Core Competencies in the IM world
If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!
You can open any forum on the topic of web design and you will find topics of how to build an internet business. These topics may range from building a virtual realestate of sites to promoting adsense sites to affiliate marketing, and article marketing. You name it on the web and someone has pretty much figured out how to market to that niche and make a little money. A lot of these people will also sell you their secrets for a price.
This inundates a lot of new people hoping to derive a living from the internet as there are just so many paths to follow. Which is the right path, what will work? I see so many posts around that show this level of confusion in many of the forums. Seems like every other day there is someone who is posting telling about all the different things they have tried but without earning any if not very little money for those efforts.
These posts are full of ideas to help the person who is struggling to find their way and many of these ideas will work. The one thing you hardly ever hear about in these posts is the subject of Core Competencies. Now this may be because not many people in the IM world have ever heard of this term, but its used in fortune 500 companies all the time. It seems elementary to me that if you want to be one of the big boys then you need to think like them.
To compete in the business of Internet marketing, no matter if you want to produce content based sites or if you want sell eBooks or what ever, you need to know where your competencies lie. Core Competencies are crucial to any businesses success and you either need to develop your competencies or buy them. So you may be asking just what exactly is a Core competency. Wikipedia describes a core competency as:
“A core competency is something that a firm can do well and that meets the following three conditions specified by Hamel and Prahalad (1990):
1. It provides customer benefits
2. It is hard for competitors to imitate
3. It can be leveraged widely to many products and markets.
A core competency can take various forms, including technical/subject matter know how, a reliable process, and/or close relationships with customers and suppliers (Mascarenhas et al. 1998). It may also include product development or culture such as employee dedication. Modern business theories suggest that most activities that are not part of a company’s core competency should be outsourced.
If a core competency yields a long term advantage to the company, it is said to be a sustainable competitive advantage.â€
The first one is easy to understand. You must provide value to your customers or they will to be your customers for long. This is seen every day in high traffic websites. The provide value to their visitors so their visitors reward them with repeat business. If you want a high traffic website and I think all of us do want that then you need to provide value for your customers in an unique way. Which brings us to the second sign of a competency.
Make your site hard to imitate. This is not as easy or as hard as it initially seems. Everyone has unique experiences and talents in this world that gives an unique perspective on life. You can use that to build your site. Anyone can go out and download WordPress or DotNetNuke or a hundred other open source applications to build websites with. Anyone can go out with just a little study and learn HTML or PHP, or Asp.Net or what ever language sites are built in. If you can’t learn it or you just don’t want to, then you can definitely pay someone else to build it for you. The code of a website is not what is unique, unless you build an app like mySpace.com which is one of their core competencies, you are the unique element. When you have an idea for a website or product, you are the best one at that particular moment to express the vision of that idea. Do it yourself. It may require time and effort, but building something substantial will provide so much more value than any monetary value will give you.
Build to a market, Make sure you are building a product or site that appeals to a wide range of potential customers. You can build niche sites and they will do well as you do not have a lot of competition in the area. But sooner or later others learn of the niche and you have as many people competing for the niche traffic as you have searching for it. It does not take a mathematician to figure out this will not last long term. Maybe you just go out and find another niche, but this means you are constantly redoing work and you will never reach the long term goal of a self-sustaining web presence that allows you the freedom to live your life while still providing the needed financial resources to allow you to live your desired lifestyle.
If you can do these three things and do them well with motivation then you will build a high-traffic website that will produce an income for you and your family for years to come. It may take a year for the traffic to come, but if you utilize your own unique perspective and believe in yourself, then it will definitely happen.
Did you enjoy this post? Why not leave a comment below and continue the conversation, or subscribe to my feed and get articles like this delivered automatically to your feed reader.
Comments
No comments yet.
Leave a comment