On-Line Business Owners: Are You Really Ready for Success?

EXPLODE!!!!, in boldface with multiple exclamation points, is a word commonly used by those on the shady side of the business of promoting things. Their emails tell you they can "Make your on-line business EXPLODE!!!" Or they promise to EXPLODE!!! your website traffic, sales, profits, or maybe even that undersized part of your male anatomy. What they don't tell you is that it is not always a good idea to EXPLODE!!! traffic or business. It sounds strange, but businesses can fail because they succeeded, but didn't plan how to handle the success.

Let's say you have a site where people blog for money ... let's pretend that you split the ad money 50/50 with the people who do the blogging. You have a couple dozen bloggers, and at any given time you have 1500 or so visitors. Business is increasing slowly. Then some of your bloggers decide to EXPLODE!!! their traffic. For the moment let's pretend they can find a way to make this happen.

What happens when you EXPLODE!!! traffic from 1500 visitors to 1,500,000 in the space of a few minutes, hours or even days? You get the Slashdot Effect. Your site slows down for everyone, many visitors can't reach it, then your web server may EXPLODE!!! ... and that's not good for the ones who wanted their traffic to EXPLODE!!! If you are running a web site, make sure the servers and the database can handle a sudden burst of traffic. Unless you are a large corporation, having an experienced hosting service is an excellent idea. When a book excerpt on a site I was managing got a link from one of the web's most popular porn sites, the hosting company handled the resulting traffic with no problems. Looking at the site stats that month made my head EXPLODE!!! ... that author's page had 300 times the traffic of the others combined.

If you have a small online store, selling hand-made teddy bears wearing hand-made silk teddies, the last thing you want to do is EXPLODE!!! your sales. If this year's PopTart singing bimbo is photographed wearing her teddy, holding your teddy, who is wearing his teddy ... your business might not survive the experience. If you normally make and sell 10 bears a week, could you handle it when the orders EXPLODE!!! because of all the PopTart copy-cats. Can you increase production and maintain quality? Can your suppliers keep up with your increasing orders? What happens when next year's PopTart is photographed with your competitor's product and you are stuck with unsold product and newly-hired staff that expects to be paid?

Letting the customers know up front that there is a waiting list works for some products, especially for high-quality products. There is a bootmaker in El Paso who has people like Willie Nelson patiently waiting for boots, and they wait years, not weeks, for the privilege of paying the guy thousands of dollars per pair. If your hand-made bears suddenly EXPLODE!!!, take advantage of it, raise the prices and put those PopTart wannabes on the waiting list.

Deliberately making things EXPLODE!!! is better left for the Loizeaux family.