Start up businesses to avoid buying

Every month people sell businesses that they feel somehow have some value. The sad part is that someone comes along and buys a real dud without doing any homework or research. What makes people do this? I set out to look at some of the reasons and I have made some very interesting conclusions. Most people want a quick and easy solution to income. It is very similar to weight loss. Why do weight loss programs keep coming out? Because people buy the "hope" factor. They buy a program or a course or a pill that they magically think will cure all their problems. Magic never works in weight loss nor in business. In fact hope is a lousy business plan. Nonetheless there is some good that can come out of looking at bad people selling bad businesses. The good that comes from it usually comes in the form of an idea for something else. I call this the creative process and most times it is triggered by something totally unrelated. Those ideas I find are usually the better ones since you can get to the heart of what people are really looking for. Again I am not selling any business, but I am always looking at different ideas and researching human behavior so that I can improve my own business. (which is not for sale) Ebay is a classic example of lousy concepts. Occasionally you can find a gem in the hay pile but it can be pretty tough. In fact trying to market a business on Ebay often finds you lumped into a bad neighborhood of terrible neighbors. This drags the intelligence factor down quite a bit, but it is still useful for research. Lets look at some good examples.

Have you ever heard of a lazy kid making this kind of money per hour? I never have, yet there it is. You know the guy is selling this, since he has to pay the insert fees to run the auction. I would have to imagine that he is tapping into the hope concept.

Here is a good example. You may instantly believe this is a profitable website, Most people do cause the author said so. It could literally make one dollar a month over cost and be considered profitable by definition. Any site that is credit card related is so over done. This guy also states that it is EASY........run for the hills kids, business is not easy. If it were easy, no one would work for anyone else. We would all be in business for ourselves. Imagine what the economy would look like if it were entirely small business. I would have to imagine that if you bought any site without an administration back end, it would not be a site, it would be an article. What a shame.

Here is a good one. First of all, most people have no idea what it takes to be a profitable and credible website hosting service. They have no idea that it takes a staff of customer service to maintain it the right way. There is no mention in the ad who or where the staff is, and I highly doubt it is Number 1. Number 1 is not for sale, its probably Yahoo or some huge provider like that. Besides he wants to start the bidding at $1 with no reserve..."MY Loss is your gain!" yeah right.

In closing I will show you my favorite stupid ad

I have never known anyone in business that would characterize their business as freaky. There are no cash machines that you can start out immedetly. Business is grown, and usually over time. There is not unique idea out there that someone has not thought of already.

Here is a good one. Let's just say this. Never, ever, ever, think that you can buy traffic to your website. If you do then you know absolutely nothing about how the internet really works. If this is the case it can be easily remedied by doing some homework. Learn how to get traffic to your site. Learn what keywords are, learn how to write meta tags for your pages, learn all the basics. This takes some work, time and money and no its not easy. That's the sign that it is real. You have to invest this time to be successful. If you are so short on time that you cannot learn it all, you then would delegate it. But even then you would have to learn the basics in order to delegate correctly and efficiently. Otherwise you would just be throwing money out the window.

No reserve auctions for business always make me nervous. They try to appeal to the "I am going to get a deal" mentality of Ebay. Now here is where you can spawn some ideas. The power of a deal is a huge opportunity if you do it right. People go on Ebay because they sense they could really stumble upon something big and get a great deal. I often hear my neighbor say she bought something because it was a good deal. I asked her is she knew exactly what the gadget was that she just got, she had no idea, but.......it was a great deal. So many people subscribe to that theory and its part of what makes Ebay so successful. People want deals. So there is your business concept, build an idea and a plan around that. There is so many ways you could go with it, if you think it through carefully.

Imagine that, now you get paid for doing nothing...