Building a successful online business is no different from a real business offline. The secret is to understand the keys to success. Just like offline businesses, competition could be tough on the internet. There are over 182 million websites as at December 2008, according to a netcraft survey and only about 1 percent of these sites are profitable. Most websites are replicas of the same thing; almost everyone seems to be doing the same thing.

Passion rules

In order to win in your online business you must choose a niche you are passionate about and there is money at the end of the rainbow for your efforts.

Before I share with you what a profitable niche is, I thought it was important to talk about passion. Merriam-Webster dictionary defines passion as:“A strong liking or desire for or devotion to some activity”. In other words, you are passionate about a topic when, the topic stirs s in you an emotion, an overriding feeling, that is intense and borders sometimes on the edge of being unreasonable.

Do you find you become so absorbed in an activity or learning that you are lost in space? It feels like your deep yearning satisfied. That is passion in action.

Your business must leverage your strength

What you are passionate about, may likely be a pointer to your strengths as a person. Let me explain: Brian Tracy, bestselling author of The Psychology of Selling” says “the best way to succeed in business is to choose a business that appeal to your strengths”. In his bestselling book, The millionaire mind, Dr Thomas Stanley talks about the results from his survey of millionaires. The survey showed that most millionaires say their success is a direct result of loving their career or business.

Another important factor for success,apart from having a love for the business they chose, the survey revealed was, their career/job allowed them full use of their abilities and aptitude. This is what I mean by working with your strengths.

Now if your strengths are important in starting your online business, what exactly are your strengths?

Rich Schrefen, legendary coach of internet gurus, and founder of strategicprofits.com defines strength as “a talent completed with skills and knowledge”. Rich points out that you can learn skills and knowledge but you can’t learn a talent. Either you have talent or you don’t have it, simple.

The key ingredient to having strength is your inborn talent. The issue of talents and strengths is a topic for another article.

However, you need to understand one thing-in order to succeed in your online business you must bring strength to the market place-that allows you to give outstanding value to your customers. This is the key to having a winning edge to succeed in business online.

The formula for success

Let’s put all we have said into perspective:

You must have passion for the niche you select for your internet business.

Your niche should appeal to your strengths – (talents + skills + knowledge).

I want to stress one more thing before you start running off to build your online business…you need to strike a balance between passion and profitability.

The primary question you must ask yourself going forwards is… Does my niche business have a proven market? – In other words, are people interested in your niche topic and want to pay you money for your products? The answer to this question is to look for your competitors, already providing products and services. And the market is sizeable to support your business.

This is what I mean by to balance passion and profitability. Because when you have chosen your profitable niche you are passionate about, you will serve your customers well and have undue competitive advantage.

This is how you succeed online.When you adopt the thinking, process I have outlined above, you will find the odds stacked in your favour to succeed in business.

To your success.