Coming up with an Idea

Posted by admin on Feb 16, 2010 in Blog | 9 comments

Before you can start your online business you need an idea.  You probably already know what interests you or where you expertise and skills are, so this it a good place to start.  Your chances of success are much greater if you develop a business around your skills and interests.

Brainstorming – The aim here is to get a list of ideas that you can work on, this can be done on your own and basically you generate a list of ideas based around your skills and interests.  Don’t over analyse at this point.  Once you have your list you need to evaluate them, its never a good idea to cling onto the first idea and equally if you have generated a large list of ideas you probably don’t want to do full analysis of all of them.  One important factor to establish is whether there is a market for your idea, if there isn’t, then it doesn’t matter how well you market the product, it will eventually fail.  When evaluating your idea, you need to answer a few important questions. 

1. Can you make money from it? Don’t get too emotionally attached to an idea, if you don’t think you can make money from it, then you probably wont. 
2. How much is each customer worth? Ideally you want to pick a product or service where you can establish a long term relationship with a customer, its much cheaper to sell to existing customers than finding new ones.  Check out the prices of products and services that are already on offer.
3. Can you describe what you are selling in a single sentence? In the online world you have limited space and time to attract the attention of your customers, so if you can’t communicate what your business is offering in one sentence, then you should wary of the idea.  If the customer doesn’t ‘get it’ then there is a pretty good chance that they won’t buy it.

There will be more to follow soon, thanks for reading.