For many business areas, the Internet has set a new standard and changed the playing field. To take advantage, you need a site. But where do you start?

Web Sites'In The Beginning

Your first thoughts regarding a web site are guaranteed to be misplaced. If you have a current business you want to create a site for, you are viewing it using techniques you have developed in the brick and mortar world. If you have decided to start an entirely new business on the web, you are probably brainstorming about potential ideas. If you want to avoid wasting time and money as well as major frustration, you need to understand that both approaches are simply, utterly, truly wrong! Well, most of the time.

If you can accept that statement, you will avoid the mistakes millions of small and huge businesses have made. You don't want to be like that frustrated person you met at some party who got killed on the web. As difficult as it will be, you must accept the fact you understand nothing about e-commerce. If you can check your ego and opinion at the door, you are half way to making profits. Assuming you haven't hit the back button, let's talk about the key issue.

There is one word to memorize if you want to have a successful site - Research. Don't worry, it isn't difficult to do. Imagine if you could find out what all the people in your city think of when they have a problem your business can solve? Imagine you new the exact phrases they thought of most often. The information would be worth more than its weight in gold. Far more. On the web, you can get this information.

The most important step you, I or any other person will take in starting a site is first determining if we should! To let the cat out of the bag, there are more than a few industries that don't do well on the web. The business just doesn't translate well or people prefer to touch the product or talk to the person. Wouldn't you hate to spend thousands of dollars or a couple hundred hours working on a site only to find out there is no interest on the web? It would be maddening, not to mention putting macaroni and cheese front and center in your diet.

The best way to deal with this issue is to use a site called Wordtracker. Wordtracker is a brilliant, cheap program. You enter a keyword, click and it tells you all the phrases being used in searches that include that keyword. It also tells you how many searches occur for each keyword phrase in a 24 hour period. Do you realize the value of that?

Assume you have an existing business that sells purple balloons for weddings. You are budgeting a bunch of time or money to have a site built. Having read this article, you go to Wordtracker and do a test for 'purple balloons.' You find out there are only 50 total searches a day for all possible keyword phrases. You now know the site isn't worth pursuing. Unlike most businesses, you've saved a lot of money and a lot of time.

Large and small businesses have crashed and burned on the Internet because they never took the time to figure out if there was a market for their product or service. Now we know you aren't going to make the same mistake.