Are You Looking for a New Online Business
Posted On: 2010-03-25
Here is a little tip for anyone who wants to break into a very lucrative mainstream area that's almost completely untapped.
Of course you will have to be able to deal with people who are not all that Internet savvy and you will be dealing with some other people who are going to be rather angry. There will be lots of confusion, lots of drama, lots of headaches and you will probably need a good supply of sedatives to get you through each day ... but you could make quite a bit of money and quite a few friends too.
And what is this wonderfully rewarding job that few people are doing? It's something I call website crisis management. Yep, if you get into this line of work you're going to be dealing with people who have forgotten to renew their domain names, people who have been totally ripped off by web designers, people who have been totally screwed by their hosts and people who are sick of dealing with those who simply cannot deliver on their promises.
And there really is such a huge market out there just waiting to be exploited ... and I use that term in the nice, friendly, technical sense. I certainly do not use it in the sense of screwing these people even more. In the last few days my little business that's tucked away in a fairly quiet part of the country has been approached by quite a few people from all over who are in desperate need of help.
We have had site owners who are basically being held hostage by the people who designed their websites and who refuse to give them such basic things as ftp details, hosting logins and even access to their own analytics accounts.
Then there have been a couple of people who can't get their designer to finish their websites ... they've paid thousands of dollars for a website but months (and in one case it's actually years) later the site is still not finished. Or they've paid big money to have someone manage a shopping site for them but it takes six months to get any changes made.
There's also been someone who forgot to renew their domain names for some very important sites while another called to see if we could fix a problem where they had transferred their domain names to a new Registrar only to find that the old Registrar had regained control and then no one got the renewal reminders in their email.
Of course, if you want to work with people like that you're going to have to be incredibly patient and willing to explain to people why some inexplicable things happen online. You're also going to have to deal with people who paid the first designer thousands of dollars for rubbish but they then only want to pay you peanuts to fix the problems.
And sometimes you'll probably have to give some very valuable advice away for free just so they'll come back to you when they need more fixes applied to the shoddy work that others have performed for them. That can be hard because there's no guarantee that they will come back ... but most do because they remember that you're the guy who got all their traffic back with just a few lines of code.
And you will also end up with friends who will want to tell others about you. When you fix a website problem that no one else has either been bothered to fix or knew how to fix the site owners are going to be impressed and when they're impressed they will tell others about you and how good you are.
That's when you begin to discover just how incredibly effective and positive word-of-mouth advertising can be and your opposition will begin to discover just how incredibly destructive and negative it cam be for them.
Of course, it can be very hard work and very stressful at times as you try to deal with others who want to get between you and your goals ... but as I said earlier, it can be financially rewarding.
Well I guess you don't really have to read between the lines to know what Steve and I have been up to over the last few days. In fact that's about all we seem to have done since Sunday and here it is, lunchtime on Thursday, and we're both very weary ... but we've got some great orders to rebuild a bunch of websites over the next couple of weeks.
So there you have it if you're looking for a new and interesting online business to get into. Just be ready to experience periods when you will have almost uncontrollable urges to tear your hair out.