". The business' leaders continue their emotional blackmail by proclaiming that the only failure is giving up and that quitters will never amount to anything. Though they speak the truth in a general sense, there's more to the equation. The prospects are not taught how to market effectively and what costs and techniques are involved with advertising. They are also not prepared for the fact that they will be competing against each other in the struggle for leads. The marketer with better education and deeper pockets will win this struggle.

Personally I would say you need to be -at minimum- willing and able to invest $5000 and 6-12 months in both education and advertising to become profitable. Most people are simply not willing and/or able to do so and can't stomach spending that time and money before turning a profit. If it was any easier, we would have a very different divide between rich and poor today. It's not your fault or mine, but it's just the way it is.

Have people done it with less than 5K and 1 year in? Absolutely, but that is exception rather than rule. You have to ask yourself: Can I build my own website and landing pages that won't get Google slapped when I run a well-managed Pay-per-click campaign? Who is my avatar prospect and where can he or she be found surfing the web? Who is my competition? Do I know which keywords I should target and which to avoid? Do I know what goals I should set for conversion rates and how to balance my ad budget with my sales? Am I doing a good enough job converting traffic into optins, optins into sales, and sales into repeat sales? Is my social media building relationships or bugging people? Do I know where to outsource things such as article writing and submission to aid in your long term back-linking and SEO strategy?

Those are just a few of the questions that you should be asking yourself. If many of them didn't even make sense to you you're definitely not in the less-than-5K&1year category and you should prepare yourself with the proper investment of time and funds. Ignore this advice and risk losing your shirt!

If you're coming into the business with some money to spend and a comfort level with information technology you are ahead of the pack. If you are starting from scratch with little funds this will be an uphill battle, I'm not going to lie to you. You'll have to save up or borrow because you'll run out of money if you just "Jump into the Frey".

There you have it. My personal warning label for this industry for the average opportunity seeker shopping for a business to join. The big dogs in this business have their own products and if you want my honest opinion, any opportunity you work with should be secondary to creating and maintaining your own products.
Check my previous blog post for more on the topic of the "information product business". My blog is at http://workfornobody.com

That's it for now. Now get back to work! ;)
-Tiemen