Club Veracity

There are a great many people who would like to quit their job and set up in business for themselves. This has always been the case I suspect, but the recent economic climate has made many aware of just how fragile their fiscal wellbeing can be if they are relying solely on a job. Simply put, there is very little corporate loyalty today. There is certainly no such thing, if in fact there ever was, as a job for life.

The growth of the web has made the work at home dream much more achievable for many. It allows you to market goods or services online, accessing the entire world as a potential marketplace. The costs associated with doing business online are, when compared with an old fashioned bricks and mortar operation, very minimal indeed. Instead of having to pay rent on a store, along with service bills, staff wages and, of course, the cost of physical stock, you can just set up a web presence and promote someone else’s goods as an affiliate without requiring to handle any stock, pay any rent, or employ any staff. You should budget for the cost of your web connection (which you may have anyway), the cost of purchasing a domain and the cost of web hosting. Over the course of a year that’s likely to be less than $100.

That is certainly a slightly simplified model, but not overly so. You will need to pick up some skills along the way – but there are plenty of free forums where this can be done.

All the same, it can be a daunting task. It’s easy to find reasons why you won’t be able to do it – but most of these can be readily overcome.

For example, one of the most frequently cited reasons why potential internet marketers either don’t start or give up in the early stages of their business development is because they are worried that someone is already doing what they want to do. They are concerned that someone else has cornered the market. In fact, if you look into selling a particular item online and learn that there is a high level of competition then this is an excellent indicator that you have located a viable market. It may be that the marketplace is saturated – but this is infrequently the case. There are very few instances where you need to be the first business into the market in order to succeed – and there are lots of real life business cases which we could use to illustrate this point.

One such example would be the Amazon Kindle ebook reader – no doubt one of today’s hot products. You might be forgiven for assuming, looking at Amazon’s current dominant position, that they have innovated and developed ebook readers from an early stage. And there’s little doubt, Amazon have brought the Kindle to market using some very clever methods, but they are, if anything, more than a little tardy to the party.

Amazon launched their original Kindle in November of 2007 some 8 years behind the Franklin ebook reader, widely held to be the first commercial scale ebook reader, was released in 1999. Today of course the Franklin device is no more and the Kindle, not the only ebook reader on the market by any means, is dominant. Amazon’s marketing and delivery has been superior to their competitors and that’s why they are setting the pace.

So, if you find a market with plenty of competition, don’t give up. Plenty competition simply means that the market is potentially profitable. It certainly doesn’t matter that you’re not first to market. You get rewarded for being better – and cleverer – than the competition, not for being early.