Modeling Your Website After the Greats - The Beginning
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There is a lot of truth in the idea that a successful business should focus on a niche market (although this has led to so called "idiot products" that are extremely unique and wacky but nobody wants to buy), and that info products are a huge hit. So it is good to base an Internet business on that technique. But the terminology given to the above themes (niche markets, info products) ignores an underlying theme which runs consistently through ALL successful e-businesses, and also through all bricks-and-mortar businesses, and that is that they all address a need.
Addressing a need, creating value, adding value to life, and reducing pain. By whatever name, it means that the customer and his needs are the most important things to you, not your money, not your dream car, but the man who holds the mouse. Let us look at some illustrations.
Google's First Day
Google began when two Stanford graduate school students decided to do something about a problem. They decided to address the pain of there being no easy way of searching for things online. And they decided to base software then called backrub (which sounds like a pain reliever) on both keyword searches as well as inbound linking from other sites to that site. They first noted a pain, and then they sought to address it. This is a rule that applies both online and offline. Your driving motivation must be towards the customer, must be basically selfless, and must add value to your customer's life. It must be bigger than just you.
Amazon's Golden Day
Another illustration is Amazon, the book site (did I need to say that? more on branding later). Mr. Bezos sought to provide a large selection of books to a desktop bound mouse owner. He cut out the process of going through a dozen bookshops and two years of searching before I found a copy of Sun Tzu's Art of War (Derma Translation) and made it available to people averse to searching for books. Instead of going through all that pain and effort, all they needed to do was use a search box.
Next: What Information Need do You Address? >>
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