Starting an EBusiness? Don’t Do This…

I accept small projects when it’s to my advantage and when I think I can do something for the entrepreneur. Recently I faced a tough call.

In this case it was a company I’ve worked with in the past that wanted me to optimize a site for Google that they had designed. The owner of this site wanted to try out his business idea.

I looked at the site and told my friend – it won’t work. The idea was lame. SUPER lame… and the site was not well designed. The idea was not well thought through. There was a need for a site like this – but nobody would pay for the information like this owner wanted. Basically he wanted someone to pay him $25.00 if they had a question they needed answered about Thailand.

Now, it’s difficult to find good information in Thailand but, it’s not $25.00 difficult. In Thailand $25.00 can almost buy you breakfast for a month.

Anyway. So, I told them what I thought. He said the guy really wants to try it and see what happens. He said the owner was committed to pay me $300 per month for 3 months and he wanted to try it and see some results and then would continue from there.

I said honestly, “In 3 months there will be little to no results on the SEO/Google side of things.”

They didn’t care – the guy wanted me to try… I faced a moral dilemma because realistically, logically there would be no gains in 3 months. Pagerank might go up to 1 or 2. The site would be spidered, there would be a few people going there but not many from Google or Yahoo.

I decided to do it, since I made it crystal clear that nothing would happen on the SEO side. What else could I do? I can’t turn away cash – I’m not at that point yet. I could turn away cash for something immoral, but for something stupid – what I could do? This wasn’t my client. My client was the company calling me to fix it. They needed my help.

Long story short. I did all I could with the $300 they gave me over the first month. Two days ago the company told me – Oh, the owner isn’t putting any more money into this idea – he got no sales over this month at all.

Ha! Really? Was someone expecting sales within a month?

Wow. So, this is how not to start a business or even test an idea.

An idea needs time to get going. I have websites that have been germinating for 8 months now. It’s like they’re flowers waiting to sprout… they’re waiting for Spring… Internet Spring – which means – about 1 year.

Recently I saw big jumps in traffic to sites I’ve had for 2 years and 3 years. Nice jumps.

What I’m saying is… if you’re not going to put a ton of money into a site or idea to find out if it really works, then you MUST let it cook for a LONG TIME.

It’s one or the other. And, if you’re slow-cooking you need to be adding content, and optimizing the site over that year or two years.

The days of big success in less than 6 months are GONE for those without big cash reserves to finance it. Literally it’s not going to happen unless you win the lotto and you hit virally and blast off for pluto (which is not a planet anymore if you didn’t hear… lol).

There are so many people that have ideas and want to try them online.

There are so many people that don’t know HOW to go about it.

There are so many people that can use the EBusiness PRIMER 34 course here to learn everything they need to know to test their new business or idea and see if it’s going to work for them.

In this case the owner spent $300 on me + markup by the company + company cost to develop the site + copywriting + hosting + banner ads at other popular sites. He probably through away $1,000.

Instead, he could have spent much less than that on the EBusiness PRIMER 34 course and been able to do his own testing on many ideas from then on.

Oh wait, he blew $1,000. He could also buy the EBusiness PRO subscription for himself and both of these elearning courses for 2 of his best friends – all for about $1,000.

Don’t do what this guy did….