I’ve always maintained there are two ways to make money online, the easy way and the hard way. My business cohorts and I are stubborn, we gravitate toward the hard way.
As a service company, much of the work we do [selling hours] helps others make money the easy way [selling air.] It’s the real world equivalent of Rumpelstiltskin spinning straw into gold for the miller’s daughter but then grabbing a pickaxe to mine ore out of the ground to pay his own bills.
Over the past few years, though, we’ve been experimenting aggressively with everything from enterprise applications to Web 2.0 services. We play with content aggregation, data mining, domaining, affiliate advertising, blogging, classified verticals, product directories, et cetera, et cetera. Even though they’re all web-based, most of these categories fall outside of our core service offerings.
Only about 15% of these experiments grow up to become sophisticated additions to our business, but all of them make us better equipped to help clients. One of these (not sure what percentage that would be) has actually developed into a significant stand-alone (profitable) business as well.
Which brings me to my point: experiments are good. (One part powdered iron, two parts flame was my favorite when I was young. We won’t speak of college.) Generally speaking, here’s what we’ve found in our experiments:
- If you want your experiment to be profitable, get it inside the enterprise and/or lock onto a massive audience base.
- If you want your experiment to be experimental (no accountability,) keep it out of the enterprise and/or cater to a small niche audience.
There are exceptions to these of course. If we knew anything about domaining, for instance, I think we’d find it to be a huge exception. Like I’ve already confessed, I just don’t know enough about some of these categories yet.
I’d love to find more blogs analyzing their ventures, experimental or otherwise. Ryan Carson can’t be the only one out there. Right?