Your Successful Internet Based Business, Part II

Several posts ago (before I got distracted, which happens quite frequently) I wrote about the first “P” of staring a successful internet based business – Passion.

In case you haven’t yet read that post, you can find it here:

Your Successful Internet Based Business, Part I

As I promised, I’m picking back up today with the second “P” – Practicality.

So you’ve written down your list of interests, and identified the ones you’re really passionate about. The next step is to determine if the ideas that are left are practical.

By practicality, I mean simply this: Is there sufficient interest in the topic to get the attention (visitors) you need to turn it into a profitable business?

Or to put it even more bluntly: Does anyone else care about your interest?

Yeah, that’s pretty harsh, but let’s face it – if nobody else is interested in your subject matter, your website will just sit and collect dust. Oh, and it won’t make you any money, either.

Case in point: I’m passionate about Tzarist-era Russian history. It’s been a lifelong interst of mine, and I can tell you more about the dynamics of Tzars, Tzarinas and staretzes than you would probably ever want to hear. But frankly, there aren’t many people out there who would be willing to listen to me prattle on about the life of Tzar Nicholas II. Although there were about 22,000 searches last month on Google containing the word “Tzar,” most of them were conducted by people looking for cheats on the role playing game “Tzar: The Burden of the Crown.”

So low interest means few visitors, which translates to little or no income. If I wanted to create a site about Russian history to amuse myself and bore everyone else, fine, but I can’t turn it into a business.

There are a few free ways to see if a business idea is practical:

• Go to the Google Keyword Tool and enter some words and phrases related to your prospective topic. This tool will give you the number of people (both in your country and globally) who searched using related terms last month. The lower the number of searches, the smaller your potential audience.
• Go to Yahoo! Answers (or a similar site – there are thousands of these damned things)and search using the same terms. Are people asking questions related to your topic? If so, you might have hit on a good business. If not, it might be time to move on to the next idea on your list.
• Enter your terms into a simple Google search. Are there thousands of relevant pages about the topic? If not, people aren’t writing about it because there isn’t much of an audience.

Now, here’s the exception. In the highly unlikely event that there are tons of searches, but few existing pages, you may have just struck gold. You know, the whole supply and demand thing. You’re a lucky, lucky sod if that happens.

In the next post (unless I get distracted again), I’ll discuss the third and final “P” of building a successful internet based business. From an income standpoint (which should be important to you if you want to get out of debt), this is the most important “P” of all.