To partner or not to partner

Consider starting your first online business with a partner. Having someone there to help with everything can make a huge difference. They'll think of things you missed and you'll think of things they missed.

It can also help reduce the financial risk and give you a bigger marketing boost right from the beginning. Let's say it costs you $200 to get your eBusiness up and rocking. Well, if at the very beginning you and you partner each put in $500 to get started that means, after paying the $200 for the site, you'll have $800 to put into marketing. If spent properly, (check out our online advertising guides later in the course) that money will go a long, long way.

If you start the business yourself and put in $500 you'd only have $300 left for marketing.

It's also just a lot of fun to share the experience with someone else. Bouncing ideas off each other, researching products, creating content, etc... Having someone there with you can be a big advantage when starting your own web business.

Finding and filling a niche

Regardless of whether you end up going with a retail, advertising based, or forum based business model, you're going to want to make sure that your web business creates or fills a special niche. This is one of the biggest keys to success for an online business.

Think about it for a second. What's going to happen if you decide to start a business that sells all types of books online? You're going to get crushed by Amazon.com. There's just no way you can compete with them.

Or what will happen if you try to create your own online auction site like eBay? You guessed it, the exact same thing. These areas are filled by billion dollar companies with $100 million marketing budgets that have been doing what they are doing for close to a decade.

But, remember above when I said to start a web business around something you love? Let's keep going with the example above and say that thing was chocolate. You'd be infinitely more likely to succeed with a retail website that sold books about chocolate and only books about chocolate.

You could carve out a niche in that area and be successful at it. You could make yourself a chocolate book expert and become the leading source of information for books about chocolate. Don't think there are enough books about chocolate to make it worth your while?

Just go to Amazon.com and do a book search for "Chocolate" there are thousands of results from chocolate cookbooks to chocolate history books, to fictional books centered around chocolate.

We're not saying that if you are passionate about chocolate the best way to go is to open a bookstore selling books about chocolate, but rather to show you that if you are going to open a bookstore, you have to fill or create a niche to succeed.

If you're going to open up a retail site and you love chocolate, maybe you could create a website that sells earth-friendly (organic, fair trade, shade grown) chocolate. There's a niche.

A great way to find a niche to fill is to look for a void on the web. If you've ever said to yourself "Why doesn't somebody make a website that _____" then that blank is a great place to start thinking about creating a web business in. Three of the six web businesses I have started have been started by me saying that very thing and then being like "Well, why don't I do it!?"

Okay, so as you read and learn more about the three different business models be sure to keep the three things we just discussed in mind: starting a business around something you're passionate about, possibly teaming up with a partner, and filling a niche that isn't currently being filled (or isn't adequately being filled).