Online marketing provides a couple of very important advantages for entrepreneurs.
First, it\’s an open opportunity. It\’s not a free opportunity and it\’s not an easy opportunity. You will have to invest money in an Internet business — you\’ll have to buy a domain, pay for a host, pick up educational material, and perhaps even pay for advertising, coding and design — and you\’ll have to work hard to build the site and promote it. But anyone can learn how to do it, and anyone with patience and determination can do it.
But second, and no less importantly, it\’s also a place where you can fail fast.
That\’s one of the most vital, and overlooked, aspects of success. For every good idea, for every launch that flies into the stratosphere, you\’re going to have a dozen that struggle to get off the ground. You\’ll be left wondering whether it\’s worth pouring in more cash or pushing in a different direction, or letting it drop and starting again.
In the world of bricks-and-mortar, that process can take a while. If you\’ve opened a real store, you\’ll have inventory to get rid of, a store front to deal with, of course, loans to pay back. All of that can take months, and cost a small fortune.
Online, you can stop working on the site any time you want.
And it happens to the biggest companies and the biggest projects. Over the last few years, we\’ve seen Google give up on its referral program, a kind of affiliate service that was never popular with publishers. Yahoo\’s Publisher Network, AdSense\’s biggest and most promising direct rival, faded away with the search company recommending that its publishers use Kontera\’s units instead. And smaller services, like ContextCash, another contextualized ad system, died altogether.
None of those systems lasted more than a few years and some of them were multi-million dollar ventures. If companies the size of Google and Yahoo can launch promising ventures and see them collapse shortly thereafter, then you shouldn\’t be surprised if the same thing happens to you.
Online though, you can spot that failure quickly, walk away and start building again – this time with success.