Check This Strategy to Discover Online Business Models

We all know that the Internet is the ultimate business platform, right? You can create a website in a matter of minutes, and if your idea is good, in a short period of time you could start generating good revenues (not overnight, but definitely faster than offline businesses). 

Setting up a website and promoting it is straight forward. I am not saying it is easy, as it takes a heck lot of work to make a website popular, but it is straight forward because you know more or less what you should do. 

The part where most people struggle is the conceptualization of the business model. They don’t know what kind of website to create, what niche to target, where the revenues are going to come from and so on.
If you are in this situation, is there any resource that you can use to generate ideas? Yes! It is called Flippa (which is the new name of Sitepoint’s marketplace for websites).

In reality you could use any marketplace on the Web where people buy and sell websites, but Flippa is particularly active, so it should be your first call.

Once you go there, click on “Buy Websites”. After that you should see a list with all the websites up for sale.
Many of those websites are terrible. They don’t generate revenues, and yet the seller is asking a huge bid. You can’t blame those people though, it is like trying to convince a mother that her baby is ugly….
But there are some very good websites listed for sale, too. All you need is a way of separating them from the bad ones. 

Luckily this is something easy to do on Flippa. You will notice that one of the columns is called “Number of bids”. That column basically tells how many people placed a bid on the auction. Guess what, the higher the number of bids, the higher the chances of the website in question being a solid one.

You can also click on the header of that column to organize the listing in descending order (i.e., the auctions with more bids on top), and after that you’ll just need to browse through the sites. 

The interesting thing is that, since people genuinely want to sell those websites, they will give all sorts of information about them, including details of how they built them, where they get traffic from, where their revenues come from and so on. Better yet, you can ask questions about specific points and the seller will gladly respond to them. It is a gold mine of information!

And mind you that this tip is not about finding good websites for sale and purchasing them, but rather about learning what business models and niches are working for other people, and adapting them with your own ideas.

Good luck with your research!

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