The online world of web offers many exciting opportunities for entrepreneurship because it is fresh, new, and exciting. The cutting edge of development has always been most fertile ground for growing a new enterprise. In 1800's, new frontier was American west and many fortunes were made there. In 2000's, new frontier is web, where many fortunes have yet to be made.

Jeff Bezos of Amazon.com is worth 4.85 billion dollars. Pierre Omidyar of eBay is worth just over seven billion dollars. David Filo and Jerry Yang of Yahoo are both billionaires. These men made fortunes on web, and so can you.

The path to becoming a successful online entrepreneur has changed in last few years. The over-optimism which characterized late '90s and ultimately led to subsequent crash in technology sector has matured into a cautious and reasonable optimism grounded in traditional business values.

The party is over; it's time to get to work.

What Are You Going to Sell?

The #1 thing you need to succeed in business is customer. Whether you have one customer, fifty customers, or millions of customers, it is critical to remember that customers are foundation of any business. Without customers, you don't have a business; you have a hobby.

Going into an online business, people usually either know what they want to sell or know how they want to sell it. If online business is an extension of a brick-and-mortar business, entrepreneur knows what he or she has to sell and is looking for a new channel for their good and services. If entrepreneur is looking to start a new business online, they may not yet know what product or service will offer best opportunities for success.

Product or Service

Every business sells either products or services, a few businesses sell both. Products are easier to sell online because they can be more easily commoditized. People have become comfortable buying known commodities online. Services which are sold online are sometimes delivered online and sometimes delivered offline.

Selling Services Online

If you choose to sell services, next decision to consider is how services you sell will be provided. You can choose to:

• Sell your own services
• Sell services of others
• Sell an automated service

Selling Your Own Services Online

Each of us has specific talents, abilities, and skills which can be useful to other people. These things which we have can be offered to others over web. Perhaps you are a lawyer, a web designer, or a painter. It should be easiest thing in world to create a web page to tell world about who you are and what you can do for them.

The key to success in selling your own services over web is to focus on needs of your customer. For every sentence you write about yourself online, write an entire page about what you can do for your customers.

Selling Services of Others

Selling services of others allows us to leverage a larger workforce, and ultimately to build revenue more quickly.

Perhaps you run a lawn-care business where you sell monthly lawn-care packages to home-owners. Your lawn-care staff may be employees, or they may be independent subcontractors who do business with you at pre-negotiated rates. In fact, you may not be in lawn-care business at all, you may simply be in business of being paid for generating referrals to existing lawn care firms.

Selling Automated Online Services

Selling automated online services presents a very lucrative business proposition, because it represents a potential revenue stream with very low maintenance costs. The trade-off is often in form of considerable up-front development cost.

If you have right idea, and determination to follow it through to a successful conclusion, there can be no better business opportunity than selling an automated online service.

The first step, of course, is to determine what people want and what people are willing to pay for. Will people pay $9.95 for an online personality test? Will they pay $19.95 for an online personal wardrobe analysis? What would someone pay for a personalized online horoscope? How about an automated resume writing tool?

Selling Products Online

If you choose to sell products, you are not limited to selling products which you manufacture. If you are already in manufacturing business, that is a significant advantage and web is an excellent sales outlet for many products.

Greater opportunities exist for rest of us by working with distribution channel. We may buy products from manufacturers and sell then over web, or we may buy products from wholesale distributors and sell them over web.

We may inventory our products and oversee their shipment to customers, or we may send a request to have products drop-shipped from our suppliers to our customers. We may never even see products we sell.

As a successful small business owner,you're accustomed to long hours; non-existent holidays and weekends spent working.

When was last time you went to your dentist? When was last time you had an uninterrupted night out with your partner?

Whether your goal for 2005 is to find more time for family or personal enrichment --like attending classes and conferences -- you'll want to consider bringing on some help.

The following tips can help you get started whether you want to bring on a team of 10 or an occasional backup!

Don't expect to hire a replica of you! Each person you meet and interview will be a living, breathing human, with their own habits, mannerisms and even ideas! This is fine - -as long as their ideas and habits are not philosophically opposed to yours. My first hire, Jen, was pursuing a graduate degree, had just moved to area and is nearly 20 years younger than I am! She's detail-oriented and relies on schedules to get things done. I'm a bit more 'seat of my pants' type of operator. She's a perfect fit because she complements my way of working! Over time she's grown into managing portions of my business that I neglected - like maintaining scheduling and billing.

Know exactly what you expect from your new hire. Before you advertise for help, sit down and write a job description. List your goals for new hire - do you want someone who can fill in on short notice when you need to take a day off, or do you want someone who can work a regular schedule? Do you want someone who can meet with clients, set their own schedules and attend meetings and events on your behalf or do you simply need someone who can pick up your overflow? By spending time working through your thoughts on hired help you are setting yourself up for a great working relationship. If you can clearly articulate job to all applicants, they will have opportunity to determine if this is a mutually agreeable fit. Be sure to concentrate on specific job-related descriptions, and not subjective information.

Determine what type of manager you are! It's imperative that you’re honest about your workstyle. After all, if you say you want an independent thinker, but really do a lot of 'checking-in' you may end up with an unhappy helper. On other hand, if you hire someone who needs lots of feedback, you need to be sure that you are cut-out for 'people part' of management process.