You still have to take a risk with your website

Here’s the thing – you have planned out your website. You have your hopes. Your ideas. But, if you’re new to the game – you cannot be sure at all about how it will go.

So we do some research using tools like Wordtracker to see what kind of traffic you might get. You could sign up to Google Adwords and use their keyword tool to try and figure out how much traffic you can buy.

But honestly – you won’t know until you bite the bullet and launch the site. And once you have launched your ecommerce site – things don’t stop there. You have the tweaks and the testing to do.

We launched one site and got our first order in a few hours. Another order the next day and a few more the day after that. It wasn’t a spectacular beginning and we were expecting. So we spent a few days playing on Adwords testing different ads and offers on the website – and within a few short weeks – the site was doing great. It was doing so well that it beat all of our estimations and ideas.

So, we thought we had the “magic formula” after spending a while analysing the site and what we thought we the key factors to its success.

So we launched another site – using those principles. And that site started the same way – but stayed there. It did a few orders a day. Not massive amounts of business – enough to pay back the initial investment and start turning a profit in 12 months – but nothing like the first site.

Now we sit around and think why. Maybe some of our “Magic formula” didn’t work. It caused us to put our third site on hold for a little while whilst we thought about it.

But you know what – as experienced as we are I am sure about this one thing – you can research and plan, hypothesise and generate success principles – but you can’t predict the success of a website. For that – the proof, as they say, is in the eating.

I was naïve enough to think that the internet could remove what has been the backbone of entrepreneurialism for centuries – namely risk. If I can predict the future – I remove risk. But market research, Wordtracker and Adwords cannot give you the future. They can look at the past and give you an idea – but they cannot tell you what the future holds.

We shouldn’t shy away from risk. Sure we should minimise it. Don’t be reckless. Research and plan. Listen to those who have experience and successful websites. These are prudent things to do. But just because this is the internet and we can measure a lot more doesn’t mean that we can predict the future. Ultimately you have to believe that you can make a success of what you do and be willing to work at it until you do.

The internet doesn’t give us an “easy” ride – just a different one. You still have to think like and entrepreneur. You still have to be willing to take a risk.