Just picture your life, 5-years from now as you close the deal on a new, million dollar estate by the ocean loaded with upgrades including your very own home theatre, private wine cellar, entertainment facilities so you can have fun showing off your lifestyle to all your friends and collegues. Isn’t that what you have in mind when you go searching for the best online business idea?

You can’t tell me that you don’t dream about having spectacular things, visiting exotic places, overcoming past limitations, and giving you and your family the means through which you can experience incredible things in this short lifetime we have here on earth.

Really, you seek an online business idea that will help you escape the daily grind, will allow you to apply your creativity, that energizes you rather than sapping all of your energy and that will allow to live out your fantasies giving you the lifestyle you see in Millionaire magazines.

Of course the reality is a little different. Online business ideas are not a dime a dozen, and the one’s that are tend to put more wealth and happiness into other people’s pockets than they do your own.

You’re problem wondering, what’s the use? You may already be so cynical, having been embarassed or burned by one of these scams in the past it’s difficult to believe there may be another way to find a true blue online business idea.

Your online business idea means EVERYTHING to your ultimate achievement. You can’t expect to latch on to someone else’s great idea and ride that all the way to the bank. You are the one that must generate your own plan for an internet business – that will allow you to not only play the game, but lets you set the rules and then win the game by a mile.

3 Power Techniques for Discover Your Ultimate Online Business Idea

You may have wondered, why do so many online business leaders appear so “normal” or “average”.

I remember sitting at a high-priced online marketing seminar where the guy beside me at one of the dinners leaned over to me and said “These guys actually know less than I do about topic X (in this case content development and search engine marketing) and yet they are taking home close to a million dollars by putting on this event” He went on to say, “next year I will be speaking at this event”.

Clearly, my friend at the seminar had just discovered that the root of million dollar entrepreneurs was not only the skill of the entrepreneur nor was it the quality of the online business idea, but rather was a combination of the two.

It is this concept of idea and individual alignment that guides our very first surefire way to find your workable online business idea:

1. Know your interests and strengths. Most aspiring online marketing entrepreneurs put way too much stock in the idea ignoring the fact that 3/4 of your success will come from what YOU do with that idea. So, ask yourself, what things, activities and tasks do I enjoy? What am I good at? What do other people tell me my strengths are? What sorts of achievements have I accomplished in my life and feel especially happy or satisfied with? What do I find myself thinking about doing in the future? You must know this, I have not yet come across a millionaire (or multi-millionaire) who lacked interest or strength in the enterprise they used to earn their fortune. What about you, when you consider your online business idea, have you factored in your strengths and passions?

2. Are you building equity. For as far back as I remember, my father used to tell me whenever you have the option of paying someone else to use a property or system that will appreciate in value (ex. leasing an apartment, renting land, or licensing a business system) or investing up-front and make sure you OWN the rights to that appreciating land or enterprise there shouldn’t even be a decision – invest. Your online business idea MUST take into account the concept of equity. If you decide to build your entire online business on Google Adsense, do you have any equity 4-years from now? Who is in control of your business – you or Google? Same thing with affiliate marketing, if you build your entire online business based on selling other people’s products, what is your equity? What value have you built over time that is UNIQUE to you that will result in an incrementally greater value in your business than when you first started?

To get the full meaning of equity as it relates to online businesses, watch the online website selling sites where new sites are listed daily. Without fail, you will find that a website that can prove original content, an organically built mailing list and an original, unique, unlicensed information product sell for ten-times the value of other sites. If your goal is to be independently wealthy in 5-years, then make sure your online business idea not only earns recurring profitability, but increases in value giving you the option to “cash-out” when the time comes.

As part of our own information product development business, and something we teach strongly as part of the InfoMarketer’s Zone system, imagine you passed away tomorrow and you could either leave your family a string of Adsense marketing sites that you may be able to sell for a few thousand dollars or one single information product site and mailing list that you could sell for $50K – what would make you feel more comfortable?

3. Leverage Gives You A Life! Ever watch a dog chase it’s tale? They have a hell of a good time for a few minutes, but quickly become bored and either fall over with exhaustion or simply move on to licking some other part of the their body that just happened to be available after giving up on their tail. For me, that summarizes a business model based solely on someone else’s magical model or on a model that does not include developing your own product – either you will end up burned out or being distracted by the next best thing never quite reaching the tail you so badly want to catch.

I have thousands of affiliates marketing my information products every hour of every day or every month online. I can’t keep up – each day there are dozens of new affiliates that join our programs. Most give up before making their first sale. A small number make a handful of sales. An elite 1-2% make a small fortune with our program. After speaking with many other product developers, we agree, the pattern is pretty much the same.

What becomes of the affiliates, do they tend to become millionaires or even full-time online marketers?

Nope, 99.9% of them never reach their goals. Their online business idea consists of following someone else’s advice on setting up a website, throwing up a number of affiliate programs, driving some traffic to the site and waiting to collect the checks.

Now, in this model, they must continually drive traffic, market their site, find new products to sell, try out new products, produce new content, keep ahead of the search engines, track their efforts as the smallest change and they may be working for nothing. Their business models look like a rollercoaster. Nothing is consistent except the effort they must constantly put in.

I love my affiliates to death – they bring in half my profit for me while I sleep and some of them do very well with our payouts, but the ones I KNOW will succeed are the very few who 1) operate in a market they are both passionate about and have some strengths and 2) have developed their own products and content leveraging their effort over time so that they can sit back and engage others to market their products for them.

Just picture this for a moment…you have spent 1-month developing a $97 information product about the topic you are passionately interested in and know you have an advantage with, the preparation of marketing material seemed like a breeze because you just love this topic, and partnerships are already starting to flood in because talking about your topic is natural and easy.

In your first month you sell your first 10 packages, you start to get feedback and have built a list of a few hundred people.

Through follow up and feedback you find 10 questions that remain unanswered – again because you love this topic finding answers is simple and fun. You organize a teleseminar to answer the questions and you pull in another $1,000 in the second month.

Now, you see demand for ongoing support on the topic and put together a private membership site or paid newsletter and suddenly you have a monthly billed recurring income adding another $1,000/month to your revenues.

You’ve now tripled the sale of your products as you turn the marketing jets on and your affiliates become more active – plans for a high-end, back-end product are in the works and by the end of year 1 you see your first 60K with plans to triple that next year with realistic plans to achieve $1M within 5-years.

Would this kind of thinking be possible without an online business idea based on the 3 surefire methods outlined above? Could you realistically hope to succeed with a business that you do not love or are not especially strong? Would it be realistic to expect a $1M business based solely on other people’s products over the long term? How could you achieve $1M in revenues without a strong leverage component that builds your army of distributors freeing up your time to add more products to the funnel?

I don’t know if you are ready to move beyond the stage of dreaming about your online business to the stage of finally deciding on an online business idea that really works, only you can answer that question. If you are, then don’t spend another second considering online business idea options until you have tested them against these 3 surefire criteria. You will find that these 3 criteria separate truly successful online business plans from those that disappoint and frustrate highly motivated entrepreneurs.