Every millionaire’s wealth seeds from an initial idea, Mark Zuckerberg only set up Facebook as a means to interact with other Harvard students, he could never have foreseen the future success of the site.
The internet provides a platform for individuals or companies to trade goods or information relatively inexpensively. These reduced overheads result in more competitive prices for consumers which is one of the reasons why consumers are turning their backs on high-street shops for the online arena.
The idea is paramount to the success of any successful site, there are many ways in which it can be conjured up.
Perhaps you already have the idea – If the you already have an idea you are one step ahead of the majority of people, everyone would like to make a million off the web, not everyone has the initial idea to make this happen.
e-ifying current tasks – The most successful web start-ups are those that are electronic versions of current activities, for example social networking is “e-ifying” socialising, eBay is an “e-ified” auction, there is are gambling sites, shopping sites, travel agents, the list is endless. The most successful sites are “e-ified” day to day activities. To come up with an idea under this category, keep a log of everything you do in x-number of days. Review this log and see which things cannot currently be done online, see if there is a way of “e-ifying” the task.
Saving the user time - This is closely related to the previous point. “E-ified” sites save the user time. Users are always looking to save time; any chore that can have its duration reduced will be a success. Sites like confused.com retrieve quotes for users, these sites make the majority of their income by the insurance companies paying them commissions for referrals.
Providing Information – To some extent use of books for regular retrieval of information has become redundant. Many users now rely on search engines to find information. Users can now use a search engine to search millions of sites rather than look in one book. Money is made from these sites by advertising and affiliate marketing, some sites also use subscriptions but this is slowly reducing. Informative sites can be broadly defined in two categories, static and dynamic. Static sites provide information in plain text; dynamic sites include forums or suchlike where users can ask for assistance. Everybody has their own specialist subjects which someone in the world is looking for. To determine your specialist subject for an informative site, ask yourself if you were on a game show (e.g. mastermind), what would be your specialist subject. The answer to this question is usually answered by the user’s profession or interests.