Sunday, November 15, 2009

Is Your Home Business A House Of Cards?

We all like to think that our home businesses are as solid as a rock. But what about yours? Is it REALLY as solid as you think it is or is it just a house of cards?

It's difficult for us to realistically look at our business model and determine if it's solid or not. That's where this article comes in. It's going to force you to take a good hard and long look at your business model. Hopefully, by the time you're done doing that, you'll have a pretty good idea of whether or not it's solid or a heartbeat away from crumbling to the ground.

The best way to do this is with an example. Do you remember the Made For Adsense sites of the early part of this decade? Marketers were making a killing with them, if you recall. Then what happened? Google decided that all these crappy sites (and yes, they were crappy) were worthless and put an end to them. They got removed from the SEs and all of the income dried up overnight. I won't even get into how many people lost their Adsense accounts. Many home business owners never recovered from this.

Okay, let's take a good hard look at this model. What was the one thing that it depended on? It depended on Google's Adsense program...a third party site. In this case, the marketer had no control over the program itself, in particular, the TOS of that program.

If Google changed the rules, which they did, it could have adversely affected the income of each home business owner...which it did. In fact, these changes in policy may have been the biggest disaster in terms of adverse effects on home business owners in the history of earning on the Internet, maybe next to Ebay banning the sale of digital products...another business killer.

Do you see where I am going with this? I know it's hard to predict the future, but you need to look at your business model and see how much of it is within YOUR control and how much of it is being controlled by a site like Google or Ebay? If the answer is more is being controlled by other sites, then you have a business model that is a house of cards waiting to fall down around you.

Once you recognize this, you can then take steps to correct the problem...even if that means you need to come up with a whole new business model.

Of course you can always just hope and pray for the best.

To YOUR Success,


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