Making Decisions

As soon as you decide to start an Internet business, you have to start making decisions.

What kind of business (ie: what market to address)?
What kind of product or service do you want to offer?
What will you name your business?
What domain name will you choose?
Where should you register the domain (ie: what registrar)?
Where will you host your web-site?
Will you use Windows hosting or Linux hosting?
What version of HTML will you use for your web-site?
What other technologies will you use?
Will you use a CMS (content management system)?
Will you collect emails?
What should your privacy policy say?
How will you accept payment?
What words and images will you use to describe your product or service on your web-site?
Where will you advertise?
Will you use Google Adwords, Yahoo or Bing PPC advertising?
Will you advertise on Facebook, Twitter, MySpace or other social network sites?
Will you employ people to manage social network message other than advertising?
Will you submit articles to magazines, newspapers and other periodicals?
Will you advertise on billboards?
How about TV commercials?
Will you advertise on radio or in magazines?
Will you have a storefront?
Will you telemarket?
Will you use direct mail for advertising?
Will you localize your advertising efforts individually at the city level?

The number of decisions is dizzying. The most important decision you will ever make is to decide the basis for making all of the other decisions. Profitable businesses are run by people who know how to make profitable decisions. They know where to get information that is accurate and leads to a more profitable business.

They know that asking questions in forums is more likely to produce FALSE information than correct information. Why? Because profitable business owners aren’t hanging out in forums.

They know that reading books by profitable businessmen is better, but that there are even pitfalls in using this source of information. Often, authors, will write what they think will improve other’s perception of them rather than risk telling the brutal truth. It is just human nature.

Successful decision makers know that hiring a successful business person as a mentor or coach is a very GOOD idea. When money is changing hands and the relationship is private, there is a much better flow of accurate information.

The very best source of accurate information comes from observing WHAT successful people do, not what they say they do. This can sometimes be difficult. Successful businesses have a vested interest in keeping their successful practices private. However, they also HAVE to reach out to the public in their advertising efforts. It is this area that we can easily spy on successful businesses to get accurate answers to all of the above questions.

Our first step is to identify advertisers that are successful (ie: profitable) and separate them from those who are just blindly trying something new to see if it will work. That is easy. Just watch and see what ads rarely change. Those are the successful companies. The ones that only run for a few days and then change or completely go away are less profitable or unprofitable ads. They form your “control” group.

Study the ads themselves to find differences between the two groups. Tally up the numbers of each attribute that you want to study. Is the answer evenly distributed between the profitable and unprofitable businesses? Then your decision probably doesn’t matter very much. Just choose an option and get going.

If you find an attribute that is much more common among the profitable businesses than the unprofitable businesses, then you have your answer… assuming you would like to also own a profitable business. Do what the profitable businesses are doing.

Does it sound like a lot of work? It is. But there are services who are already doing this research and making the results available to you. In fact, we run just such a service.  We study hundreds of thousands of profitable and unprofitable web-sites and tabulate the data so you don’t have to do it yourself.

Once you have access to the data, you can make every single decision using the very best source of information… other successful businesses.