Every business everywhere has a design, intentionally or not; a structure that is tuned to generating profit by exploiting
whats known as leverage and sustainable competitive advantage.
Lets look at a few offline examples:
If you are a manufacturer, your design involves identifying a market opportunity, developing a product, building a factory,
locking in distribution, and handling customer warranties and complaints. Your leverage is in the capital you put into the
factory and your competitive advantage can include superior products and product development, lower manufacturing costs, access
to capital and locking up the distribution
http://webdesignerhouston.com. You measure your success by return on investment (the capital bit) and market share (the advantage bit.)
If you were one of the big management consulting firms, your design is simple ? hire the best minds ? your leverage is
usually a few (well-connected) partners selling work at partner prices but done by low cost juniors. Your competitive advantage;
the relationships you form with clients who then prefer you to the unknown competition for jobs on which their own employment
security may depend.
Things are different on the web and much more fragile. An example?
On the web, you write an e-book, put up a web site and drive traffic to it by locking into search engine keywords. Thats
your design. The leverage, you are endlessly told, is the small amount of time spent on the book and the competitive advantage
is your expertise ? captured in the book.
The problem for the web entrepreneur
http://webdesignerhouston.com is that digital products are extremely easy to copy eliminating the leverage. Search engine competition is fierce and
positions unstable. And the apparent expertise is as easily replicated as the book (no sustainable competitive advantage.)
The bottom line: on the web most entrepreneurial activity is transient. People enter, create something, and hold on to
it as long as they can but then their position is eroded, their profits drop and they exit. If you want to develop a long
term business, you have to shift to something much different. Thinking about the three components ? design, leverage and competitive
advantage will help you enormously. A couple of examples:
In the e-book field, e-Book Wholesaler sells private label e-books to resellers with full resell rights. The design is
very simple. Tom Hua, creator of e-Book Wholesaler, sources books from a stable of authors and offers them to the market with
resell rights.
Very simple. But he levers and protects his business cleverly.
The basic leverage is in outsourcing writing and selling the same book many times. He also levers his marketing by allowing
each book to be personalized with your address, codes and favorite affiliations (generating viral marketing opportunities
for the buyer plus selling memberships of the e-Book Wholesaler site at the same time - automated affiliate marketing.)
Even though he uses a membership site formula (levering a single sale into regular income), his sustainable advantage
is low, being mainly in the inventory of books he has. His formula is easily copied or muddied, the primary barriers being
getting it organized and building membership. Indeed there are others like his including The Viral Profits Warehouse ? and
the increasing number of private resell rights sellers.
In the AdSense field, JVMembers have built something original. The design is again simple. They set up a number of AdSense
sites; they promote them on the web, and populate the sites through contributions by their members. The members write short
articles and share in the AdSense revenue generated from their pages.
The leverage is in the writing of the articles. JVMembers needs thousands of individuals generating fresh, original content
all the time (very attractive to the search engines). These thousands of writers cost JVMembers nothing and for their role
in organizing it they get 50% of the AdSense revenues. Sustainable advantage is not high in that the concept could be easily
copied.
Our two examples share the characteristic of having simple structures, using leverage well but being readily copied.
Are there web businesses that cannot be easily copied? Here are a couple.
Saleshoo is in the eBay drop ship business. They use a regular design ? sourcing product and distributing it to members
who have pre-sold it on eBay. Members can also buy for their own account and can derive affiliate income (marketing to new
members.) So where is the advantage? It lies in excellence of service. The major problem faced by drop ship users is reliability
of supply. If you sell something on eBay the buyer expects you to deliver it. Failure of a drop shipper can impact your reputation
with eBay. Saleshoos focus is on reliability of supply as well as good prices.
The Internet Marketing Center is a $60m business selling web tools and education. Their sustainable advantage; they started
out as a guru business and migrated to a bigger entity. Today, their advantage lies in their exceptional in-house web marketing
talent plus their huge affiliate organization and finally their access to capital to build exceptional products with high
production values.
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