If you are then you’re like me, you’ve launched hundreds of dot com’s over the years, some have been worthless, but you tried anyway, but some have done quite well and profited.

Either way, an essential part of starting any online business is research and planning.

A key difference with an offline business is that the internet is local, everything is local, and you can use any service or buy any product made by anyone anywhere in the world. It doesn’t matter.

Whereas with an offline business, it doesn’t matter much if the market you’re starting you business in is already saturated, because there might not be anyone doing it in a particular area.

So in my opinion, whatever it is that you’re starting, there’s a high chance that someone else is already doing it, and it’s accessible to and probably already being used by your potential customers already.

You really need to find these sites, bookmark them and asses them, work out their weaknesses, their strong points, and how you can make your product or service more attractive to the people already using your competitors services, and your potential customers.

Putting your service up online and marketing isn’t enough; you need to really have a good hook to bring users your way.

On top of that, marketing research is essential, as much as I like advertising on Google, it’s saturated with people overpaying for clicks now days, which is why I think their revenue from clicks has dropped recently, but that’s another topic.

Whatever your product or service is that you’re wanting to advertise, I guarantee you that there’s sites out there that offer free content, articles or some kind of community with traffic that are in the same niche as the customers that you’re after.

This is where you want to advertise, most of these sites already have Google ads on them, but you find you can often get a better rate by buying direct, not only that, try to establish a long term ongoing deal, or some kind of offering for the site to offer to their users, and you’ll find the marketing costs will start to drop and the traffic to your site increase more than that Google can offer per click for the same price.