The Internet has changed the way we can do business in two important ways especially for small and micro-businesses.

• It allows you to be open for business 24/7

• It allows micro-niches to be served

In some sense these are merely improvements over mail order but they allow you to do things that wouldn’t have been economically feasible pre-net.

The ability to be “open” all the time –like many things– can be both a blessing and a curse. You have to watch the amount of time you’re investing and you have to plan for “down-time” like vacations. In other words, what are you going to do when you want to take off for 2 weeks? You have to have a plan up front instead of coming up with something just before you leave if you are physically involved in order fulfillment or product delivery. Remember: the idea is to make a lot of money and have the time to spend it. A properly structured fulfillment system will alleviate many of these headaches.

The second way the Internet has changed things is that it allows micro-niches to be served that wouldn’t have been close to profitable in the pre-net days. Back then to reach a micro-niche you had to use mail order which meant printing a catalog, finding your customers and selling your product to them. The ‘Net isn’t magic, it’s just made the world a small place again. Now, on the web, you don’t have to print a catalog and you don’t have to pay somebody else to find your customers. That means you can bring your target market (the people you sell to) to a razor edge — ie. people who collect stuffed skunks.

One last note — conventional wisdom says that to make money on the web you have to cultivate customers (spend money) the same way you do with a brick and mortar — which is true if you’re running a small business on the web. If you’re running a micro-business on the web you only have to make enough profit to justify the time you’re putting in to it. I have one website that only makes about $50 a month profit. Not much, you say, but I only spend about 10 minutes a week on it. $50/0.66 hrs = $75/hour … good enough for me. And as near as I can tell this money will keep coming in forever.