If you think your building a successful business peddling someone else’s ad network think again. Slanging products you have little control over for pennies without building any kind of a customer list isn’t a very intelligent path to building a business. Short term, making a few bucks may be profitable but long term it just doesn’t make any sense.
Don’t believe it? Check out the points made by Jon over at Art of Money about the crack ads sweatshop.
For those who still disagree let’s break it down into how business is done in the real world:
First no savvy business owner is ever going to accept a customer that demands you only sell to them and it certainly doesn’t limit itself to one customer that can pull out at any time for any reason without some serious monetary repercussions.
A customer doesn’t dictate the price, the vendor (you the website owner) either sets the selling price or an agreement between both parties for the price is established and that doesn’t just change on a whim when the customer feels like it or because you’re making to much profit.
Assuming a business is going to be foolish enough to limit itself to one customer with a predetermined price this is outlined in a legally binding contract that is fair for both sides and certainly doesn’t allow the customer to pull out at any time and stiff you… especially not after having provided the goods or services. In the real world customers who do this are turned into collection agencies or sued, try that with the agreement you have with your crack ads customer.
The time to stop fooling yourself into thinking you are building a sustainable business model with third party PPC is over. Go out and create real products and services… if you’re currently running pay per click ads on a network of sites purchase some software to run these same kinds of ads and sell traffic. You determine the rules and price.
Think about how much work you put into driving traffic, collecting leads and then selling them off for nickels when you could be selling your own product to those leads for significantly more profit while building a customer list worth its weight in gold. That’s how you create a real, sustainable business.