On my forum rounds today I came across an interesting post by a user that had managed to purchase a great domain name. The natural problem that came with this was what to do with this domain name; a subject that many think would be planned weeks, months, even years in advance.

It seems that the myth of easy money on the Internet has spread like wildfire. Well, I have some bad news for you guys, running an online business is hard, just as hard as…an offline business!

These stories are as rare as rain in England. Millions of people climb into the Web Entrepreneurship ship, believing that it’s smooth sailing to a successful business. It’s true that an idea can get you far on the Internet, but the Internet is still bound by rules of commerce. It’s a lot harder than slapping a few ads on your web pages and a bit of SEO! I’ve devoted a number of hours to this website in my spare time and whilst my traffic is building my legitimate visitor count ranges from 3-5 visitors a day. Sure, I haven’t made any effort in promoting it, other than to use it in the URL field of the Blog’s I already comment on, but since a lot of my traffic comes from search engines content really is king for me, not commenting on dofollow blogs or finding dodgy ways of gaining back-links.

I’m sorry to break it to you, but there is no magic way of earning money on the Internet. People will try and feed you secrets and advice that apparently no one else knows, along with articles on how they earned five billion dollars a second by putting one link on Digg, but the truth of the matter is that running an online business requires a lot of work in all areas of the website life-cycle.

If you want a successful web business first and foremost you’ll need a website. If you’ve never made a website before then don’t even attempt to try and create a site for commercial use yourself. Without experience and knowledge of security your website will be up in flames the second a hacking bot comes across your page. Get yourself a Web Designer and Developer to create the page for you, ones that you feel you can trust and ones that you feel will do the job you tell them to. Once this is done you can either ask the same people or hire someone to promote your website, ranging from building back-links, mailing lists, advertising campaigns, etc. After this your side will come in and the content and functionality will need to come from your ideas. If you’re creating an online shop and you have the software and CMS in place then you need to get the items put on the shop. From then on it’s smooth sailing and endless maintenance.

This ideal situation will only work if you’ve already got this all planned. You need a strict Business Plan and Cash Flow Projection to ensure that this idea will even work and become profitable, as most people pour resources into an online business to get very little in return. Much like a real business your online business needs careful planning and research. You need to find the balance between deploying at the right time for the market and the right time to ensure your business will actually work.

If you wish to be an Internet Entrepreneur you need to do a lot of thinking, because this business is no longer about who can get there first. All the easy ideas have been taken and to stick around on the Internet you need to be sure that you can profit. Come up with a large Business Plan and Cash Flow Projection, do your research, and when it all comes down to making it hire people you can really trust to get the job done.