Ever have a great business idea, one that you’re sure is going to make you some serious coin and then discover it’s a dog?

If not, then you're not failing forward fast enough.

Back in the late ‘90s I was working with a couple of partners doing advertorials for Fortune magazine, and the two of them had this idea that we should try our hand at making money online. Being the newbie on the team I differed to them - big mistake.

My partners’ idea was to take an existing paper directory of newsletters and put it up online to make it easier to search. Seemed like a good idea but…

Somehow, I ended up being the one who managed the project and paid for the site build. Which took 9 months and cost me $35,000. And then when it launched, I couldn’t even find it.

Turns out the site wasn’t built with SEO in mind, and almost no one had figured out the rules of SEO back then before Google became a verb.

What’d I do?

Being the stubborn type (don’t get my wife started on this topic) I started researching and writing about SEO, publishing one the first guides to Winning the Search Engine Game.

Back then, finding the content you wanted online was a bear!

Sure there were a bunch of, now mostly deceased, search engines like Webcrawler, Lycos, Altavista, Excite, Yahoo, Dogpile, Ask Jeeves - to name just a few. The problem - most were pretty terrible, providing only somewhat relevant listings.

To make it easier to find my way around the web, I put up a site that ranked and reviewed search engines. I spent a week or two on the original site and then a few hours a week adding new search engine reviews.

After a couple of months, I added in one more key element. I started emailing my opinionated reviews to the top 20 or so top online publishers. Then I started emailing the same to all the librarians in the U.S.

Which led to an offer to buy the site for over seven figures.

So why did my first website lose $35k and my second make me over seven figures.

At the time we built out newsletter directory we had no effective way for people to find it, Which was the big problem pre-Google, that my second site solved.

Solve an existing problem and you’ll make money. And the more specific the better.

Looking to avoid losing money and instead make more online?

Let’s talk…